On “The Bog People” by PV Glob
Uncanny Bog
It’s week two of recommendation week at One Sitting Reads, and the following comes from my father, who was turned on to it by Seamus Heaney.
The bog is not an intuitive place for mummification: bogs are wet, and also support any variety of green living things. When things die there, oughtn’t they return to dust and feed the bog about them?
The explanation for why certain Iron Age men (and women) occasionally did not is not the subject of The Bog People, a 1965 study by the Danish archaeologist PV Glob. “There is a strange power in bog water that prevents decay” is how the work begins and also its last word on the science of preservation. (The extreme variable in the bog, it turns out, is acidity, which kills bacteria that aid decomposition.)
What is the subject of the work is just how many bog people there are, with numerous illustrations of each. The work is structured as a response to a letter that Glob received from a group of English school girls in 1962 requesting information about the bog people. Glob took three years to respond, which surely puts him in the top .01% of academics with respect to mail/email efficiency.
And there are hundreds of these bog people mentioned, and dozens examined in depth. The process of discovery is the same: the Danish bog, over thousands of years, turned to peat. Later the peat is for fuel, and some peat cutter finds himself staring at the face of a man or woman preserved since (roughly) the time of Christ. The thrill of discovery, scientific preservation, and confirmation (via carbon dating, or pollen seed analysis) that the preserved body was not in fact a town drunk that fell in, or a murder victim of local repute, make up the balance of the narrative portions of the work.
It is the photographs that really deliver the spark of poetic inspiration. The Windeby Girl, for example, is still bound with a blindfold she was fit with on her last walk to the bog.
The binding is one of the striking patterns for the bog people, and the extended subject of the last philosophical chapter of the work. Glob notes that the bog people (unlike, say, the unfortunates who fell in ice for later preservation) were often selected for death (by strangulation, by bludgeoning) and then committed to the bog. Glob oscillates, sometimes committed to the notion that the bog people were the mystical spouses of the spring gods (generally the husband of a fertility goddess), but also admits the possibility that they may have been something else. He does note the potential irony that those preserved in the bog were likely the outcasts of their Bronze Age societies: sacrifices chosen on the basis of their criminality, or, in the case of the Windeby Girl, alleged witchcraft.
It was, in other words, those selected for expulsion and execution that the bog welcomed for preservation, and for everlasting life. These sorts of minor gods are everywhere.
The Bog People
Author: PV Glob
Pages: 197 (NYRB ed.)
Year: 1965 (2004 Re-Issue)
Genre: Non-Fiction/Archaeology
OSR Tier: Minor Canon
Next: A Personal Matter, by Oe