AS SERENE AS THE PRESERVED dead often seem as they slumber under glass in the world’s museums, they do not always rest there in peace. My first inkling of this came during a pilgrimage I made to the small Danish town of Silkeborg to see a particularly famous mummy, Tollund Man. Silkeborg lies some 250 miles northwest of Copenhagen in a dark moody land of heaths and fens and small thatch-roof cottages, and it was there nearly half a century ago that the body of a 2,400-year-old man came to light in the waters of a local bog. Eerily preserved down to the day-old reddish stubble on his chin and the delicate tracery of crow’s feet around his eyes, Tollund Man is a marvel of nature. He possesses one of the most haunting faces of any ancient mummy ever discovered. As a result, Tollund Man has become something of a national hero in Denmark, an indelible reminder to all Danes of who they once were and where they came from.
I reached Silkeborg rather late in the day, frayed and travel-worn from an early morning flight from Amsterdam and a dawdling milk-run trip by train from Copenhagen, but I was eager to see Tollund Man. I dumped my bags at my hotel and went hurrying off down the street to the museum, a spacious eighteenth-century manor house painted bright egg-yolk yellow. I arrived just twenty minutes before closing. The staff was clearly surprised to see a foreign traveler pitching up so late in the day, but they were too polite to say so, and the woman collecting admissions hastily gave me directions to the room where Tollund Man was enshrined. With a map scrunched in my hand, I hustled down the echoing corridors. It was a memorable twenty minutes. I had become adept at bobbing and weaving around the thick crowds that inevitably form in front of mummies. This room was completely empty. I circled the glass case, paying my silent respects to Tollund Man, but as I did so, I had a strange, unsettling sensation. I felt as if someone were peering at me intently as I peered at Tollund Man.
The next morning, I returned to spend more time and to chat with the museum’s amiable director. Christian Fischer had been knighted by the Danish government for his loving care of the museum’s famous charge and for his scholarship on Denmark’s bog bodies. As we talked in Fischer’s airy office, I discovered why I had felt so uneasy the day before. No one, it turns out, is ever alone with Tollund Man. The museum has installed three video surveillance cameras around his tomb. Tollund Man himself rests in a bulletproof case. Over the years, explained Fischer sadly, wandering psychiatric patients had become greatly distressed at the sight of the dead man, and after one or two disturbing incidents, the museum had reluctantly invested in a bulletproof case for its most famous resident. As safe as Tollund Man now seemed, these measures had not entirely allayed Fischer’s fears. He worried that one day his charge would be kidnapped by thieves intent on ransom. This was not some personal paranoia. When Fischer recently squired a visiting Israeli professor around the museum, his guest was startled by the security in Tollund Man’s room—not that it was too much, but that it was far too lax. “Where is the gunman?” the Israeli scientist asked Fischer in astonishment. “Where is the gunman?”
What made this story all the more poignant to me was that Tollund Man had already suffered considerably at the hands of his fellow men. Indeed, during his own lifetime, the ancient Dane had been the victim of terrible violence. Like so many of Europe’s bog bodies, he had been put to death mysteriously by his contemporaries and cast away into the cold bleakness of a bog. The murder weapon in Tollund Man’s case, a sturdy rope so neatly and precisely plaited that the sight of it sent chills down my back, still trails from his neck. In Denmark, there were many theories about what had happened to the ancient man and to the hundreds of other bodies that had been hauled dripping wet and trailing tendrils of peat from northern Europe’s bogs. Indeed, people had mused and told stories for generations about the fates of these ancient bog people. Over time, their tales had given birth to legends of creatures from the black lagoon.
Today we take great pride in the ingenuity of criminal investigators who are able to make so much of slender clues to a murder, bringing the guilty to justice. But these specialists are accustomed to favorable conditions, examining crime scenes that are relatively undisturbed and bodies that are but a few days, months, or years old. What would they make of cases that had gone cold hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago, and committed in places that had long vanished? Could science help finger a likely perpetrator? And could the mummies themselves tell us something important about our own murderous impulses and what had long impelled us to take the lives of others? Have we always been such calculated killers?
These questions led me ultimately to the damp fens of the northern Netherlands. There the ancient dead had been subjected to hideous indignities.
