The Bog People
– P.V. Glob / Translated by Rupert Bruce-Midford (1969)
Thank goodness for peat
and peat bogs! And thank goodness for
great translators, as they permit us all to share in the learned literature of
all the world’s nations. This intriguing
book by Dr. Peter Vilhelm Glob, translated by Rupert Bruce Midford, himself an
eminent scholar of antiquities in the British Museum, explores the fascinating
and macabre discoveries made by farmers digging peat used to heat homes and
cook food through the long Nordic winters.
As the Director General of Museums and Antiquities in his home of
Denmark, Dr. Glob is a prefect guide through the history of the bogs, the
people found buried within the bogs, and the many cultural items discovered
alongside the bodies.
This relatively short
work (200 pages) takes its impetus from letters received by Dr. Glob written by
English schoolgirls intrigued with the tales of the bog-people they read in
local newspapers of the time. They reached out to him inquiring about the
Tollund Man, a find which had ignited great interest in the world’s media
following his 1950 discovery by farmers digging peat. The idea of a 2,000-year-old human preserved
so well that we could see his fingerprints, hair, and skin so clearly seemed an
impossibility, but it was very real. Dr.
Glob goes into great detail describing the find itself, the excavation and
preservation processes, and the analysis of the Tollund Man’s remains, all in
the form of a “long letter” to the schoolgirls whose interest sparked the
correspondence.
Peat bogs are chemical
factories, created when thousands of years of vegetal growth sinks into a swamp
to be buried under low-oxygen and high-iron content groundwater. The weight of subsequent plant matter
deposits presses down on the material, and the highly acidic water kills and
prevents bacteria from decomposing the organic matter. It also stains skin a dark ebony. As Dr. Glob relates, farmers digging peat for
fuel came across such buried bodies countless times in the previous 400 years,
many of which were documented by local priests and officials. Townspeople saw these bodies as evil, partly
because of their dark appearance and partly because they were found 4-8 feet
underground, the abode of satan himself.
Because of this, many of the older finds were not studied
scientifically, but instead given a proper Christian burial in a local
churchyard.
Sometime in the 18th
century, people started to analyze these finds, and they realized that most of
them were over 2,000 years old, an amazing fact. Bodies from the time of Christ
just did not survive. Even the ancient
Egyptian mummies did not keep in such a great state of preservation. Studies showed that these bog finds, men,
women, children, and animals, belonged to early Iron Age societies. Further study informed scientists as to the
nature of these burials.
Our agrarian ancestors
worshipped the very idea of fertility, in the guise of a goddess responsible
for the return of life to the Earth following the “death” of life during
wintertime. Many of the people found in
these bogs were spring sacrifices to the goddess of fertility, and when the
goddess was supplanted by a male fertility god, the sacrifices continued to
him. In the old myths, the figure of the
goddess was cared for by her priests, and once a year, a special wagon was
outfitted with the carved image of the goddess (usually in wood) and taken
around the farmer’s fields in a grand procession involving dancing, song, and
prayer. Much as in other ancient
agrarian cultures, the “king” was chosen specifically for this spring
sacrifice. Many of the bog men have
ligatures around their neck, and many others have their throats cut. In this century, scientists were able to
analyze the stomach contents of the bog-people, finding that most of them, the
ones showing ritual strangulation or ritual throat-cutting and bleeding, were
served simple meals of gruel, which, when analyzed, showed a remarkable variety
of local grains and seeds, numbering in the high dozens. It makes sense to include seeds from all the
edible grain and grasses if what you want is to make an offering to the
fertility goddess thereby propriating a great harvest and lush abundance in the
coming year.
One of the details I
found most intriguing is the way that the peat bog’s chemical nature preserved
textiles. Amazing examples of woven
fabrics and leathers show just how advanced and creative the humans we call “ancient”
and “primitive” were. Human ingenuity
brought us out of the wild, and only the truly ignorant or vain assume that
intelligence is a hallmark of modern man, and not of humanity in general. Examples of trade and commerce between
ancient people always fascinate me, and one of the greatest bog finds is the Gundestrup Cauldron, a masterpiece of silversmithing which was broken into pieces and placed
as an offering within the peat bog. The
beautiful images of the goddess, and of the ritual lives of the people,
sculpted into the silver cauldron transport us back into antiquity. As Dr. Glob details it, the amount of silver
used to create this massive cauldron likely represented much of the actual
wealth and riches of the local people and their leaders, as most of the silver
they had arrived from far-off lands, and would never have been broken into
pieces and buried as an offering if the times were not critically dire. Ancient man did everything with purpose, even
if today those purposes are forgotten, or seen as inconsequential. It is a great example of how everything we
value today will be either forgotten, ignored, or supplanted by new things and
new ideas, just as modern man dismisses the ideals, beliefs, and religions of
ancient man.
The last section of the
book describes the many carved wooden gods found in the bogs. These carvings, usually abstracted and taking
advantage of the natural shapes and forms of the wood used, were found in all
ancient human cultures that worshipped the great goddess of fertility. It was these carved gods which were cared for
and protected by the god’s priests, and which, in a wholesale act of evil, were
ordered destroyed or burned by the early roman catholic church (always ready to
exterminate humans, ideas, and religions they saw as counter to their fascistic
fake-ass christianity.) The patriarchal
and pedophiliac roman catholic church feared the power of women, and the power
of the Great Goddess, and they still do, seeking to subjugate half the
population into subservience towards the male half. So fucking dumb. There is nothing more stupid
in human history than the actions of religions and their followers, and the
attempted erasure of our collective human past and human mythology is among the
worst, along with the wholesale slaughter of “heathen” humans that religions
love to engage in frequently. We are
currently living through the same thing as the state of Israel commits genocide
attempting to erase the ancient and storied lineage of Palestine. There is nothing more evil in the world than
a religious idiot.
Two thousand years is
not a long time. Modern humans, Homo
Sapiens Sapiens, have been around for just over 60,000 years. The Homo family, our human ancestors such as
Homo Habilis, Neanderthal man, and such, have been around for around a quarter of a million years. This is but a drop in the
bucket compared to the dinosaurs, who flourished on Earth for hundreds of
millions of years, or green plants which have populated our planet for over two
billion years, a ridiculous amount of time.
I bring this up because the humans that started what we call
civilization did so very recently, cosmically speaking. We are more similar in our day-to-day lives
to the ancient Scandinavians working the old peat bogs that we care to admit. Our collective humanity has learned more, and
forgotten more, than we can ever imagine, and it is great books such as this
one that help us keep the awareness of deep time in mind. Reading about the bog-people and their
culture keeps us grounded, aware that the concerns of humanity have always been
the same. The need for family, food,
shelter, and spiritual connection is found in all human cultures. I hope more people read this great book and
open their minds to the infinite variety of human existence.
(This great book can be purchased here: https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-bog-people )
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