Bog bodies: Iron Age dreamland – by Lucinda Lagos
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I would like to share a recurring dream. I am wandering through a picturesque northern European marshland when I stop and drop to the ground with an overwhelming sense of purpose. I begin digging with vigour, the way you do in dreams, knowing that your actions are essential. Dream knowledge is its own canon; the implicit information I possess in a dream is unquestionable even upon waking. I find that every time I re-enter this familiar yet extraordinary dreamland, I am unphased by any strangeness, the dream and I being old acquaintances. In fact, I find the irresistible urge to dig comforting.
Digging like breathing, in the dream I push away peat and uncover a girl in the bog who looks just like me, only her hair is braided and she is swaddled in cloth. I know she is me, but I also know she is ancient. She is rosy cheeked and fleshy, lacking the withered and tanned skin of bog-preserved, Iron Age bodies in today’s world.
In my dream, I do not question her/my freshness. I intuit that she is immune to temporal logic and the bacterial process of rot. When you know things in dreams, you know them when you wake up. The girl in the bog who is also me represents a rest that is truly peaceful.
I have never been in a northern European marsh. Nevertheless, I can smell, hear and touch my dreamscape, feeling its fecund dampness underfoot. Not land, not water. This is the perfect place for a dream.
My dreamland and the comfort it brings me may have given me an ahistorical, romantic perspective on the reality of those sacrificed to Iron Age peatland bogs, but it is this dream and the peace of preservation beyond thousands of years which fascinates me. When the famous Tollund Man was uncovered in 1950 after his 2000-year rest in Denmark, one of the men helping move the body from his grave exhausted himself and died of a heart attack. I always wake from my dreams before I reach this point in my digging, but I choose to believe that my waking up is the culmination of a burial and a rediscovery. The fixation began after I visited the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, where I was able to look at a real bog body, encased in glass in a dimly lit room. I did not know much about Iron Age northern Europe then, and I would not claim to be an expert now – the time and geographic distance which separates the dated bodies is so massive that there can be no homogenous explanation. My urge to understand the minute details of each unique burial is stressful in its hopelessness, despite reading books and articles on the subject in attempts to frame my dream in truth.
What I do know is that I stared at a woman who lived thousands of years ago. She had blankets around her shoulders, teeth in her gaping shrunken mouth, stringy remnants of brunette hair on her blackened scalp, and an expression on her face that reminded me eerily of somebody snoring. I became obsessed with understanding her. I wondered about her life before her death, why she was buried. Most impossibly I wondered how she had felt. I longed to probe the humanity of her blanketed corpse. The more I read about her and other bog bodies, the more frustrated I became at the vastness of thousands of years that obscured the person in front of me and replaced her with an archaeological artefact.
This artefact – the Huldremose Woman – had broken her leg at some point in her life, but this had healed long before her death. I love this fact. Maybe she tripped while running and playing as a child, was comforted by a mother while she cried, helped by neighbours to walk until the bone healed. She had an amber-beaded cord around her neck. Was it a gift from a lover, something she made herself and wore with pride, a spiritual amulet? Although time and mud have turned her clothing brown, her skirt would have been blue and her scarf red. I wonder if this was her favourite outfit, one she carefully selected to be buried in. Perhaps it was chosen for her. The sheep-wool cape she was wearing in her grave had been well-loved, patched and repaired 22 times. Before her burial, somebody – maybe even Huldremose Woman herself – had sewn in an animal bladder pocket which held a bone comb, blue hairband and a leather cord, and then stitched this pocket shut. I like to imagine she sewed these amulets in herself. That, knowing she would be buried, she regarded these objects as essential for her afterlife.
I think about the black corduroy jacket I wear frequently and imagine sewing in a secret compartment – maybe with my favourite rings, or the lipstick I use the most.
The bodies and objects found in peat bogs are preserved due to the lack of oxygen in the peat, which slows the decomposition process. Soil is covered in layers of moss and water, suffocating the bacteria that usually help decompose organic matter. Moss grows on top of moss. Each bog and its chemical composition is unique – some things are preserved, some things rot. Watery spaces were seen as a gateway between the earth and a divine dimension, thus the significance of the bogs in holding sacred objects and bodies.
The science of preservation and the spiritual justification of burial are inextricable. In religion, as in a dream, molecules and bacteria transform into a god made of mud – one who suffocates me until I am her perfect amulet. I am sewn into her pocket. She will need me for something later.
In reading about bog bodies, I am always most fascinated by the lists of grave goods found alongside the bodies, at being able to see the articles deemed necessary for this otherworldly journey. There is an aspect of essentialness and practicality within the dreamy landscape of mist and moss, especially considering that Iron Age locals would have farmed the peat for iron ore and fuel for their fires. In this era, sacrificial offerings were part of the domain of water and marsh. In contrast to the limited examples of grave goods found with cremated remains, thousands of pottery vessels containing food, clothing, bronze and silver treasures and even large wagons, are found purposefully deposited in bogs. Encasing an object in the earth was essential to its reception from higher powers.
During the early Iron Age, cremation was the usual funerary tradition in north-western Europe. Cremation was believed to free the soul from the corporeal form and help the dead journey into the afterlife. Those buried in bogs would have taken with them an understanding of their eternal preservation, would have likely viewed inhumation as distinctively tying their bodies and souls to the earth for eternity.
Why were they buried? Many scholars suggest that those who became bog bodies had either transgressed against the laws of their community or been chosen as sacrifices in times of dearth, such as famine or drought. Perhaps these types of threats against the greater community were seen as a reflection of earth and the spiritual realms being in discord.
The fact that most of these victims were killed, often brutally, before their burial, does not necessarily denote a lack of care or love. They were likely known members of the community, seen to be forgoing their own lives for a greater cause, or to appropriately atone for criminal or otherwise socially unacceptable behaviours that could endanger the group by angering supernatural forces. These victims were not murdered and thrown haphazardly into swamplands, but deliberately dressed in furs and linen, and deposited with branches over their bodies in order to keep them properly placed.
I have wondered if the people who were sacrificing their kin and sacred objects to the bogs understood that thousands of years in the future people would be marvelling at the tangible evidence of love. There must have been some foreknowledge that objects encased within peat did not decompose. Despite errors and misidentifications, despite clear facts slipping from your lucid awareness, a dream will always preserve emotions, and so will the bog.
It must be the ultimate kindness to contribute to the bog and know your gifts would remain there beyond plague, famine or poor harvest, beyond even the hardest winter. How can we carbon-date burying the things we love? How can we infer through the grains and nuts still sitting in the shrivelled bowels of these humans if they enjoyed their last meals, if they were terrified, if they had to fight to keep it from erupting from their throats?
The urge which first rose in me upon ‘meeting’ Huldremose Woman in Copenhagen is one familiar to anyone with an interest in history – it was the urge to know everything in a way which is impossible. When I see my bog-self in the dream, my sense of peace signals relief at the opportunity to finally ask her these unanswerable questions: Were you able to choose how to braid your hair on the morning you died? Did somebody do it for you, did somebody give you this coat especially for the journey? Has it been your favourite to keep you warm for years? When you closed your eyes for the last time was it in acceptance or fear?
My dream does not answer these questions. The beauty of humanity is what remains – a broken leg that healed, a coat with 22 patches. I think that these little details are what bring me so much comfort in the dream. I don’t know how to braid my own hair, so when I scrape the mud away from the face of my bog-self and see her hair coiled on her head, I know that I am loved, and I know that this love will be preserved beyond bacteria and decay.
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Image: Oleh Feilo - Unsplash
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