Seamus Heaney's poem on the Tollund Man has got into many anthologies, but he is only one of many people who have been fascinated by the discovery, in bogs all over Europe, of sunken bodies which the bog waters and juices have preserved. Some still have halters around their necks, and almost all show signs of having died violently. Theories have been various: these people have been viewed as executed criminals, or human sacrifices, or merely victims of local feuds and murders. The bodies include women as well as men. Glob inclines to the belief that they were in fact ritual sacrifices to the gods or the mother goddess, and in support quotes from Roman historians on the customs of the Cimbri and other tribal peoples of the ancient world.
Brian Fallon
