Photo of Tolland Man by emeuser used under a Creative Commons license.

P.V. Glob, The Bog People (NYRB, 2004).
One spring morning in 1950, two men cutting peat in a Danish bog uncovered a well-preserved body of a man with a noose around his neck. Police were baffled until an archaeologist identified the body as that of a two-thousand-year-old man, ritually murdered and thrown in the bog as a sacrifice to the goddess of fertility. There’s very little here about modern Denmark, but an awful lot about life in northern Europe during the Iron Age. Well received when it was originally published, and now reissued by NYRB.

David Kraut reviewed the book at Bookslut. In 1991, Sarah Boxer wrote about the book’s influence on Seamus Heaney and other writers. Heaney has been rereading the book, and it has influenced other artists. William Clark offers a sort of introduction to the bog people. Two articles describes recent academic work on bog people. Via Chas. S. Clifton, Astrid catches recent archeological developments.

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