Murder in the Bogs

Murder in the Bogs

Sometime in the ninth century, an Arab diplomat named Ibn Fadlan was en route to the court of the King of the Bulgars as an envoy of the Caliph of Baghdad. In his diary, he recorded what he saw and experienced during his journey. This included an encounter with a group of Norse traders on the Danube River. At the time the Arab came upon them, the traders’ chief had just died. Ibn Fadlan describes the funeral held by the Norsemen.

After the chief’s body had been dressed in his finery and laid with his weapons in his ship, a young slave girl was brought forward. Going from one tent to the next, she offered herself to the men. Each in turn said to her, "Tell your master that I did this because of my love for him." Then an old woman, called by the Norse the Angel of Death, used a length of rope to strangle the girl, who was also stabbed through the heart and clubbed, before being placed at the side of the chief’s corpse. They then burned the ship and its contents. The charred remains were buried under a mound of earth. After a period of feasting and drinking, the Northmen were ready to resume their journey.

Regarding Ibn Fadlan as a curiosity, the Norse persuaded, or forced, the Arab to accompany them on their return to their homeland. Ibn Fadlan’s observations during the journey, recorded in his diary, provide a fascinating source of information of Scandinavian life and customs during the Viking Age. In the 20th century, Michael Crichton wrote a fictionalized version entitled Eaters of the Dead. A few years later, a film version starring Antonio Banderas was made. If you missed it, be glad.

The focus of this blog is the ritualistic murder of the sacrificed slave girl. Scholars have identified it as representative of the practice of the Cult of Odin. (Odin was the chief deity in the ancient Scandinavian pantheon.) The reasons for the inflicting of multiple forms of execution when one would have done the job are obscure. The strangling of the sacrificial victim might be representative of the trials endured by Odin in order to gain knowledge and wisdom. These included being hung on the World Tree and the sacrifice of an eye. The sagas sometimes refer to the god as Odin One Eye. But why were human sacrifices strangled, clubbed, and stabbed? It is also noteworthy that this type of ritual killing was not confined to Scandinavians, but was practiced by other Europeans as well.

For more than 10,000 years, the peat bogs of northern Europe have been the burial places of hundreds of bodies. The first were found in the 18th century. Peat cutters are the usual discoverers. Some of these bog bodies are quite old. Koelbjerg Woman from Denmark dates to about 8000 B.C. Another yielded by a Danish bog was Grauballe Man (below), discovered in 1952. Around 2,300 years ago, he was a healthy man in his 30s, about 5’ 7” tall, strongly built. He was strangled, his throat was cut from ear to ear, and he was thrown into a bog. When he was found, he still had his skin and a full head of hair.

One of my favorites, whom I have seen close up, is Lindow Man. Discovered in 1984 by peat cutters in Lindow Moss in northern England, the owner of this bog body had lived in the first century A.D. At the time of his death, he was a healthy person in his 20s. His smooth hands and manicured nails suggested that he had not done much physical labor in his life. Shortly before his death, he had eaten a grilled bran pancake and washed it down with a drink made of mistletoe. He then suffered two blows to the head, driving a bone splinter into his brain. In addition, he was strangled with a cord of animal sinew that was left on his neck, and his throat was slashed across his jugular vein. One of his ribs was broken, possibly from a knee pressing into his back. And he was thrown into a bog. Some scholars have speculated that Lindow Man had been a noble, possibly a druid, who had been selected as a high status sacrifice at the time of the Roman advance in the direction of Manchester. It is possible that the sacrifice was intended to effect the help of the gods for the Britons.

But do we really understand what these ritual killings mean? For the Celtic tribes that lived during the Iron Age (c. 500 B.C.–100 A.D.), bogs were sacred places in which sacrifices and offerings were made. Some scholars have speculated that many of the bog bodies had been criminals. Others have viewed them as examples of Celtic religious practices common to many European settings. We may never know the answer. New discoveries of bog bodies are becoming rare as northern Europe’s bogs are disappearing due to the excessive cutting of peat.

History and archeology often have their amusing side. The area around Lindow Moss had been under police investigation in 1984 due to the discovery the previous year of a human head. It was believed to be that of a woman who had mysteriously disappeared the previous year. When questioned by the police, the woman’s husband broke down and confessed to her murder. Later it was determined that the head actually belonged to a man who had lived 2,000 years earlier.