ON A FINE spring day in 1897, two Dutch villagers spotted a strange corpse lying in the murky waters of a small bog in the northern Netherlands. The men had been hard at work laying in a winter’s supply of fuel, dredging sodden basketfuls of peat and stacking them to dry in the sun along the shore. The northern Netherlands had many such barrens, and with few exceptions these lands had a bad reputation among local inhabitants. Treacherous underfoot, with slippery hummocks and deep pools of cold dark water, the northern bogs had claimed several lives over the years. In surrounding villages there were tales of demons in the bogs, with long arms capable of dragging the innocent to their deaths. In Yde, where the two peat cutters lived, people generally avoided these fens. But the two men did not have that luxury. A smoky peat fire was all that stood between them and bitter cold on winter nights.
So in the spring of 1897, the pair headed off to the mere to cut peat. And it was there that one of them noticed something human in the black muck of the dredge basket. It was the shriveled body of a crone. Her face was dark as a puffball and her eyes were squeezed shut, as if she hated the sight of the world. Her cavernous mouth seemed to wince, revealing a row of tiny peglike teeth that gleamed like black pearls. Down one side of her head, a thick tress of long red hair fell to her shoulder. The two men stared in disbelief. For a terrible moment, they thought they had unearthed a carmine-haired demon. They dropped their gear and fled.
Working up their courage, they later returned, dragging what they could of the wizened body from the peat. A week or so later, the mayor of Yde came by to investigate. He examined the body, which lay beneath a stack of peat, then notified the police. He also contacted the museum in nearby Assen, for the bog was known to have special powers of preservation. Investigators hurried out. Scrutinizing the nearly naked corpse, they concluded that the woman had lain in her watery tomb for a very long time: no recent body from the bog looked as leathery and shriveled as she did. They also concluded that she was no elderly crone at all, but a girl, for her feet were tiny and childlike. But the thing that most struck the investigators was the manner in which she had died. She did not seem to have drowned accidentally. A seven-foot-long band was wrapped three times around her neck. Someone had tied a slipknot in it and tightened it beneath her left ear until she could no longer breathe. It seemed a very calculated, knowing way of killing someone.
The investigators called her Yde Girl and handed her body over to the museum in Assen. There she was put on display. Decades later, when physicists had finally devised a technology for radiocarbon dating just a tiny portion of the cloth found with her, museum officials arranged to have her dated. Yde Girl was very, very old. Indeed, she had breathed her last two thousand years ago, during the dying days of the Iron Age, when empire-hungry Roman legions were beginning to push their way north. During those troubled times, loosely knit Germanic tribes had gained a reputation as fierce warriors. They battled their enemies with iron swords, dressed in fine woven woolens, pulled on gleaming bronze neck rings, warmed their houses with peat fires, drank to the health of their allies with beer, and proudly counted their wealth in cattle.
Yde Girl’s survival from that remote age was an act of nature, accomplished not by human hands but by the secret alchemy of the bog. Over the years, researchers advanced many theories to explain this phenomenon. Scientific thinking today suggests that it is due to the complex chemical changes caused by the death of sphagnum moss, the chief vegetation in a bog. When sphagnum dies, it releases an unstable substance known as sphagnan, which is slowly converted by several chemical steps into humic acid. The sphagnan and its transitional compounds, as well as the humic acid, all have a strange effect on a cadaver. They extract calcium from bones, softening skeletons. Under the weight of overlying layers of peat, human bones bend, break, and warp until some corpses take on the grotesque look of melted toffee. The same chemicals also trigger a complex reaction with the nitrogen in human flesh, slowing bacterial growth and effectively tanning skin and organs like Tuscan leather. By such means, Yde Girl escaped the way of all flesh, surviving for millennia after her executioners had turned to dust.
All across northern Europe, wherever mossy bogs are to be found, turf cutters stumbled upon similar bodies. Indeed, one German researcher, Alfred Dieck, collected reports and local stories of nearly 1,900 cadavers in watery graves stretching from the meres of Ireland to the fens of Sweden. While some scholars now dispute Dieck’s figures, most agree that the ancient practice of burying certain members of society in bogs was once widespread across Europe. And they shake their heads at the terrible fates that many in the bogs met. In Denmark, someone fed Graubelle Man a gruel tainted with poisonous fungi, then slit his throat from ear to ear. In Germany, someone bound the hands of Kayhausen Boy behind his back and stabbed him in the throat. In England, someone clubbed, strangled, and beheaded Worsley Man.
