Authors: Neil Oliver
With the day’s filming complete, the crew packed their gear back into the cars and headed off for a night in a hotel some miles away. As I watched their vehicles’ tail lights vanish into the darkness, it started to rain. Not long after the rain began, a wind picked up – so that by the time I closed the heavy wooden door of my own billet I had the distinct and unsettling sensation of being the only person left alive in the world.
One of the house’s modern caretakers had earlier informed me the builders of the place – a team of enthusiasts working
nearly 20 years ago – had buried the body of a dog beneath the threshold. He didn’t elaborate on quite how the dog had come to meet its end, but he seemed to imply that the intention had been to ensure the home was protected for ever by a benevolent guardian. I was in two minds about being accompanied by the spirit of a departed Scandinavian hound as I set about banking up the two log fires that would provide me with most of my light and all of my warmth for the next 10 hours.
My bed was a pile of reindeer- and sheepskins, and I kept on most of my clothes as I climbed
gratefully into the four-season sleeping bag that was my only concession to twenty-first-century sensibilities. And so it began, my Bronze Age night. I lay in the firelight, listening to the logs crackling and settling ever deeper into their own embers. The wind and rain laid siege to the thatched roof and the wattle and daub walls and my thoughts drifted – first and fleetingly to the dead dog buried beneath the doorstep, and then, for longer, to those folk that had lived there long ago. It is impossible to recreate the past, of course, or truly to experience even a moment of it, but at least I was lying on a hard clay floor, listening to the dying breaths of fires on the hearth and breathing air laden with woodsmoke. That much would have been achingly familiar to the mother, father and son who lived and died at Borum Eshøj the best part of 4,000 years ago.
I had expected a sleepless night but in fact I slept straight through. Waking up in a Bronze Age house, however, was a lot less comfortable than going to sleep in one. Danes and other Scandinavians talk a lot about a concept they call
hygge.
It is almost impossible to translate and, anyway, almost every person you ask has a different idea as to the precise meaning of the term. From what I have gathered over the years it seems to me to involve a deep sense of cosy warmth and safety – the sensation that all is right with the world and that one is in just the
right place at just the right time. I have even wondered if our own word ‘hug’ might derive from some of the same idea. Lying in the fire-lit dark the night before, I had been overcome by a feeling of well-being. Impervious to the wind and rain, warmed by a crackling, snapping fire, I had only felt safe. The absence of all other people, all other distractions (once I had turned off my mobile phone) had only added to the splendid isolation. Whatever might have been happening elsewhere, I was blamelessly oblivious to it. In as much as it is possible to be, I had been lost in time. Hygge.
But the morning . . . I have to say I awoke, around dawn, as far away from well-being as it is possible to get. The fires had long since died and the interior of the house, exposed to the grey, wintry light of early morning, looked and felt as lifeless as the cold ashes piled on the hearth. Most depressing of all was the smell – the cloyingly rank miasma of last night’s smoke. It clung to my skin, my hair, my clothes, my bedding – everything. I have never wanted a shower so much in my life – nor been so far from having one. Without a fire – or any other source of heat – there was no chance of even a hot drink to improve my mood. The only option available seemed to be a breath of fresh air, and so I piled on all the layers of clothing I could find before opening the door and venturing outside.
We had arrived at Borum Eshøj the day before, in the semidarkness of dusk, and so had had no opportunity to explore beyond the house itself. Now the significance of the place, its appropriateness as the location for a reimagined Bronze Age house, was clear to see. Rising from the fields in front of me were three huge turf-covered mounds. The tallest of them, I knew, had once been the resting place of the mother, father and son I had spent time with in the museum in Copenhagen just the day before. Rather than wait for the return of the television crew I walked briskly across the sodden field – with the intention of
getting my circulation going, if nothing else. As I drew close to the larger of the mounds, I could hardly help but be struck by the scale of them. Time has eroded and lowered them – and nineteenth-century antiquarians have further diminished them by burrowing clumsily inside – but that they are still massive even now is testament to how mighty they were originally. Archaeologists have calculated that the family’s grave would once have been in the order of 115 feet across and 30 feet tall at the highest point. It comprised some one and a half million individually cut turves – the equivalent of 14 football pitches’ worth of topsoil. Those who commissioned such monuments to their own lives and deaths were powerful indeed. Rather than scratching a living from the land, they were masters and mistresses of it. Just one of the Borum Eshøj mounds would have kept a team of 150 people busy for as long as three or even four months. Clearly the deaths of people able to command, feed and shelter so many people for such a long time would have resonated far and wide.
