Eileen Battersby has a face-to-face encounter with some well-preserved men from the Iron Age
Some day I will go to Aarhus/ To see his peat-brown head,/ The mild pods of his eye-lids,/ His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country nearby/ Where they dug him out,/ His last gruel of winter seeds/ Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for/ The Cap, noose and girdle,/ I will stand a long time,/ Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him/ And opened her fen,/ Those dark juices working/ Him to a saint's kept body,
Trove of the turfcutters'/ Honeycombed workings,/ Now his stained face/ Reposes at Aarhus.
(from 'The Tollund Man', Wintering Out, Seamus Heaney, 1972)
Miles of flat landscape interspersed by bog. Early on a still Sunday morning, it's cold but dry. The light is muted by the cloud. A half-hearted, misty rain ends as quickly as it began. In some places, as far as the eye can see it could easily be the Co Meath countryside, but as the stretches of bogland assert themselves any Irish onlooker might well shrug and reconsider, recognising the midlands of Co Kildare or Co Offaly. Only the presence of some self-possessed falcons might cause a change of mind.
No. Somehow, this is not an Irish landscape, this is another part of northern Europe - there is a subtle difference in the topography. The raised, and therefore constantly wet, bogland before us this winter's day kept its secrets safe for 2,000 years, and continues to appear discreet and unspoilt.
Bjaeldskoval is an area of peat-bog on the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark. Peat has been dug here since the Iron Age. But this long- established turf-cutting has also revealed strange findings encased in the turf and preserved by bog acid countering the bacteria that would otherwise rot any organic matter within the fen. It was here on May 8th, 1950 that two brothers, Emil and Viggo Hojgaard, busy about their usual business of turf-cutting, and hardly on the lookout for a diversion, were shocked to discover a human face gradually emerging beneath their feet. The first reaction was to call the police; here, the brothers thought, was a murder to report. But the Silkeborg police had by then already dealt with ancient bodies taken from the bog in 1927 and again in 1938. Experience had taught them at what point forensic science must yield to archaeology and anthropology.
Just as Heaney's lines ("Someday I will go to Aarhus"), with their sense of a vow or mission to go on pilgrimage to visit an ancestor,have inspired others to make the same journey, the poet himself had been first influenced on reading The Bog People - Iron Age Man Preserved by Peter Glob, then a professor at the University of Aarhus in Central Jutland, and later director of the Forhistorisk Museum in Moesgard, some miles outside the city. Glob's book remains the definitive study despite subsequent extraordinary developments in the scientific procedures investigating such finds. For Glob, the human remains found in bogs in a state of unnervingly fine preservation, defying time itself - thanks to the special properties of the peat environment that, while rendering bone to sponge, enables flesh and skin to survive - provide clues to the world in which Iron Age man lived and died two millenniums ago, at the time of Julius Caesar.
Denmark in December, on the approach to midwinter and the death of the old year, seemed the ideal time for such a pilgrimage. On being asked to participate by EFACIS, a European Irish Studies group, in a conference about Ireland to be held in Denmark, I hesitated until the organiser elaborated; the conference was to be held at the University of Aarhus. Suddenly, it became irresistible. The name Aarhus already meant something to me: the resting place of Tollund Man. This apparently peacefully sleeping dead man is both watcher and watched. His strange, obviously violent death and even stranger eternal life have been immortalised for anyone interested in archaeology by Heaney, whose imagination had in turn been shaped by the past and archaeology as well as his awareness of the Icelandic sagas. The point should be made that Tollund Man rests in Silkeborg, not Aarhus, but the poet should be granted poetic licence.
Wintering Out, Heaney's third collection, which includes 'The Tollund Man', was published in 1972. It was followed by North three years later, a landmark book, as it transpired, for the poet and, as with its predecessor, powerfully shaped by the archaeology of the Baltic area, particularly its Viking legacy and its impact on medieval Ireland. Among the poems in that collection is 'The Grauballe Man'. The images have never faded from Heaney's mind. More than 30 years later he recalls having bought Glob's book at Christmas 1969 ("I wrote 'The Tollund Man' poem at the Easter of the following year"). Invited to Denmark in 1974 to lecture to English teachers in Copenhagen, Heaney met Glob there and later travelled alone to Silkeborg - "I felt I had to. I see the poem, which I had written before ever going to Denmark, as a form of vow."
But Tollund Man's story, which we can only piece together, suggests he was a ritual victim, sacrificed for a specific purpose, possibly even with his consent, in order to guarantee the next year's crops - or perhaps in thanks for the harvest that had been? Ironically, when first discovered, and after his peaceful saint's face with its gentle expression was noted, there were those who felt he might have been punished for a crime; or could he have been murdered? Was he a suicide? After all, the rope noose that caused his death was still around his neck when he was found in 1950 and remains with his body to this day.
Extensive research carried out on the many subsequent bog bodies, including evidence of a grain-like porridge-type substance, possibly a ritual last meal, consolidates the opinion that Tollund Man, in common with other Iron Age bodies, was deliberately, ritually sacrificed and later carefully deposited in the bog, these special places of earth and water. In addition to the ritual aspects, there is also evidence suggesting many of the victims were of high social standing, judging by their hands, which in the case of the Tollund and Grauballe bodies appear well-kept and without calluses - the hands of men who had not done manual work.