Such chilling acts of violence rival anything seen today on the streets of Europe or North America, but archaeologists have long been divided in their theories about what happened. For years, many European researchers suggested the victims were homosexuals, adulteresses, and societal outcasts executed for their transgressions. Other scholars theorized that they were people chosen for human sacrifices or cast out as vengeful spirits. None could clinch the case, however, and in the 1970s, archaeologists’ interest in bog bodies died. Giant excavating machines were gobbling up vast swathes of bogs for gardeners’ bags of peat, blindly tearing buried bog bodies to shreds. That left only the older finds, hauled out from the meres before the invention of modern archaeological methods. Most scholars shunned such poorly documented cadavers. And there matters might have languished had it not been for a little-known Dutch researcher, Wijnand van der Sanden, whose speciality as an archaeologist was not bog bodies at all but Iron Age villages. “Wijnand really started the interest in the bog bodies again,” said Torsten Capelle, a professor of archaeology at Westfalische Wilhelms-Universtität in Munster, Germany. “It slept for nearly thirty years.”
Van der Sanden is a gentle man in his late forties with a shy smile and the stiff, slightly strained manner of someone who enjoys the company of books more than he does that of most people. He lives in the small village of Rolde in the northern Netherlands. I met him on a sunny Saturday morning in neighboring Assen on the first good day after a long winter. Along the street outside the restaurant, market vendors were setting up booths to hawk homemade sausages, cheese, kites, and wooden shoes. There was a decidedly festive air to the day. Van der Sanden, however, paid it little mind. Slipping into a seat in a local restaurant, he seemed every bit the serious scholar with a short, closely cropped white beard, steel-gray hair and penetrating blue eyes. After an hour or so, his wife and young son turned up to claim him for a family outing. He gently asked them for an hour’s reprieve, sending them back to the market. They returned to the restaurant an hour later, then an hour after that. Each time he begged off. Finally, seeing his absorption, they set off for home without him. Van der Sanden and I talked late into the afternoon. I felt guilty for ruining his family’s day, but I had the impression that these kinds of things happened fairly often. Van der Sanden couldn’t help himself. “My wife hates bog bodies,” he told me with a nervous laugh.
For all his obsession, however, the soft-spoken archaeologist maintains a strict scientific objectivity about his subjects. He is cool, careful, and exact in his speech. He rarely permits himself a word too many, or an adjective or phrase that is too colorful and hence unscientific. Listening to him, I wondered how such a cautious man had ever become caught up in such a strange passion. But the measured talk is just so much wallpaper. Van der Sanden is a romantic. As a teenager, he had read a book entitled The Bog People, which was a lyrical account of the bodies and their mysterious past. The author, P. V. Glob, was a Danish archaeologist who had been one of the first on the scene when Tollund Man was discovered. Glob had been powerfully affected by the experience. When one of the excavators perished from a heart attack while hauling the sopping body from its watery tomb, Glob saw a certain poetic justice. “The bog claimed a life for a life,” wrote the Danish researcher, “or, as some may prefer to think, the old gods took a modern man in place of the man from the past.” Van der Sanden was fascinated. The romance of the ancient past seemed so much more inviting than the sensible pragmatism of modern Dutch society. “That was the most impressive book I’ve ever read,” he explained. He decided to become an archaeologist.
Specializing in the prehistoric era in the Netherlands, he applied for a job at the Drents Museum in Assen. It had one of the largest bog body exhibits in Europe. But when van der Sanden first went to work there in 1987, he noticed that most people stared blankly at Yde Girl and the other bog bodies that had come to join her over the years in the museum. Then they quickly moved away, finding it hard to see any humanity in the rags of chestnut-colored skin and hair. The few who were curious, however, peppered him with questions about what had happened to the bodies. To van der Sanden’s deep regret, he wasn’t able to give them many decent answers. “I’d have to say, ‘Oh sorry, these things haven’t been studied.’ ”
This troubled him greatly. He knew that science—particularly the disciplines of pathology, radiology, and physical anthropology so useful in forensic investigations—could potentially reveal a great deal about such bodies. He had been reading of just such a case. Three years earlier, English workers had made a gruesome discovery in a peat land just outside of Manchester, uncovering what they first thought was a piece of ancient wood while cutting turf at Lindow Moss. It was actually a muck-covered human calf and right foot. Soon after, a flap of human skin was discovered in the uncut bog nearby.