The three mounds visible today are impressive enough, but in the middle of the second millennium
BC
they would have been surrounded by around 40 more. Situated on an area of relatively elevated land, they would have been visible from miles away. Hundreds more would have been dotted across the landscape and archaeologists have found evidence for around 45,000 Bronze Age burial mounds in Denmark alone.
It was bitterly cold on top of the mound. A brisk, chill wind was blowing and it was with some relief that I spotted, approaching along the road beyond the house, the cars carrying the crew. Leaving the Bronze Age behind, I climbed back down onto level ground and set off to meet them.
The world of bronze had been one dominated by a clearly defined elite – those with the power and the will to control resources
like locally produced food surplus and luxury imports like foreign metalwork. The early part of the Iron Age was quite different. It appears to have been a time when people lived quieter, less ostentatious lives. Climate change was making life harder, concentrating minds and hands. Rather than bronze from far afield, people relied now on tools made from raw materials collected close to home. After millennia of connections to the wider world – and of a steady flow of foreign ideas and influences – the Scandinavian world seems to have drawn in upon itself and become altogether more self-reliant. It may have been a time of consolidation, when society adjusted to altered circumstances and looked inwards rather than out.
At least one tradition continued, however: that of making offerings to the gods. It had begun at least as early as the Neolithic period with deposits of tools and trinkets, as well as the occasional animal sacrifice. During the Bronze Age it was about weapons, and also domestic items like cauldrons and cooking pots. Often those items were deliberately broken – cauldrons crushed, sword blades bent double. It would have been plain to all who witnessed the destruction that those items were no longer for the use of people; now and for ever they belonged to the gods instead. But as the Iron Age got under way, the appetites of the gods grew sinister indeed.
Maybe the deteriorating climate seemed like a punishment from above. The incessant rain made the soil heavy, leaching it of its nutrients so that crops failed to thrive. All was doom, gloom and desperation. It may well have occurred to some that the time had come to make a new peace with the unhappy gods – even if it meant paying a higher price. If
things
were no longer enough to ensure the goodwill of unseen, all-powerful forces, then perhaps life itself would have to be given away.
Whatever the explanation it is certainly true that the first centuries of the Iron Age were a time when Danish men and
women were being put to death by their fellows so that their bodies might be offered up as gifts to the gods. Lakes and bogs had been deemed suitable for other votive offerings – swords and cauldrons and so on – and it was to those same places that the victims of human sacrifice were taken. Tacitus himself recorded evidence of the gory spectacle among the Germanic Semnones tribe, during the first century
AD
:
At an appointed time all tribes meet . . . in a forest consecrated by their ancestors, surrounded by fear, sacred from the dawn of time. There, on behalf of those assembled, they celebrate the commencement of their barbaric cult with a human sacrifice.
Perhaps the reflective surfaces of still water seemed like portals, places where the boundaries between worlds were weak, and therefore penetrable. In any case it is precisely because those dead were placed into water that so many of them have survived into the present day. The bodies settled into the sediments of the bogs or lake bottoms and were protected there from the processes of decay. Acids and tannins in the mud penetrated the skin and soft tissues and all but stopped time. What were lakes and marshes in the past have often been transformed into peat bogs – and most of the discoveries of so-called ‘bog-bodies’ have been made by people collecting fuel for their fires.
The most famous bog-body of them all was unearthed in 1950 by two brothers cutting peat in the Bjældskovdal bog near the village of Tollund, in Jutland. They had brought their wives along to help and as one of them busied herself piling sods ready for loading onto their cart, she spotted a man’s face in the glistening wall of the cutting. So fresh did it seem, so newly dead, a call was made to the local police station, at nearby Silkeborg, and a murder reported.