After a couple of days of the EFACIS conference lectures at the university, it was time to set out to Moesgard, some six miles south of Aarhus, to visit the Manor House of Moesgard. Formerly a great estate dating from the 16th century, the existing house, set in some 250 acres of parkland, was built by the Gyldenkrone family in the 1770s. The stables of the courtyard now house an international-class museum with a permanent collection spanning the Stone Age to the Viking period. Also mounted at present is a fascinating exhibition devoted to Afghanistan. It is a remarkable complex that also includes a folk park with a reconstruction of the Horning stave church in which Vikings would have worshipped. Near the manor house there is a small graveyard surrounded by yew trees. Each grave, in keeping with Danish Christmas tradition, has been covered with pine branches.
The route to Moesgard passes through what are effectively the suburbs of Aarhus, itself the second city of Denmark. It is a heavily wooded area, the houses built among the now bare trees quietly suggesting what must be a beautiful, mysterious place in summer growth. It reminds me of Vermont. The subtle planning and diverse design of these Danish houses that are beautiful as well as simple and individual, in an apparently uncluttered area defying its dense habitation, would make any thinking Irish urban planner - if there is such a person - blush with shame.
It is an ordinary working day; people get on and off the bus. The terminus is the museum. I have come to see the Grauballe Man. The most complete bog body from the Iron Age, he lies like a bog oak sculpture, "As if he had been poured/in tar", in the same tormented, twisted positionin which he was discovered on April 20th, 1952 - almost two years after Tollund Man was taken from the bog. Unlike him, Grauballe Man, found by peat cutters from the village of Grauballe, near Silkeborg, some 20 miles west of Moesgard, does not wear a peaceful smile in death - "he lies/on a pillow of turf/ and seems to weep/the black river of himself" (from 'The Grauballe Man', North, 1975).
Confirmation of his violent death is provided by his contorted face and the vicious slash across this throat. He looks as if he was flung into the bog. His skin has been stained black by his immersion in the bog, just as his once dark hair is a rusty red. As expected, looking at his vulnerable body at once makes the viewer feel both voyeur and supplicant. An ambivalence lingers: should he not be allowed to rest in privacy, away from our eyes, just as we all expect privacy in death? Yet still we look.
When he was first found, officials had some misgivings. The expression on his face, itself compressed and flattened by the weight of material on it and also the effects of de-calcification, was considered too shocking to be exhibited to the public. So his face was slightly remodelled to make him appear less terrifying. Even so, there is no mistaking that this man met a horrible fate.
The turf-cutters who discovered him on that April day in 1952 alerted a local doctor, who immediately contacted Peter Glob. In the two years that had passed since finding Tollund Man, substantial improvements in preservation methods had been made.
Grauballe Man, already tanned by the acid water in his peat grave, was further tanned or cured. It has proved an efficient process; his body is complete bar some small tears which have been filled with coloured wax.
Many examinations have been carried out on him. His intestine, removed during various tests on the contents of his stomach, remains in the museum, as do some 20 of his teeth about to be re-inserted in his mouth. A co-project devised by Manchester University with the museum at Moesgard is currently working on recreating a full 3D model of the man as he would have looked in life. According to a conservator at the museum, they have now decided that Grauballe Man was probably in his mid- to late 30s, was tall for the time (about 5ft 10in), and appears to have been "quite handsome".
As for his death, he was beaten and clubbed before his throat was cut. Looking at him now, in his glass display glass, another exhibit amid the pots and ancient tools and weapons, he is tragically human. His leathery body, pulverised and beaten, yet toughened by time and further consolidated by science, possesses a weird beauty. Particularly graceful are his delicate hands and fingers that once reached at and felt life. Long after the viewer becomes accustomed to the distorted face of this contemporary of Julius Caesar, it is the elegantly clenched hand, long fingers folded back with perfect nails, that remain in the memory.
And on to Silkeborg, a quiet, pretty village housing an extremely sophisticated museum with beautifully designed display cases. The quest for Tollund Man ends in a doorway leading to a darkened room. On entering it, the weight of a footstep on the polished wooden floor activates a light. A large glass box contains Tollund Man. When Heaney visited this place, all that remained was the head (in its skin cap) and a foot. On being taken from the bog in 1950, and transported by horse and cart to the railway station for despatch to Copenhagen, the body, having been photographed in situ, was extensively studied. The head and one foot had been boiled in paraffin to preserve them. But the body, wearing only a leather girdle, had been left untreated. It became dehydrated and disintegrated. In 1987, the entire body was recreated in an exact replica of Tollund Man, lying in the same fetal position as he had been when discovered in 1950.
Unlike Grauballe Man's final agony, Tollund Man today lies as if he had been carefully placed in the bog after an execution exacted as a ritual sacrifice. His body seems to have been regarded as precious. Those present at his death, witnesses and perhaps even his executioners, must have felt a sense of ceremony. This was no random killing. He seems content, in an eternal sleep that has given him a life that appears to defy time and death itself.