The Manchester police were very interested. They had begun looking into the disappearance of Malika Reyn-Bardt, a local woman who had vanished under mysterious circumstances from her home near Lindow Moss. Investigators strongly suspected that the woman’s homosexual husband, Peter Reyn-Bardt, had married her as a convenience, then murdered her, chopping her body into pieces and disposing of her remains in his cottage garden. This garden perched above Lindow Moss. Reyn-Bardt had confessed to the murder to a friend who was serving time in an English prison. But the Manchester police had so far failed to unearth any sign of the woman’s corpse—or rather its chopped-up pieces. They wondered whether the mucky leg belonged to the vanished woman.
Cheshire County archaeologist Rick Turner thought it unlikely. In 1983, workers at Lindow Moss had discovered a partial skull and eyeball. Subsequent studies showed they came from an Iron Age woman. Turner believed the severed leg likely belonged to her, too, or to someone else of similar vintage. He persuaded investigators to allow him to excavate the new find under police supervision. With a team of six, he cut out an entire block of peat and transported it by a peatworks railway car to a local morgue. To identify the body within, pathologists took X rays of the teeth. Not one filling could be seen, a rare state of affairs for someone living in the age of modern dentistry. Subsequent radiocarbon tests confirmed Turner’s suspicions. Lindow Man, as the corpse was soon known, had perished nearly two thousand years ago.
To glean clues to the man’s last moments, Turner painstakingly brushed away the peat from the body, exposing the gnarled and deformed skull and the withered abdomen. Then he mounted an investigation of his own, bringing in fifty specialists, from chemists and microbiologists to entomologists, botanists, and knot experts. Lindow Man, it transpired, died in the prime of life, in his mid-twenties. He stood five feet six inches tall, an average height for the age, and weighed about 130 pounds. On the day of his death, his body gleamed with a blue or green coppery clay pigment, similar to the dark-blue paint that Julius Caesar saw on Britons during his campaign on the island. The ancient man had dined on a charred piece of flat bread or griddle cake. He had also consumed a small quantity of mistletoe, a toxic plant often associated with Druids, the philosopher-priests said by the Romans to practice human sacrifice. And he had not died quietly. Indeed, Lindow Man suffered not one violent death, but three. He had been bludgeoned, likely with a small ax. He had been garroted with a string made of animal sinew. Then his throat had been slashed with a knife, until he bled to death.
Sifting through the evidence, researchers concluded that Lindow Man had perished during an ancient human sacrifice. One well-known scholar, Anne Ross, was particularly fascinated by Lindow Man’s consumption of mistletoe and charred cake. It reminded her of accounts of an ancient fire festival conducted in the Scottish Highlands on the first of May. Known as the Beltane Fire, the festival was celebrated atop high hills in the region as late as the eighteenth century. All fires were doused the night before, and participants gathered on a prominence to light a sacred bonfire. Then they drew bits of toasted oatmeal cakes from a bonnet. One piece had been colored black with charcoal: the person who blindly picked it was considered a sacrifice in exchange for the gods’ favor. In eighteenth-century Scotland, the sacrifice was not a fatal matter: the victim was required only to leap three times through the flickering light of the bonfire. But Ross and others believed that the fire-jumping rite had at some point replaced the Druids’ ritualistic execution.
Van der Sanden, however, was far from convinced. He saw Ross’s theory as just an elaborate, somewhat fanciful story built on little more than a few carbonized grains and four specks of mistletoe pollen. Such minutiae, so critical to Ross’s argument, could easily be explained away. Absentminded cooks were not confined to the modern era: someone could have accidentally burned the bread that Lindow Man ate. Moreover, the ancient Briton could have consumed mistletoe as a medicine. During Roman times, Pliny the Elder described how Druids prepared a tonic from mistletoe as an antidote for poison. Still, Turner’s studies greatly intrigued the cautious Dutch researcher. They showed just how much of the ancient past could yet be retrieved from a few pounds of leathery flesh.
Excited by the possibilities, van der Sanden began calling up forensic, medical, and anthropological experts, asking them for their help in recovering what they could from the bog bodies in his care in Assen and in other museums in the Netherlands. He desperately wanted to glean new clues to the final chapters of their lives.
UNDER THE LOW museum lighting, van der Sanden stood among the silent litter of bodies and smiled. Far from the restaurant, the market, and other people, he was very much in his element. All around us on the second floor of the Drents Museum, ancient corpses lay like gnarled tree roots. It was a surreal scene. There was Exloermond Man, a barrel-shaped body topped only by a thin strip of scalp and wispy red hair, and there was Emmer-Erfscheidenveen Man, a paper-thin patch of torso and thighs. He resembled, although I did not say so to van der Sanden, Wile E. Coyote after a particularly disastrous fall. Then there was the Weerdinge Couple, two headless male wraiths stretched out in a tender embrace. They made a poignant pair, but for one disconcerting detail. Someone had disemboweled the taller of the two men. His withered intestines corkscrewed out in a leathery cascade.