Investigation revealed an unlawful killing right enough – but one committed sometime in the fourth century
BC
. Empires had come and gone while Tollund Man lay entombed and mummified within the peat. He is older than Christianity or Islam. He is on display now in the Silkeborg Museum and the only word to describe him is beautiful.
The flesh of Tollund Man’s hands and arms had mostly decomposed – likely a result of partial exposure to the air in the days and weeks before he was spotted. The rest of him, however, had been largely unaffected by the passing of two and a half millennia. The tannins that preserved him had darkly stained him too, so that he seemed made of polished stone, or coal. He was naked but for a pointed cap of sheepskin on his sorry head and a thin leather belt around his waist. Scientists found the contents of his last meal still languishing in his gut – a simple soup of vegetables and seeds.
Around 12 hours after he had finished eating that thin gruel, he was put to death. Still around his neck was a braided leather rope, and analysis by the local coroner determined Tollund Man had been killed by hanging. Not for him the mercy of a snapped neck and a quick death, however – rather the evidence showed he had suffered the special misery of strangulation.
Only his head survives today, fastened onto a skilful reconstruction of the body modelled from photographs taken in the 1950s; but it is a marvel just the same. His eyes and mouth are closed so that at first sight he seems peacefully asleep. Under his cap his hair is cropped short and as he had recently shaved, his chin and upper lip are covered with a light stubble.
The Irish poet Seamus Heaney was fascinated by him as well. In ‘The Tollund Man’ he writes:
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap . . .
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,
Tollund Man is certainly the best known of the bog-bodies, but he is one of many. Grauballe Man, his hair stained red as a robin’s breast by the peat, was found just two years later and only a few miles away. Also naked, and after a similar meal of seeds and vegetables, he had his throat slit from ear to ear. His millennia in the mud have crumpled his face so it has the look of an old leather bag. Elling Woman was found in 1938 just 80 yards from the spot where Tollund Man would come to light a dozen years later. She was wearing a woollen cloak and had a cowhide wrapped around her legs. Her hair was long and worn in a ponytail. Like her near neighbour, she had been hanged with a leather rope. Other bog-bodies have been unearthed there and elsewhere, and all in similar, gory circumstances. Two men’s corpses were found in Borremose bog, in Himmerland – the first in 1946 and the second the following year. Borremose Woman was found in 1947.
In the National Museum in Copenhagen I came face to face with Huldremose Woman, revealed by peat-cutting, at Ramten, in Djursland, in 1879. She was fully clothed when she met her death – possibly the result of being throttled with the long woollen cord found wound several times around her neck.
Her right arm had almost been severed as well, at the time of death, by a blow from some lethally sharp weapon. In her stomach were found the remains of a last meal – a soup of rye and seeds from the weed spurrey. While Tollund Man seems peaceful in death, there is something distressing about Huldremose Woman. Her feet, alarmingly well preserved, seem to bear witness to a final struggle. The toes are flexed, splayed and pulled upwards – rather in the manner you might expect of someone who has been pulled up off the ground by a cord around the throat. Perhaps it is only an effect of centuries in the peat, and then more recent drying in the air of the modern world, but she has about her an air of suffering.
The Iron Age practice of human sacrifice, followed by disposal of the body into a bog, was not limited to Scandinavia either. Similarly executed souls have been unearthed in Germany and there have also been several such finds in the British Isles – including the famous Lindow Man, in a bog in Cheshire in 1984, and two from Ireland in 2003. Lindow Man had been dispatched with two blows to the head, probably from an axe. One impact had been heavy enough to drive fragments of his skull deep into his brain and to shatter one of his back teeth. He had also been throttled, the rope left around his neck when his body was placed into the bog that preserved him. The luckless Irishmen – called Clonycavan Man and Oldcroghan Man after the names of their last resting places – were victims of cruel violence. The former had been struck repeatedly on the head and chest with an axe before a blade was used to open a gaping wound across his lower abdomen; the latter was stabbed through the heart by someone standing in front of him and likely looking him in the eye.