Post #347973 by Cammo on Wed, Dec 5, 2007 7:47 PM

People of the Bog
Part 5

Enough questions. Here are some answers.

Bogs were the places where prehistoric peoples got the fuel to heat their homes. Peat is an early stage of coal, when dried it burns long and well - better than wood. One of the reasons so many Bog People have been found these days, in fact, is because today almost 90% of the bogs in England have been dug up for their peat and utterly destroyed. More than one Bog Body was found dangling at the business end of a front end loader. It’s still a big industry; peat is used to heat whiskey stills. It gives Scottish whiskey its strong distinctive flavor. The best Irish linen has a peaty fragrance, from the fires lit in the cottage hearths where it’s spun. It’s a very important fuel.

Without dried peat to burn, primitive northern cultures would have frozen to death in winter.

Also, peat was and still is used to add to farm soil. It helps retain moisture, and is a great fertilizer. Without peat, your crops could die. Peat is still sold in all plant nurseries, it’s valuable to gardeners.

Bogs were extremely important to iron-age peoples for one more reason.

Two thousand years ago they were the most vital places in Europe. They were storehouses of something more than just peat, an enormously valuable substance, the material that formed the axes they built their homes with, a magical substance that their knives and farming tools were made from.

The most expensive material ever seen in those days, used as trade goods all over Europe, lusted after by everyone, for enough of this metal could make kings of fools. Or more often, fools of kings.

Because bogs were where the iron-age people got their iron.

Streams and groundwater springs hold fine dissolved iron. Running into a bog concentrates the iron by two processes; the low oxygen environment and actions of anaerobic bacteria. The bacteria can be detected on the surface by the iridescent oily film they leave on the water, a sure sign of bog iron. In Iceland the shiny film is called jarnbrák (iron slick). When layers of peat are cut and pulled back using turf knives , pea-sized nodules of bog iron can be harvested. The iron nodules are very pure, and because of the high carbon content of the bog they make extremely high-grade, expensive, hard iron. They are also a renewable resource. Approximately every 30 years the same bog can be re-harvested when the iron nodules have reformed, similar to farming pearls.

Most iron during the Viking and prehistoric Iron Age was made from Bog Iron.

Ned Kelly is resident keeper of Irish antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland. He has examined Bog Bodies, but more importantly the locales where the Bog Bodies have been found. After a lot of research, it turns out that a great many of these bodies were staked down on borders; tribal or political fences between you and your neighbor.
"Bodies are placed in the borders immediately surrounding royal land or on tribal boundaries to ensure a good yield of corn and milk throughout the reign of the king." Said Kelly, and further, “The Oldcroghan body is on the border of what was the royal estate of the O'Connors in the Middle Ages. When I looked at the Clonycavan Man, he is buried on the border between the modern counties of Meath and West Meath, which were also very significant tribal boundaries in the early medieval period. Now, I think that's not coincidental.”

Keep in mind that streams and bogs are natural borders. All over the world, rivers and lakes separate countries. The 49th parallel that divides Canada from the USA is basically a continuation of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. It may in fact be entirely coincidental that some bogs are both a grave and a border; it’s tough to find a bog in Ireland that wasn’t a border at some time. And Kelly’s milk-yield connection makes no sense at all, especially as the bodies were buried with no personal effects, no riches as offerings. Mr. Kelly could be wrong about part or all of it.
However, Kelly opened up an enormous can of worms in making his statements, because he finally acknowledged a fact that has been obvious to virtually everyone (except senior historians) who have examined the Bog Bodies. The bodies were not of criminals, but from the pampered upper classes.

And the bodies had intentionally been used as nightmarish scarecrows to ward off poachers and trespassers.

Because nothing else makes sense.

They were engineering undead monsters out of unfortunate young men and women.

Then staking their bodies and souls to the earth for eternity.

To guard their bogs, the source or all the riches the village enjoyed.

Possibly the whole village took part, witnessing the spectacle of public torture and execution. Why not? The more public the death, the more effective the intended haunting would be.

Or perhaps it was something done and witnessed only by the priests and kings of the land. Was the person picked at random, short straw loses, from the young village princes?

Or – was the Bog Monster the eldest son of the king? The defacto next owner of the land, interred there to protect his iron? And was this whole tradition started from even earlier stone-age traditions of sacrificing your eldest child in order to ‘own land’; each side of a border had to place a family sacrifice on their side, to seal the deal.

The only time iron pellets could have been stolen was by night. What was to stop someone from poaching these enormously valuable pellets by dressing in stealthy black and creeping to the heart of the bog? What but lurking monsters, real or imagined?

Because once it was known that a bog had been haunted by the biggest, toughest, healthiest male the village had (or the son of the king) who had been made into a restless, violent thing that haunted the bogs every night pulling unwary visitors into the depths, protecting the bog, HIS bog, from anyone silly enough to go near them, nobody in their right minds would think of thieving. Nobody would venture into the bogs by night to steal the iron pellets forming there. Would you? Maybe the village priests or headmen would help things along by going near the bogs some nights and making noises, screams, moans. It’s an interesting idea.

Vampire and revenant stories are probably survivals of the tales told to villagers about these Bog Monsters. Keep away from the Bog, because IT WILL GET YOU. Nuff said. They were suggested by real observed facts of uncovered corpses, things that already scared villagers like buried bodies being uncovered by dogs at night, thus leaving what looked like freshly un-dug graves. Graves of the restless undead.

If you’re interested in this incredibly morbid stuff, look up the book;

Vampires Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality, by Paul Barber. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1988

So the Bog Bodies were monstrous scarecrows, inciting fear for thirty years among the peasants, until the next iron harvest and the next needed execution. Probably rights to certain bogs were always being purchased, like a real estate market. The 30-year cycle was a time for drawing new borders and firming up boundaries. And torture of course.

It’s interesting what greed will do to people.

You see, the problem is - maybe, just maybe, it worked.

Over and over in modern times ghost researchers have found that poltergeist activity, in other words violent spirits, were the result of recent accidental or suicidal deaths of young men. Men in their 20’s, taken before their time. Maybe the tortures and the quick killings actually did trap souls just as they intended, forever dooming the ghosts to wander the bogs, angry and dangerous. Thousands of years of killings. Why would they have continued the tradition if it didn’t work? They say the bogs are still gloomy places, dark and unhealthy. Sherlock Holmes roamed the moors, where the bogs lay in “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. When these bodies are dug up in modern times, people say they get a creepy feeling - as if someone is watching them. The old bog lands are unsettling, haunted by deep shadows and quiet damp cold air that pushes you back from the marshy edges.

There’s something else, though.

The term Bog Man has Old Norse (Iron Age Viking) origins, and is so similar to a current word it’s almost too obvious to have been associated with it. It’s a very old word we continue to use these days to describe something that waits under your bed to grab your leg when you turn the lights out; oddly similar myths to those built up around the bog rituals. Very old myths indeed, that still seem to haunt us.

Because we still call the monster under the bed the Boogieman.

Or, as it was pronounced in England; Bog-ee-man. The Man in the Bog. They’re even called Boggarts, or Boggies in Scotland.

One more thing. “Boogieman” is in turn the ancient source for another word we still use to scare with, the most frequently used scare word of all time, maybe the oldest scare word in Western Civilization. It is the word kids use to jump out and scream at each other with. Because Boogieman, as far as anyone can tell, is where we got the word

boo.

the end

All contents copyright Cam MacMillan 2007. All rights reserved.