A New Poem in Context: A Medieval Bog Woman in Northern Europe

By Amanda Brighton Payne

Dramatizing the Past

It’s not easy being a historian of the early Middle Ages. Historians most commonly use primary sources to reach into the experience of people whose world was far different from our own. But the very limited nature of the records and clues they left behind, especially in the early medieval period, means that every bit of evidence must be brought to bear, requiring us to deploy both our detective abilities and our imaginations. As Rory Naismith puts it, early medievalists ‘have to cast a wide net and use a variety of archaeological, landscape and linguistic evidence,’ but unfortunately, ‘[t]exts are few.’[1] This scarcity of information continues throughout the early medieval period, especially in the British Isles, which was subject to so much raiding and warfare and the consequent destruction of records.[2]

However, history still lurks in many places. We can learn much from documents that are not strictly historical in intention—for instance, poems or medieval Arthurian romances. As Anastasija Ropa argues, on the topic of the role of horses in medieval society, ‘critical reading of romance supplies information about the ideology and daily practice of horsemanship in the Middle Ages that is otherwise impossible to obtain from … archaeology, chronicles or administrative documentation.’[3] In short, authentic period works of fiction can inform us about fact, precisely because they can’t help but reveal their own historical reality.

If historical reality is ineluctably enmeshed in medieval storytelling, it could be said that modern storytelling—through poems, novels, films, and other creative works—can help us to imagine historical experience and a past of humanity that is otherwise almost too alien to grasp. Modern storytelling can help bridge the gap between then and now, by bringing the humanity of long-dead people a bit closer to us. Dramatizing the past helps us to present and express history’s magnetism—its deep pull on our psyches, if not always its ‘charm.’

There is arguably not much ‘charm’ in the incredibly well-preserved bog victims of northern Europe, who were killed in a variety of ways and probably for a variety of reasons, over a few millennia. But they do fascinate, for two main reasons. In the first place, we are amazed that any natural environment could preserve so well their facial features and soft tissues, even down to their fingerprints. Secondly, their gruesome anonymous ends inspire both speculation and pity. Unlike other victims or fallen of history, they have had no poems to record their lives, declaim their virtues, or make the case for their innocence or goodness (as in, say, Y Gododdin, a ninth-century Welsh poem).[4] No one in history speaks for those that ended their lives in a bog. Their personal stories cannot be known. But if we can see them not just as specimens to be picked over in a lab, but as people who once had families, loves, struggles and anxieties, then we are further enriched by investigating their existence. This desire to feel the humanity as well as the weirdness of past human experience is the motivating factor behind my own ‘bog body’ poem, which I present here, after providing a more specific historical and literary context.

Daniel Huntington, ‘Cornwall, 1871 (from Sketchbook),’ The Met

The historical-archaeological context

People’s fascination with bodies mummified in peat moss bogs across Europe never abates, but most of their attention centers on certain famous mummies of Denmark, England, and Ireland. These bodies belong to the Iron Age, which in Britain includes the so-called ‘Celtic’ period a few centuries before the arrival of the Romans, up until the Claudian conquest of AD 43. So we have a popular focus on a very few, very well-preserved pre-medieval bodies, in a relatively small geographical area. Whereas in fact, as a recent article in Antiquity points out, ‘bog skeletons and partial/disarticulated skeletal remains are far more numerous than previously assumed.’[5] The article maps the location of remains, analyzes the trauma done to them and the specific body parts found, and plots their time distribution. The authors make the point that although violent death is the norm, ‘[s]ome individuals, mainly in Phase 5 [1000 BC - AD 1100] demonstrate evidence for excessive violence, with multiple potential causes of death. In rare cases, only occurring in Phase 5, disease is the probable cause of death.’ Among numerous other observations, the authors also state that ‘[t]he Iron Age and Roman periods are generally considered to represent a peak in the deposition of human remains in mires’ but this ‘persistent notion … requires nuancing. Even though this peak indeed is highest, it is significantly longer than previously thought, starting in the Late Bronze Age and continuing into the early Middle Ages.’

Joseph Mallord, William Turner, George Clint, ‘Peat Bog, Scotland, part IX, plate 45 from “Liber Studiorum”,’ etching, 23 April, 1812, The Met

In addition to establishing the frequency and lateness of bog bodies, the article discusses the conditions in which such preservation occurs. The extent and kind of mummification varies greatly: ‘Most bog mummies are found in raised bogs, where the antibiotic properties of sphagnan, [found in] Sphagnum moss, are essential in the bodies preservation…. The survival of human tissue also depends on how quickly a body is immersed in water, the temperature and time of year, and the presence of insects and internal micro-organisms.’ Bones may or may not be preserved. ‘In general, calcified and keratinous structures, such as bones, teeth, skin, hair and nails, are the most resistant to decay. In more alkaline wetlands such as calcareous fens, however, only bone will be preserved.’ Clothing may also survive, as on most of the bog bodies found in Denmark.

