The bodies have also been transformed by their time in the bogs. Their hair, where it remains, is a deep and inhuman red. Their bones have often been cracked after hundreds of years of the peat pancaking their bodies. Even their exhumation can become a kind of violent metamorphosis, as the open air accelerates the long-postponed decomposition.
Many of the people found in the bogs had been executed. The Tollund Man was almost certainly hanged, while others appear to have been disemboweled, decapitated or bled from the throat. One young boy, unearthed in Northern Germany, appeared to be blindfolded. The intention with which the bodies were interred — as with a woman, also discovered on the Jutland Peninsula, whose body was pinned down with stakes — suggested a ritualistic aim. In his book “The Bog People,” P.V. Glob, a former director general of museums and antiquities for Denmark, argued that the unearthed were either criminals or sacrificial victims, killed to appease ancient gods.
In analyzing its own holdings, the National Museum of Ireland emerged with a different interpretation, emphasizing the inherently political nature of the deaths. Found near ancient seats of power, the bodies display characteristics of the Iron Age upper class, from fine clothes to hair gel. Trimmed nails, in this view, point more toward a violent transfer of power than a primitive blood rite.
Eamonn P. Kelly, the museum’s former keeper of Irish antiquities, has posited that kings may have been executed for failing to ensure adequate food for their people, a problem that worsened in the sixth century, when Europe’s climate began to change. How fitting that their bodies, usually discovered during the cutting of peat, which is burned for energy, have become unexpected climate revenants, like the ice mummies disgorged by retreating glaciers or the diseases thought dead forever beneath melting permafrost.
When I first came upon the Dublin bodies, I was barely out of college, living thinly on a temporary work visa. At that point in my life, I spent my months thrilled by the ready access to deep time: ogham stones, passage tombs, Bronze Age barrows, ring forts, all marked in red on my collection of survey maps. I was sure that I could construct a narrative of the past large enough to contain me, a certain thing on which I could steady myself.