Glob on bogs

THOMAS BRAUN

The Bog People, Iron-Age Man Preserved P. V. Glob translated by Rupert Bruce-Mit- ford (Faber 50s) Glob on bogs never clogs; which is a good job, for many will be agog to read Glob's bog-log.

Yet the mind might well boggle at its sub- ject-matter. Lord Melbourne refused to read Oliver Twist, because, as he said, 'it is all among work-houses and pickpockets and coffin-makers. I do not like these things. I wish to avoid them. I do not like them in reality, and therefore I do not like to see them represented.' What would he have said of an illustrated book about corpses, dredged up from the bogs of Denmark after meeting death by decapitation, strangulation, cutting of the throat, hanging and drowning, often preceded by torture and mutilation? Well, at least these are no recent horrors. They date from the time when northern Europe, outside the Roman Empire, was peopled by the ancient Germani. Miraculously preserved by the chemical properties of bog- water, the corpses provide valuable evidence of a remote and sinister past. Glob, who has himself unearthed some of the most celebrated bog-men, writes about them with eager enthusiasm.

Alas, Glob's career has not been one uninterrupted success. At times he has been harassed by unfair criticism. When the Grauballe man was found in Nebelgaard Fen in 1952, naked, with his throat cut, and with an expression of pain and terror on his ill-shaven face, Glob at once announced the poor fellow's iron-age origin. An ungrateful populace refused to believe him. A farmer's wife insisted that the body was that of 'Red Christian', who had vanished from the district in 1887 and might well have tumbled into the bog when half-seas over. Jutland was torn by factions, pro-Glob and anti- Glob. A hostile gossip-writer published a poem, which combines the idiomatic vigour of Andersen and Ibsen with the sombre music of the Eddas:

They still remember him well in the

parish, But how famous he's now become! Yet we have to admit his age has been Considerably overdone.

Yes, Glob must have made a big mistake When he made his diagnosis, And now the folk who know what's what Want to speak out, and tell what they know There are 'owls in the bog' somewhere— Glob must admit it's so.

('Owls in the bog' says the scholarly translator, is an 'untranslatable nuance.' It seems to mean something like a bat or fly in the belfry or ointment respectively.) Hounded by these cynical criticisms, the great Dane doggedly continued to pursue the true archaeological scent. He had to wait five years for his patience to be rewarded, for nuclear explosions in 1956 raised the radioactivity in the atmosphere to so high a level that Carbon-14 dating tests had to be postponed. But in the end they completely vindicated him. The Danish press capitulated handsomely. 'Red Christian knocked out by atoms', it proclaimed in ban- ner headlines.

Tacitus' Germania, the most valuable of contemporary sources, explains why these Iron-Age victims met with violent deaths, and were immersed in bogs instead of being cremated or buried like their fellow- tribesmen. Often it must have been as a punishment. 'Traitors and deserters are hung; cowards, poor fighters and evil-livers are plunged in the mud of marshes with a hurdle on top of them.' Sure enough, several bog-men have been found covered with branches. Adulterous women, says Tacitus, had their hair shorn and were flogged out of the village. There is a pathetic parallel with the young girl from Windeby, found naked in the peat with her hair shaved and with bandaged eyes, a collar of ox-hide round her neck.

But there is evidence, also, of ritual sacrifice of innocent, even of privileged peo- ple. Western Nordic sources tell us that one of the kings of the Yngling house was hanged by his people as an offering to the Corn Goddess. One tribe, says Tacitus, regularly "celebrated the grim initiation of their barbarous rites with a human sacrifice for the good of the community'; another drowned the ministrants of the Earth God- dess after her periodic ceremonial epiphany. The rope nooses round the necks of many victims may be replicas of the twisted neck- rings which are a sign of consecration to the goddess.

Such neck-rings figure on the great embossed silver cauldron of Gundestrup, a sacred vessel of enormous value, doubtless the trophy of foreign wars; and it has a human sacrifice for its main scene. Wooden totems of the Earth Goddess and of her male partners in divinity survive: grim, hideous and erect, sometimes surrounded by as many as forty vessels with harvest offerings.

Men singled out for death were ,given a sacrificial meal, of gruel compounded of spring grains, presumably to symbolise fertility and rebirth. No less than sixty- three different varieties of grain were analysed in the large intestine of the Grauballe man, including knotweed, clover, dock, spelt, rye-grass, goosefoot, buttercup, lady's mantle, yarrow, wild camomile, smooth , hawksbeard, linseed, gold-of-

pleasure, blue and green bristle-grass, black bindweed, black nightshade, and Yorkshire fog.

Two archaeologists were recently served with gruel made up to the Tollund man's recipe, which they hastily washed down with a cow-horn of Danish brandy. One of them commented that it would have been punish- ment enough for the unfortunate man to be made to eat this gruel for the rest of his days, however terrible his crime may have been. But the Tollund man was probably no criminal at all. With his melancholy, sensitive features and delicate hands and feet, he may have gone to his grave in the peat at the end of his term as votary of the Earth Goddess, to fulfil the demands of religion. And she, as Glob puts it, 'in return gave his face her blessing and preserved it through the millennia'.

Glob's narrative provides many incidental glimpses of present-day Denmark. He loves its heaths and farmsteads, its birches and heather; he speaks with reverence of its folklore. The huldre, he gravely states, 'is a kind of fairy, ravishingly beautiful to outward appearance but in reality hollow, who entices hunters and lone wanderers with the illusion of love and happiness. But she is a troll and so alwiLys dangerous. Any man who is bewitched by the huldre becomes spell bound, yearns for her night and day and finally loses his senses and his life, unless he is set free by some "wise man": Fortunately, there are plenty of these in Denmark. The local pastor, schoolmaster and station master, backed by the farmers' co-operative, would between them daunt the most dangerous of fairies.

With satisfaction, Glob tells us how 'an

absolute plague of ghosts' at DynVed was dispelled fifty years ago by a clergyman who drove in a stake at a spot on the hillside where there was nothing in particular to be seen. Forty years later, a Viking was found buried in the same spot, his breast still transfixed by the stake. It was the clamour of this heathen soul that had been troubling the good Christian folk of Dynved. These Danes can be very obstinate when a prin- ciple is at issue. The station-master of Aars involved the National Museum authorities in unduly heavy freight charges when he insisted on consigning the first Borre Fen man to the National Museum as a 'corpse', even though he was assured it was two thousand years old. They had to pay for disinfecting the railway carriage too. 'We may take the station master's stand', says Glob politely, 'as a compliment to the in- destructibility of this Iron-Age man'.

There is indeed a strange contrast between the worthy citizens of modern Denmark and their Iron Age ancestors. And perhaps this is the moral of the story. The inhabitants of Denmark, whose ferocity had scared the Roman world during the Cimbric invasion, and who were later to 'terrify King Alfred's England, were eventually freed from the bondage of their grim religion by Chris- tianity.

It is to this conversion that they owe their peaceable and civilised way of life. In the twentieth century, their European neighbours reverted to massacres far more extensive and cruel than the worst human sacrifices of their remote ancestors. But with this betrayal of civilisation the Danes resolutely refused to co-operate. It is less than thirty years ago that they saved the lives of their Jewish fellow-citizens, after King Christian X had promised to don the badge of shame himself in the event of a single one of his Jewish subjects being compelled to wear it. Today, the friendship of the Danish people should be regarded as one of the most valuable of British possessions. The publica- tion of this book by the Director of the Copenhagen National Museum, translated by a distinguished Keeper of the British Museum, is a happy instance of the way this friendship works in practice.