It should be noted, as well, that bodies are sometimes pinned down with wooden stakes,[6] a fact that may be a response to the physical realities of decay as well as a part of ritual. Caution is required in interpreting ancient practices, since ritual in pre-scientific peoples often derives from their need to contain dead bodies and prevent them from ‘re-emerging’ as the processes of decay continue. This is especially true of shallow, waterlogged graves.[7]

Literary responses to the bog-body phenomenon

J. R. R. Tolkien’s most important work would not be the same without bogs and marshes, which feature prominently in his Lord of the Rings as eerie grave-landscapes, where the dead make their presence felt.

Hurrying forward again, Sam tripped, catching his foot in some old root or tussock. He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. There was a faint hiss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled. For a moment the water below him looked like some sort of window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry. ‘There are dead things, dead faces in the water,’ he said with horror. ‘Dead faces!’

Gollum laughed. ‘The Dead Marshes, yes, yes: that is their name,’ he cackled. ‘You should not look in when the candles are lit.’[8]

Here we have several natural features of bogs: the will-o’-the-wisp gaseous lights that appear in the dark, the ooze of decomposing mosses, the stillness of the water. The ghostly natural and the supernatural blend evocatively with the historical fact of bog bodies.

Other writers have been similarly inspired. Believing that a woman found some years before was none other than the putative Queen Gunhild, Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher wrote a poem in 1841 that contrasts her gorgeous queenly state in life with the wretchedness of her fate. Once powerful, both as woman and as wife of King Harald Bluetooth, king of Denmark and Norway, she is now only a grisly victim. Despite Blicher’s misidentification—the body is now called the Haraldskaer Woman—and wrong assumptions (he believed that she was pegged down while alive and drowned in the bog), there is a striking pathos to his contrasts. Repeatedly in ‘Dronning Gunhild,’ he observes the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ (here in translation):

Before

Then you were clothed in sable and marten,

And bedecked with precious jewels,

Gems and pearls in your golden hair,

Wicked thoughts on your mind

After

Now you lie naked, arid, and foul

With your bald head

Blacker far than the oak stake

With which you were wed to the bog.[9]

Blicher didn’t live long enough to learn that the woman he believed to be a tenth-century queen was actually killed in about 490 BC. Indeed, the story he believed in was merely a historical legend, which claimed that Bluetooth had married Gunhild only to drown her in a bog. But if the body itself—‘corpulent’ when first discovered, since then much shriveled—was unusual for its completeness and fineness,[10] what really intrigued Blicher was her imagined story.

‘Queen Chess Piece,’ Scandinavian, 13th century, The Met

Reality, as well as imagined stories, also spurred the poetry of the late Seamus Heaney. His preoccupation with bog bodies began with his reading of a history by P. V. Glob, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved (1965 in Danish, and 1969 in the English edition).[11] This soon inspired a handful of poems, which emerged in three different collections from the 1960s onwards. Heaney took various approaches to the subject, speaking of famous bodies (‘Tollund Man’ and ‘The Grauballe Man’), of bogland as a natural phenomenon (‘Bogland’), and finally addressing the reader from the first-person perspective (‘Bog Queen’). (Other works are ‘Punishment’ and ‘Strange Fruit,’ not discussed here.) Taken as a whole, Heaney’s poems suggest that history itself is like a bog—its people possible to glimpse but difficult to know, with both great magnificence (crown jewels, extinct elk) and the ordinariness of human need (preserved butter) buried in its ‘bottomless’ depths. Let’s briefly look at the two poems inspired by actual individuals, first as archaeological reality and then as a literary response.

Tollund Man

Found near the village of Tollund in Jutland in 1950, radiocarbon dating places his death in about the 4th century BC. Nude except for a leather belt and a sheepskin hat, the short stubble on his clean-shaven face is still visible. He was hanged with a cord, still attached, and then carefully placed within a cut hollow in the peat bog.[12] Modern microscopic examination has shown that he suffered from many parasites before death, and that his last meal was a gruel containing a weed (termed ‘thresh-waste’) that no one would choose to eat. Tollund Man’s remains are now in the nearby Museum Silkeborg in Denmark.