But the star of the exhibit was unquestionably Yde Girl. Still possessed of her head and face, she seemed infinitely more human than the rest. Wrinkled and shrunken as a moldy prune, she looked as old as time itself. But even so, something of the lost girl remained. She was tiny and frail, and in van der Sanden’s artful arrangement of her remains, he had managed to capture a certain demureness in her. Only her head and toes peeked out from beneath an immense reddish-brown cloak. I found it hard to take my eyes from her. I couldn’t help but wonder who she had once been and how her laughter had sounded and what thoughts had traveled through her mind on the last day of her life. Staring down at the band rudely twisted about her neck, I pitied her. It seemed a particularly brutal end.
During his studies of the Dutch bodies, van der Sanden shipped off samples of her tissues to human geneticists and blood-typing specialists. He carried her by car to Groningen University for X rays and CT scans and arranged for textile experts to examine the woolen rags found with her. He brought in physical anthropologists and pathologists to study in a nondestructive fashion both the manner of her death and the diseases that she had suffered from in life. He contacted forensic experts to study the distinctive papillary lines that ridged the soles of her feet. He left no stone unturned.
For every success, however, van der Sanden ran aground with frustrating failure. The geneticists, for example, were unable to amplify any DNA from her tissue samples: the chemicals that protect soft tissue in the bog water had destroyed fragile coils of DNA. This meant that researchers would never be able to track down any modern descendants of her family line or discern any hereditary diseases. But van der Sanden was very patient. Scans of her skull showed that her wisdom teeth had neither erupted nor grown roots. This meant she died as an adolescent, at about age sixteen. X rays of her spine revealed that she had suffered from a skeletal abnormality known as scoliosis, which results in a sideways S-shaped curve of the spine. Possibly an inherited trait, this curvature leads to a certain lopsidedness, a tendency to favor one side more than the other. This was confirmed by the swollenness of the big toe on her right foot and the calluses on the toe next to it. In all probability, Yde Girl walked with a slight asymmetrical gait, as her weight fell more heavily on her right foot.
Since her discoverers had accidentally destroyed much of her lower body, including her gastrointestinal tract, the research team was unable to determine the menu of her last meal. But textile experts could hazard a guess as to what she had worn for the occasion. An examination of the cloth recovered from the find spot revealed that she had been buried with a large, much-darned woolen cloak striped with pretty pale yellow, blue, and red bands. It was quite possible that the girl had been killed with cloth from another item of her attire. The woven band knotted around her neck looked like a waistband from a garment.
There was little doubt that Yde Girl had been harshly treated. The forensic examination revealed that someone had shorn the long blond hair from the right side of her head, likely with a pair of scissors, and possibly stabbed her just under her collarbone. Her killer had then wound the cloth band about her neck three times and tied a sliding knot beneath her left ear, tightening it inexorably until she asphyxiated. The marks of this cold-blooded act could be seen even two thousand years later on her body: a deep furrow creased her neck and a large depression beneath her left ear recorded the spot where the knot had extinguished her breath. But the killers were not done with her. As a parting gift, someone had arranged her facedown in the bog, for the front of her head was far better preserved than the back.
Van der Sanden was intrigued by all this, but he wanted to know more. To see her as she had once been, he contacted medical artist Richard Neave at the University of Manchester. A stylish man in his early sixties with an arch sense of humor, Neave works closely with the Manchester police, helping to identify criminals from the blurry images of closed-circuit-display camera videos and to physically reconstruct the faces of unidentifiable homicide victims. From time to time, the artist has also re-created the faces of historical figures, from Lindow Man to Phillip the II of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great. To van der Sanden’s immense relief, Neave agreed to try his hand at Yde Girl. He asked van der Sanden to bring her body to England.
In the Stopford Building in Manchester, Neave toiled for months on the reconstruction. He first arranged for a series of CT scans to be taken of her head, clearly imaging all the bones and bone fragments. Then he contacted experts at London University College Hospital, asking for their help in digitally reassembling the fragments until at last they had a complete skull. Entering the data into a computer linked to an industrial milling machine, Neave made an exact three-dimensional plastic model. With this replica of Yde Girl’s skull, he began modeling the soft tissues, inserting wooden pegs of different lengths into twenty-four key points on the skull, from the tip of the chin to the curve of the brow ridge. Each peg indicated the average thickness of soft tissue on an adolescent girl’s face. This technique allowed Neave to recreate the girl’s facial muscles and skin in clay. He then made a wax cast of the results.
