okay gentleperson and scholar @literaetures has some brilliant ideas on meaning carried in the very bodies of these dead but that’s their thing and i won’t put it on the internet for all and sundry but trust me. brilliant
anyways! when i was in ireland a month ago i spent some time out in the countryside, where there are bogs, and i spent a good deal of time in the kingship and sacrifice exhibition of the national museum of ireland - archaeology where you can actually see bog bodies and their artifacts and read about the science of preservation and bog formation and theories behind their placement and treatment (also where they built an entire artificial bog in a back room for. you know. research purposes. but more on that later)
so after scouring the exhibit and looking at some gruesome photos and getting the mythic chills i did some digging on my own and got a book on the subject and i’m obsessed with them now
so bog bodies are human remains found in raised peat bogs that form in parts of northern europe like ireland, scotland, denmark, germany, the netherlands, etc. these bogs are like 95% water and 5% other things like land, sphagnum moss, tiny invertebrates, what have you, and this mostly anoxic composition with the sphagnum moss acts as a preservation chamber for organic material. the bodies placed in these bogs are often so well preserved that they’ve been mistaken for recent murder victims despite the fact that a lot of them date back to a few centuries bce
now that’s spooky enough but the thing is? they were all brutally murdered
there’s lots of research and speculation on how and why– the how is generally pretty nailed down for most due to modern forensic science on the better preserved corpses but the why is very elusive. the only literary reference they think alluded to the practice of killing people and putting them in bogs came from tacitus, and he was a biased bitch who was basically romanticizing germanic peoples to deal with his feelings on the bloat and corruption of the roman empire, so they don’t know for sure that a) that’s actually what he was talking about and b) that he wasn’t lying through his teeth about the shameful nature of the killings as criminal punishments
and these bodies have been found across northern europe. that’s a lot of different groups of people and you can’t extrapolate from one to all the rest so it’s tricky to try to pin any one explanation down
speaking of pinning down, though: some of them were. they were pinned down to the bottom of these bogs, possibly as territory markers, possibly as appeasements to capricious land gods, possibly to make sure they couldn’t come back up again because there is a lot of superstition surrounding the dead in the mists leading folks to their doom because again. bogs are just enough water to let you sink, and just enough land to keep you from leaving. please do not go looking for bog bodies on your own.
there’s a huge variety in bodies, treatments, ages (some children, some elderly, some probably warriors) but there are a few common themes, like overkill, the servile nature of bindings, being fed truly bizarre diets as last meals (lending weight to the argument of ritual killings)
there’s also two guys buried together that scientists were like “we thought one was a woman bc they were in an intimate embrace but then we found out they were both guys so they’re comrades in arms or maybe cousins” like please. let the bogmen be gay
i have many more thoughts but there’s so much out there and i’m not 100% accurate everything i know i learned from museums or the internet or the book by miranda aldhouse-green called “bog bodies uncovered:solving europe’s ancient mystery” which i highly recommend and where you can read about that bog that those researchers built in the back of their museum to recreate and study preservation conditions (i won’t say dream job bc i just applied to dogsit two golden labs but like. isn’t it)
thank you for the interest!