Tollund Man photo by Sven Rosborn, Wikimedia Commons

The poem

Heaney’s first bog poem appears in his collection of works from 1969 to 1971, Wintering Out (published in 1972, itself a year of deadly riots in Northern Ireland, where he then lived). The ‘I’ of his poem begins by wishing one day to go to Aarhus, the region where the body was found. He gives details about the body, including the ‘peat-brown’ head (though modern color photographs show that the skin is virtually black). He suggests that something about the manner of the death and burial has sanctified the victim. He mentions Aarhus again, as the place where the body now ‘reposes’ like saints’ relics transferred to a church or shrine: a proper place of worship. He then jarringly brings his thoughts forward to modern Irish political murders, of such horrific savagery that they cannot shame the past for its own. He wonders if he could commit the ‘blasphemy’ of praying to this stained saint to somehow undo the carnage of his own time. It’s as if praying to his own god has not been enough. His troubled country, like those of the ancient pagans, has its share of ‘man-killing parishes.’ The violence of the past is sadly present and familiar.

Grauballe Man

Now housed in the Moesgard Museum, this early Iron Age body was found two years after Tollund Man, in 1952. Almost decapitated, he died between 400 and 200 BC (though a date of 390 BC is favored by experts). He had whipworm eggs in his gut and bad teeth. His head, with hair dyed red by the bog, is compressed on one side: this may be the result of pressure within the bog, but equally it could have been caused by a curious onlooker inadvertently treading on him. The man’s gashed throat is obvious, but there are two other notable injuries. Before death, a heavy blow fractured his shin; after death, his skull was fractured. Interestingly, radiocarbon dating is especially complicated in his case, on account of plants that had grown into his body while he was lying there.[13]

The poem

On the one hand, Heaney’s poem is a straightforward and accurate description of the remains. They are solid, and have distinct features that can be named. On the other hand, the poet has a sense of wonder at how such tarry boneless remnants—reminding him of eels and mussels, basalt and bog oak—can still give such a human portrait, and one so lifelike. The ‘forceps’ comment obviously notes the squashing of the man’s head, an association that also reinforces the sense of the victim as subject to forces beyond his control. Yet the ‘Dying Gaul’ reference runs counter to this picture of innocence: the Roman marble by that name shows a warrior in his last moments, agonized and naked, defeated but manly and dignified. The poet suggests that the killers could take Grauballe Man’s life but not his humanity.

‘Bogland’ and ‘Bog Queen’

Heaney’s ‘Bogland,’ which appeared in A Door Into the Dark (1969), is more general than his other poems, in that it reflects on the repository nature of bogs themselves. ‘They’ll never dig coal here,’ it declares—but by golly, ‘pioneers’ will dig bodies out! Coals have utility, as does peat moss; but bodies are only useful for reflecting on the human being that we were and still are. In ‘Bog Queen’ (from the collection North, 1975), we get a sense of Heaney both inspired by reality and being willing to create a character, a fictional person, for himself. The contrast with Blicher is interesting. Blicher wrote as a spectator, expressing his shock at seeing a queen in the context of a filthy bog. With a kind of fascinated horror, he observes the way that she has taken on the qualities of her grave. Heaney’s approach is quite different. His queen, though still oddly magnificent, calmly records her own decay as though it were also a broader part of life, as if it’s not just personal or even about herself alone:

My diadem grew carious,

gemstones dropped

in the peat floe

like the bearings of history.

A new response

Like ‘Bog Queen’, my own poem speaks subjectively, from the point of view of an executed victim. But my victim is no queen: she can be imagined to be anyone, anywhere in Europe where such crime or injustice occurred. Through its first-person voice, the poem also meditates on the preservative quality of bogs, and the great spans of time that bodies can remain in them. It speaks of both the preservative and transformative power of nature, but most especially, of the age-old human need to exert control over both nature and other humans, in fear and misunderstanding. My poem imagines the victim as a liminal being suspended between life and a ‘final’ death—trapped in an ecotone, the peat bog, which itself is the margin between open water and solid ground. Our victim is neither ‘with us’ nor really gone, and nor is the human society that killed her.

The Window Bog

I couldn’t open my eyes like before, when first
I fell in the bog
and the water of the clear cold pool
glazed over my face,
and I stared through it like a shimmering window
of shock before it all went black.
There were faces looking down at me,
and I knew those faces at the time but that memory
was snatched away with everything else. And yet —
I don’t know when, except that it was no longer winter —
my eyes did open, though never far enough to see
the boughs or their shadows, which must have been reaching
claw-like from the drier bank.
I lay mainly undisturbed, beneath the glassy water
and the sound of crows,
the calm interrupted now and then by rain and thunder.
Sometimes the rain pelted down so hard
that it almost stung my face.
But I must have imagined the almost-stinging,
for in truth I couldn’t feel anything.

