Post #341919 by Cammo on Sat, Nov 3, 2007 6:51 PM

People of the Bog
Part 2

Tortured quite horribly. The Bog People had marks of almost incredible violence all over their bodies. They were fresh marks, too, ones that had been inflicted right before death, huge wounds, knife marks, broken bones, signs of hanging, bludgeoning, often many marks at once, as if the killers had tried to come up with more ingenious, crueler, more painful ways of torture in succession. Some had been decapitated afterwards.

“Tollund Man”, from Denmark, was found with the finely woven rope used to hang him still tied to his neck. Some Bog People had their entrails drawn out through cuts in their stomach. Was this done while they were still alive? Others have been found with deep ax wounds on their heads, first smashing into the front of their faces, then almost splitting the skull down the center. Or with their throats cut, their legs and ribs broken first.

A female Bog Body has been found with a deep wound to her knee joint, as if an iron spike had been shoved under her knee cap, and with rope burns still visible on her neck. She is 2500 years old.

It was a quietly kept secret for many years. The findings across Denmark, Germany, and up into Sweden were all the same, but few liked to talk about it. It seemed impossible that there was a many-thousands-year old tradition, all over Europe, that was so bloody and vicious. So the findings were ignored. Not hushed-up; just recorded and pushed away to the back shelf. Many of the early Bog Bodies rotted away once they were removed from their age-old peat baths, leaving just the bones, and bones tell us very little indeed.

Until the last 25 years, little scientific research had been done on the bodies. Then, in 2003, a Bog Body was dug up in Ireland who is now known as “Old Crogham Man”.

He was remarkably preserved, and historians decided to go over the whole corpse with the most recent scientific tools, including the services of a forensic pathologist.

Here is what they found, and remember that these points turned out to be true of most of the other bodies found as well. It was a pattern that was repeated over and over, throughout Northern Europe.

Old Crogham Man was a rich young man in his 20’s, extremely tall and seemingly a well-fed aristocrat.

He didn’t know he was going to die, but was aware of the attack at the last second.

He was tortured first; by almost slicing his nipples off with a knife, then by stabbing him in the chest. As he was screaming in pain, he was suddenly decapitated, probably with a sword.

Then his body was cut in half with the same sword. The tools used for torture, such as axes, knives, swords, blunt rods, all seem to be made of iron.

Then his body, minus the head and legs, was pinned down, chest up in the bog water with twists of willow wood wound around stakes of other wood driven into the swamp. (These stakes wouldn’t decay.)

He was probably visible just below the water, where they knew the bog would preserve the body almost indefinitely. We now know that this is due to an almost complete lack of oxygen in bog water, but the people of the time probably had superstitions explaining it.

He was probably given no last rites or rituals to see his soul off to heaven.

So – there are a few things that become very clear all at once about the bog bodies.

These people were not criminals.

There’s a strong similarity to vampire legends, with the willow and the stakes through the body and the decapitations.

And it sure seemed like they didn’t want the person’s soul traveling anywhere. They wanted it right there, in the bog, just under the water, screaming in resentful anger for eternity. Because the strangest part of all was that after torturing and killing the person – and this was done up close, where you could see the life draining right out of them, and then doing the job right by slicing the body into pieces – after all this, they tied the body down underwater.

Where exactly did they think it was going?