The day van der Sanden flew back to England for the reconstructed Yde Girl was one of the most thrilling of his life. “It was like going on a blind date,” he told me a bit self-consciously. But he had nothing to worry about. The young woman who awaited him in Manchester was a haunting strawberry-blond beauty, far removed from the crone that had been pulled from the waters of the northern bog. Van der Sanden was elated. Back in Assen, the Iron Age girl captivated the Dutch public, who flocked for the first time to see her in the museum. Restored to herself, the Yde Girl became celebrated by Dutch writers and poets, no longer a nightmare figure. “People have written radio plays, poems, and books about her,” said van der Sanden. “They can see now that she was a real person.”
THE MEDICAL TESTS and forensic examinations were turning up vital new clues, but van der Sanden realized they could never solve the mystery of Yde Girl’s death. Nor could they explain the demises of the other twelve bog bodies in Dutch museums. A more complete picture was needed, and this had to include all the ancient bog bodies that had been lost, destroyed, or reburied over time in the Netherlands. In all likelihood, reasoned van der Sanden, the sum of all these homicides would be far more revealing than the details of individual killings: it could disclose a lethal pattern to a discriminating eye. So, as the forensic tests proceeded, he began amassing all the information he could on the Netherland’s lost bog bodies. He wanted to know who they had been, when they had lived, and how they had died.
Others had already attempted to gather such data. The German researcher Alfred Dieck had spent nearly half a century rooting out obscure historical records of bog bodies across Europe, interviewing the turf cutters and villagers who claimed to have found them. By such means, the elderly archaeologist had penned nearly two dozen articles and produced a series of scientific tallies of Europe’s bog bodies. The last of Dieck’s counts, published in 1986, listed more than 1,850 bog bodies in all of Europe, although it included airmen from the Second World War and political victims of the Troubles in Ireland. According to this tally, 49 of the ancient corpses had surfaced over the centuries in the Netherlands.
Dieck was a trusting man, however. Indeed, he had often taken local folklore, tall tales, and myths at face value. When a doctor mentioned a bog maiden so perfectly preserved that even her fragile hymen could be seen, Dieck dutifully wrote the story down. When someone else described finding a body decorated with wreaths of oak leaves—materials that would never survive in the acidic waters of the bog—Dieck made credulous notes. And when an informant recalled stumbling on an entire bog body battlefield, complete with swords and crushed shields such as the world had never known before, Dieck nodded and jotted it down, never thinking to ask for any proof. He even counted place names, such as Norway’s Daumannsmoor, which meant “dead man’s bog,” as finds.
Van der Sanden decided to look into the matter himself, searching out reliable records of bog bodies that had gone missing. He rummaged through collections of ancient textiles and human remains in Dutch universities, searching for the slightest vestige of bog body clothes or tissue. He pored over the correspondence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeologists, taking note of brief mentions of lost bodies. He combed through huge stacks of old newspapers, hunting for articles about corpses found in the bogs. In the process, the Dutch archaeologist turned up something quite wonderful: a detailed newspaper story about a bog body that had eluded Dieck’s attention.
Heartened by this, van der Sanden redoubled his efforts, and every so often he scored a success. While poring over the Emmer Courant of May 21, 1921, for example, he spied a small article. “During the digging in the peat,” noted the reporter, “about twenty-five centimeters deep in the black peat, a very complete, very old human being was found, probably a male person. The entire body was intact, and the skin was tanned and the bones were dissolved and the legs and hands were in a very good state. One of the eyes was open. The local police officer took the body away.”
By such dogged work, van der Sanden found records of fifty-six Dutch bog bodies. Some had been ground up in apothecaries’ mortars to make a medicine popular in Europe at the time. Others had been hastily buried along the peripheries of graveyards, where suicides and unbaptized children were customarily interred. In all, forty-six had lived during the Bronze or Roman Iron Ages, judging from published accounts of clothing styles or from radiocarbon tests on surviving bodies. Most were adult males. Many were buried in the bog without a shred of clothing, stripped of all personal possessions. Most had perished in the troubled late Iron Age, when Rome was marching north, throwing the ancient Germanic world into chaos. Of the seven bodies for whom cause of death was known, all seven revealed signs of foul play, from smashed skulls to nooses about their necks.