This went on for ages, uncounted and undated. Time
wasn’t measured in the usual manner — it was something made up
not of days but long seasons, one fading vaguely into another.
What measured my time, when I was even aware of it —
between deep and unguessable stretches of blankness —
was the height of the water. Sometimes
it rose, and my chink in the wall
was blocked as if by a curtain:
no clouds could be sensed nor faces detected,
however dark or sunlit they might be.
Sometimes the water thinned, and teasing impressions
of a world, with sudden movement, flitted over my head.
Then came a new storm, growling and wounded like all the others,
and the pool would flood again.
As the water climbed, my dim perception thickened.

At some point there was a permanent change,
and the water went right down. My little pool,
which had seemed to contain nothing but me
and had seemingly existed just to be my grave,
was drying up. I realized this suddenly one day,
probably in the afternoon to judge by the sun —
its warmth and the lower slant of its rays —
which, for the first time since that moment,
shone through to my face. Or at least,
the warmth touched the thin peat layer
like a hood fallen over my head,
though for the moment I had no idea
what still lay upon the rest of me.
No longer completely under water,
I still couldn’t see: the soggy web of newly dead moss,
like guess-who hands, stopped my lids from opening
as the water had not done, when I first went in.
To get out of this place, I would have to rely on something
other than sight. Perhaps I could use the power of my limbs.
It was then that I realized the priests had staked me down.
No amount of writhing, even had I the strength,
could possibly have freed me. Once more I sank,
back into torpor.

The showers came again, and my tightly woven hair,
in one long braid, floated up where I could glimpse it
through just-parted lids. Though soon
pushed down by the raindrops and ripples,
the truth, like all else, had already sunk in:
my locks, once pale yellow, had become ginger-brown.
————————————————————————-

Author Bio:

Amanda Brighton Payne is a writer and a member of both the Royal Historical Society and the International Arthurian Society (North American Branch).

Notes:

1 Rory Naismith, Early Medieval Britain, c. 500-1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 4.
2 Aside from all the infighting among the early medieval English themselves, the vikings, burning and looting wantonly wherever they went, ‘effectively obliterated the written history’ of two major kingdoms within England over three centuries. See Marc Morris, The
Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, 400 - 1066 (New York: Pegasus, 2021), p. 406.
3 Anastasija Ropa, Practical Horsemanship in Arthurian Romance (Budapest: Trivent, 2019), back cover.
4 The poem is elegiac, lamenting the fall of many brave and noble warriors.
5 R. Van Beek, C. Quik, S. Bergerbrant, F. Huisman, and P. Kama. ‘Bogs, Bones and Bodies: the Deposition of Human Remains in Northern European Mires (9000 BC–AD 1900).’ Antiquity 97.391 (2023): 120-140.
6 See for instance Windeby Man, strangled and pinned down with eight stakes; also Osterby Man, Dåtgen Man, and Haraldskaer Woman.
7 See especially the chapters ‘The Body after Death’ (which describes bog bodies, among other cadavers) and ‘Down to a Watery Grave,’ in Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality; with a New Preface (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 102-119 and 147-153.
8 ‘The Passage of the Marshes’, Book Four, The Two Towers, in the omnibus Collector’s Edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 235. (The Two Towers was originally published as the second volume of The Lord of the Rings in 1954).
9 For an in-depth analysis of Blicher’s ideas and the poem itself, see Karin Sanders, ‘A Portal Through Time: Queen Gunhild,’ Scandinavian Studies 81.1 (2009): 1-46. See also Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe’s Ancient Mystery (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015), pp. 69-70 and 130-131.
10 Sanders, ‘Queen Gunhild,’ 1-3.14
11 The first English edition was published in the United Kingdom by Faber and Faber in 1969; Heaney read it in that same year. It’s now a classic, if out of date.
12 Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies, p. 20.
13 Aldhouse-Green, p. 72.

Further Reading:
Aldhouse-Green, Miranda. Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe’s Ancient Mystery (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015).
Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality; with a New Preface (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
Claffey, Tina. Portal: Otherworldly Wonders of Ireland s Bogs, Wetlands & Eskers (Dublin: Currach Books, 2022).
Reece, Shelley C. Seamus Heaney s Search for the True North, Pacific Coast Philology 27.1/2 (1992): 93-101.