My Sacrifice...

The Nederfrederiksmose body, uncovered in 1898, was the first bog body to be photographed. (Image from archeology.org)



All I know about bog people is that they are usually dead, mummified after centuries of lying in the peat bogs of Europe. I remember reading about Tolland Man, discovered in 1950 - he had hanged, the leather belt still around his neck. It was the little details that fascinated me - like the contents of his stomach. His last meal had been humble one of barley gruel.

Bogs are made up of 90 per cent water filled with peat - decaying plant matter - and since bacteria does not grow there, bodies that fall, or are pushed, into them are naturally preserved. These bodies are often found when draining bogs, and everything is preserved, from the clothes they wear to the contents of their stomachs. Huldremose woman was fully dressed, and even the bright colours of her gown and robe were preserved.

Many bog bodies are believed to have been sacrifices, but bogs are damgerous places - often you can happen upon one without knowing it and down you go. Like quicksand, bogs suck in the unwary.

But some may have found their final resting place for far more sinister reasons - not sacrifice, which may at least have had an aura of dignity, but murder most foul. It says more about our sensibilities, perhaps, that we invariably assign any ancient thing we find a ritual or religious significance - but people have always been just human, and murder is as old as man.

Huldremose woman, for example, was clearly the victim of great violence - her arms and legs were hacked with a weapon, one arm completely detached. This does not seem like sacrifice - this is more like a crime of passioon. An cuckolded husband, perhaps, or a jealous wife, disposed of her body in the convenient bogs after attacking her so viciously.

A young girl discovered in Holland was stabbed and strangled; Tolland man was hanged, but by his own hand, or another? Elling Woman was also hanged - was she the victim of foul play, or a tragic suicide, thrown into the bog because she took her own life?

I was thinking of all these things as the Bog Queen demanded my own sacrifice. She was very much alive, just as Huldremose and Elling Woman once were, bursting out of her skin with rude health, but with thoughts of death very far from her mind. The sacrifice she demanded wasn't human.

That sort of sacrifice is nothing new to me. I have clung with immense stubborness to life, and to the lives of others - but many things have passed through my hands over the decades that I regret losing. Once, in the grip of something I have no name for, I burned whole manuscripts. It seemed to me that every word I had ever committed to paper was worthless, a waste of trees. How I regret it now - I can't get those stories back.

Little has stayed with me on my travels - except - my teddy bears. Two of them, carried with me for more than 50 years. They don't look much now, torn, ragged, stuffing spilling out - but still I keep them wrapped in a shawl. I offer them now - perhaps the bogs will work their magic and preserve them forever, so I will never have to admit that they have finally had their day.