THERE WERE THREE main schools of thought about these bog bodies. Many archaeologists believed that the ancient homicides were an Iron Age version of capital punishment. The executioners, they observed, often stripped the victims of arm rings, cloak pins, and other valuables, as warders did prisoners. They further humiliated their captives by partially shaving their heads and stripping them of their clothes. They denied them proper forms of burial and dumped their bodies in desolate wildlands. Sometimes they anchored the corpses to the bottom of bogs with wooden posts or branches, ensuring that the offenders would never again see the light of day.
All this sounded very much like the punishments that Germanic tribes had once meted out to their undesirables. In the first century A.D., a high-ranking Roman magistrate, Tacitus, penned an account of the customs and lives of these people. Likely based on information gleaned from Germanic princes and prisoners of war living in Rome, Germania reads suspiciously like a lecture on morality. Making much of the simple virtues of the barbarians, Tacitus pointedly described their marriage customs for his hedonistic Roman readers. The northerners, he explained, greatly esteemed marriage, dealing harshly with adulteresses. Cuckolded husbands wasted little time in punishing their wives, shaving their heads, stripping them of their clothes, and flogging them in the streets. Moreover, they exacted even greater penalties against those who broke other social codes. “Cowards, deserters, and homosexuals were drowned,” observed Tacitus, “pressed down under wicker hurdles in bogs and swamps.”
In nineteenth-century Germany, researchers took note of these passages. Some, such as Johanna Mestorf, a professor at Kiel University, drew explicit parallels with the circumstances of several bog bodies, and their papers attracted a large following that eventually included a prominent twentieth-century Nazi official. Heinrich Himmler was head of Nazi Germany’s Schutzstaffel, or SS forces. He ran both the country’s police forces and its death camps, and considered himself a student of history. Indeed, he had borrowed heavily on the mythology of ancient Germanic tribes when designing the insignia and rites of his beloved SS. By the late 1930s, Himmler viewed both war and the shedding of German blood as inevitable, and he had become obsessed with measures for the procreation of a new generation of blond-haired youth. He urged his SS officers to raise large families and to sow their seed in whatever field presented itself. At the same time, he turned his ire on German homosexuals, whom he despised and considered an unnecessary burden on the Nazi state.
During a speech to the SS in 1937, Himmler offered a chilling history lesson to the men in his command. He pointed to the executions of the bog bodies as an example of an ancient Aryan tradition deserving of revival. “Homosexuals were drowned in swamps,” he said. “The worthy professors who find these bodies in peat do not realize that in ninety out of a hundred cases, they are looking at the remains of a homosexual who was drowned in a swamp along with his clothes and everything else. That was not a punishment, but simply the termination of such an abnormal life.” With history seemingly on the Nazis’ side, the SS brutally proceeded with the unthinkable, rousting gay men and women from their beds in the middle of the night and stuffing them into cars. In all, fifteen thousand homosexuals were dispatched to Europe’s death camps, more innocent victims of Nazi hatred.
After the war, most German researchers quietly shelved the theory that the bodies had been victims of capital punishment. They were ashamed of the way the Third Reich had used the ancient dead to justify its own fanatical bigotry. It was not the first, nor sadly the last time, that politicians tried manipulating the dead, but many German anthropologists deeply regretted the part their research had played in Himmler’s schemes. They cast around for new explanations of the bog bodies. Downplaying Tacitus, some turned to traditional German folklore for ideas. The tales, they discovered, were replete with Wiedergänger—ghosts of executed criminals, suicides, murder victims, and others who had perished under violent and unnatural circumstances. The Wiedergänger were restless, spiteful beings who generally made life miserable for the living. To fend off these unwelcome guests, peasants in the tales often mutilated the corpses of those who died violently—binding their hands, shaving their heads, and covering their eyes.
Neither the Wiedergänger nor the capital punishment theories, however, seemed to fit most bog bodies. It was true that someone had shorn off half of Yde Girl’s hair, but there was no striping of lash marks on her body. Nor was there any indication that she had ever been staked to the bottom of a bog. Other bog bodies were equally problematic. The two Weerdinge men had indeed been found in a timeless embrace, but there was nothing to suggest they were lovers: they could as easily be brothers or comrades in arms. And there was little to indicate that they had ever been shunned as outcasts—quite the contrary; in death they had been gently arranged side by side so that they could touch one another for eternity. This seemed more an act of tender-hearted affection than the curt dismissal of an executioner or the curse of a terrified peasant.
