The bog people, and Tollund Man in particular, seem to have particular resonance at the moment. No sooner had I put down Sarah Moss’s excellent Ghost Wall, concerned with an experiential archaeological recreation of Iron Age sacrifice, than I picked up her earlier Cold Earth (also excellent) to discover that it too was about the bog people (bodies naturally mummified in a peat bog). Then along comes Anne Youngson’s Meet Me At The Museum which references, as all three books do, Seamus Heaney’s poems on the same subject.
Tollund Man clearly has a haunting quality which is not difficult to explain if you look at pictures of him. The 2,000-year-old perfectly preserved face is calm and tranquil despite the likelihood of his having been murdered, possibly in a ritual sacrifice.
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