Bog Bodies: Tollund Man, Lindow Man and the People the Peat Kept

Peat cutters Emil and Viggo Højgård came across Tollund Man on 6 May 1950 in Bjældskovdal bog, near Silkeborg. Radiocarbon dating places his death in the fourth century BC, about 405 to 380 BC in recent museum-associated dating, and Museum Silkeborg describes him as roughly 2,350 to 2,400 years old. He was an adult man who had been hanged and then carefully placed in the bog, with his eyes and mouth closed.

His last meal is known. Analysis of his stomach and intestines showed a vegetarian gruel, or soup, made from about 30 kinds of seeds and grains, including barley, flaxseed, gold-of-pleasure and knotgrass. So, the last thing this man ate was a plant-based meal, with no meat in it.

Where is Tollund Man today? His preserved head and selected body parts are displayed at Museum Silkeborg in Silkeborg, Denmark, alongside a reconstruction of his full body. The museum's pages cover him together with Elling Woman, another person from the Danish peat.

A peat bog is cold, saturated with water, low in oxygen and acidic, and few microbes can work there. Sphagnum moss adds something more. It releases sphagnan, a sugar-based compound that binds calcium and nitrogen, slows microbes and helps tan collagen, the protein in skin. Skin, hair, nails and some organs can last. In his paper "Bog Bodies," Lynnerup describes this combination, and Painter and McLean write about sphagnan and the bog chemistry in more depth.

The same chemistry that tans skin pulls calcium out of bone. So, the bones of a bog body can be soft, bent out of shape or partly dissolved. If you have wondered whether bog bodies are hard or soft, the answer is a leathery skin around a skeleton that may have gone soft. Scientists agree that sphagnan matters a great deal. One proposed process, a browning reaction called the Maillard reaction, is not considered fully proven.

Tollund Man is the best known, but museums across northern Europe care for others.

Lindow Man was found at Lindow Moss near Manchester, England, in 1984. His official museum name is Lindow II, because other human remains turned up at the moss too. The British Museum, which holds him, places his death between 2 BC and AD 119 by radiocarbon dating. He had multiple injuries and was placed face down in a pool in the bog. Because that date range spans both the Iron Age and the Roman period, the museum says ritual sacrifice cannot be established.

Grauballe Man was found in Nebelgaard Bog, Denmark, in 1952. Moesgaard Museum dates him to around 390 BC, within a range of about 400 to 200 BC. He was about 34 years old, with a broken shin and a cut throat, and he is displayed at Moesgaard Museum.

Yde Girl was found near Yde in the Netherlands in 1897 and is displayed at the Drents Museum in Assen. The museum places her in the Roman period, about 190 BC to AD 220, and counts her among the best-known bog bodies in the Netherlands.

Old Croghan Man, from County Offaly, and Clonycavan Man, from County Meath, were both found in Ireland in 2003. The National Museum of Ireland dates both to about 400 to 200 BC.

Cashel Man, from County Laois, is the oldest bog body that still has flesh. The National Museum of Ireland gives his radiocarbon date as 3678 ± 31 years before present, which calibrates to about 2141 to 1960 BC. Older skeletons have turned up in bogs, but he is the oldest known fleshed body.

Were any bog bodies women? Yes. Yde Girl in the Netherlands and Elling Woman in Denmark are two. Bog bodies include people of different sexes and ages, not only the famous adult men.

There is no single answer, and the scientists who study bog bodies say so. A 2022 study in *Antiquity* estimates that about 2,000 bog bodies are known in Europe, counting mummies, skeletons and partial remains, and that figure is cautious. Most come from northern and northwestern Europe, especially Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and Ireland. The Iron Age and Roman period produced the most famous group, but people were placed in wetlands from the Neolithic through the medieval and modern periods.

Proposed reasons include human sacrifice, execution or punishment, deliberate burial and accidental drowning. Each museum describes its own people differently:

• The National Museum of Ireland reads Old Croghan Man and Clonycavan Man as sacrifice linked to kingship and sovereignty, in its Kingship and Sacrifice guide.pdf).
• The British Museum says Lindow Man may have been a ritual victim, an executed criminal or the victim of a violent crime, and that the evidence does not settle which.
• Moesgaard Museum presents sacrifice as a leading reading of Grauballe Man and also records punishment as a possibility.

What does this mean for you as a reader? That one explanation does not fit every find, and a label like "sacrifice" belongs only where the museum that cares for the person has made that case.

Have any been found in the United States? Yes, in a different form. Windover Pond near Titusville, Florida, came to light in 1982 during housing construction. Excavations from 1984 to 1986 recovered at least 168 people, from newborns to elders, and radiocarbon dating puts the cemetery about 7,000 to 8,000 years before present, in Florida's Archaic period.

These were intentional burials in a freshwater pond, and many people were covered with woven plant-fiber textiles. The saturated peat kept wood, textiles, bone and other organic material. Windover is a cemetery of mostly skeletons, not leathery bodies like Tollund Man. Brain material survived in 91 individuals. The University of Central Florida notes that the site shows waterlogged burial traditions in North America long before European contact, and that it gives evidence about diet, disease, tools, family relationships and burial practice. You can read more in the University of Central Florida's account of Windover.

For many readers the first meeting with a bog body is a poem. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney came to the Danish bodies through P. V. Glob's book *The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved*. His poem "The Tollund Man" appeared in *Wintering Out* in 1972. Later poems, including "The Grauballe Man," "Bog Queen," "Punishment" and "Strange Fruit," linked the preserved bodies with memory, violence, Irish identity and the political violence of the Troubles, as the Irish Times has written.

These poems are literature, not archaeological evidence. Heaney treated the bodies as human figures able to carry memory across time, and he acknowledged the danger of turning real dead people into symbols. His work helped make Tollund Man and Grauballe Man known far beyond museums.

Tollund Man and Elling Woman are at Museum Silkeborg, Grauballe Man is at Moesgaard Museum, Yde Girl is at the Drents Museum in Assen, and Lindow Man is held by the British Museum. Display arrangements change, so check each museum's own page before you plan a visit.