But if the bog bodies weren’t victims of capital punishment or the remains of a Wiedergänger, who were they? Outside Germany, several researchers subscribed to the view that they were human sacrifices. Such practices had been well known in northern Europe. In Germania, Tacitus had described such an event during a festival held to honor a Germanic goddess who reigned over the bounty of fall harvests and the fecundity of the herds. Nerthus was a powerful deity, someone not to be trifled with, so the northern tribes regularly buttered her up with a major festival. Casting aside their weapons, they gathered en masse to watch a priest carry the goddess’s shrine in a chariot from her sanctuary. Days of celebration followed. When the divinity had finally tired of mortals, she instructed her slaves to haul her shrine and chariot to a near lakeshore for ritual cleansing. Then her priests sacrificed the slaves.
The choice of a lakeshore for this carnage was deliberate. Most Germanic and Celtic peoples saw their gods not as celestial beings who floated ethereally in the sky or who perched majestically like Zeus atop mountains, but as deities enthroned in the underworld. The doorway to this divine realm lay in water, the glassy sheets that covered lakes, springs, bogs, or the rippling currents of rivers. In Germania, Tacitus described how two Germanic tribes once fought fiercely over possession of a river. Both were desperate to win, since they believed that the river was the doorway to heaven: a man’s prayers here would instantly reach the gods. Other ancient Europeans apparently saw water in a similar light. According to the classical Greek historian Strabo, Celtic tribes to the west often bestowed precious offerings of gold and silver to their gods in sacred lakes.
Archaeological discoveries have since borne this out. During Denmark’s Bronze Age, prosperous tribespeople left remarkable gifts and ritual paraphernalia in the bogs—entire chariots with gleaming bronze axles, wooden warships, bronze axes, bronze daggers, bronze swords, gold arm rings, and magnificient bronze wind instruments known as lurer. During one memorable ceremony, someone bestowed a huge silver caldron ornamented magnificently with scenes of gods and what might be a portrayal of human sacrifice. In other parts of Europe, however, the offerings and ritual items were often more humble. In the Iron Age Netherlands, for example, people left more down-to-earth presents in the peat lands: leather shoes, wooden wheels, ploughshares, braids of hair, bronze spearheads, bronze daggers, balls of wool, bronze arm rings, bronze neck rings, woolen clothing, deer antlers, bull horns, and earthenware pots that likely held food.
In all likelihood, said van der Sanden at the end of our afternoon together, ancient Europeans had seen the life of a human being as a precious sacrifice and they had chosen the bleak bogs with great care. Two thousand years ago and more, they had glimpsed a magical waterworld charged with religious significance in the fens, not a place of desolation and abandonment. “The best evidence for that,” he said, “is seeing all the objects that have been found in bogs. I find it hard to imagine that the bogs were places where punished people were just dumped to get them out of society.”
But that is as much as the careful scientist will say. After all his long years of research, neither he nor anyone else really knows who Yde Girl was or exactly why she was chosen to die two thousand years ago. She may have been a slave captured from a neighboring tribe. She may have been a physical misfit selected as an offering because of her slight physical imperfection, a lopsided gait. Or it may be, as I choose to think, that she was simply an innocent child selected by village elders as the greatest gift they could imagine. Lying her face downward in the bog, they ensured that she would see for herself the splendors of the divine world she was entering. To be chosen for such a grand fate would be an honor, and in this, her homicide, however calculated, bore little resemblance to the cases that occupy police investigators today.
Our explorations of such lost worlds are limited, however, by the telescopes that science fashions for us. As riddled with flaws as the original Hubble telescope, our lenses are often crude, capricious things. Rarely showing us what we most want to see, they shed minute specks into exquisite, breathtaking focus, while smudging giant fields into an indecipherable blur. This is the great frustration of studying the bog bodies. Peering through the thick lenses that science has given us, we can often see only tiny patches of light—what people ate, what they wore, how they looked, how they dressed. Try as we will, struggle as hard as we can to make better lenses, we are unable to train our sight steadily on the people themselves, their thoughts, their desires, their dreams, the inner lives that make them truly human.
Science will never be able to solve the mystery of Yde Girl’s death. Investigators will never have the satisfaction of closing the case or fingering the murderer. But we have not thoughtlessly abandoned Yde Girl to a forgotten grave. We have not turned a blind eye to her plight. We have done all we can to retrieve her memory and retrace her final moments. That is all the justice the ancient dead can hope for.