TALES FROM ANCIENT BOG BODIES: WITCHCRAFT, PHYSICAL ABNORMITY AND HOMOSEXUALITY DURING THE NORTHERN IRON AGE

Abstract

Bog bodies are corpses conserved in north-european peat bogs thanks to particular conditions wich were probably known by the men of the Iron age. By recalling previous studies this review suggests the existence of a link between many of this corpses and witchcraft and shamanism.

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TALES FROM ANCIENT BOG BODIES:
WITCHCRAFT, PHYSICAL ABNORMITY AND HOMOSEXUALITY
DURING THE NORTHERN IRON AGE
Silvio Melani
Università degli Studi di Udine
silvio.melani@tin.it
Introduction
The number of bodies preserved in northern Europe’s bogs until our days and belonging to the Iron Age
is not easy to determine, although we can state that about 1800 bog bodies and skeletons, from very
different periods, have been discovered since the 17th century at least1. Today, we can assert that the
majority of bog bodies found in the bogs date precisely to the Iron Age2. They have been unearthed
mainly in Denmark, Northern Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Ireland, but many
(mainly those discovered in more ancient times) have been lost again: only written records remain of
them, and generally not very exhaustive3. Today, each of these bog bodies tells to the scientists at least
fragments of an interesting and generally tragic story: its own. But for obvious reasons of space and
time, I will deal only with a few of them, in particular with some of those that seem to be connected by
a sort of common thread. A thread that ties together magic, shamanism, physical impairments, suspects
of evil eye and, eventually, sexual “deviations”. In effect, these categories, apparently heterogeneous
and unrelated today (or at least imperfectly correlated), were often connected during the northern Iron
Age. We will see how and why. I do not pretend to exhaust even this more limited field of research.
However, I hope at least to provide the reader with elements of reflection and some parallelisms between
probable beliefs and ritual practices of the Nordic cultures during the Classical Age and those belonging
to the Medieval North Germanic peoples. I acknowledge that may perhaps be risky to explain certain
customs of the ancient Germanic peoples in the light of written and archaeological documents belonging
to the Middle Ages. Indeed, explanations can be only hypothetical in these cases. But I think that they
are worthy of consideration, because Norse traditions and documents – although incomplete, altered
and transcribed late enough – still refer to a large extent to customs, beliefs and myths of very ancient
times. Using them to interpret a particular type of archaeological finds such as bog bodies means nothing
more than proceeding – as it is often done in the scientific field – from what is known to interpret and
describe what is unknown. Although what is known is uncertain and unclear.
1. The bog bodies phenomenon
What is a bog body? A bog body is a human corpse that has been naturally mummified in a peat bog.
Unlike most of ancient human remains, the bog bodies often retain their skin and internal organs. The
preservation of bog bodies in peat bogs is a phenomenon caused by the acidic, oxygen-poor conditions
1 See M. Parker Pearson, The Archaeology of Death and Burial, Stroud, The History Press, 2009, p. 67.
2 See M. Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies Uncovered. Solving Europe’s Ancient Mystery, V. McDermid (Fwd.), Thames & Hudson,
London, 2015, p. 8. M. Ravn, Burials in bogs – Bronze and Early Iron Age Bog Bodies from Denmark, in «Acta Archaeologica», 81, 1,
2010, p. 107, says that «approximately 560 bog bodies have been found in Denmark. 145 of these bodies, distributed over 79
locations, can be dated to the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age». In Germany, we even have one historic reference dated to
1450: a group of peasants in Bonsdörp found a man’s body stuck in a peat bog with a noose around his neck. The parish priest
said to leave him there (K. K. Hirst, The Bog Bodies of Europe, in «ThoughtCo», Feb. 11, 2020, thoughtco.com/bog-bodies-burials-
170238). As of now, I warn the reader that he has not been able to consult a text deemed to be fundamental asW. van der Sanden,
Through Nature to Eternity - The Bog Bodies of Northwest Europe, Amsterdam, Batavian Lion International, 1996. I hope this, and some
other forced bibliographic gaps have not led me to too serious omissions and errors.
3 The reason for such a great discrepancy in the estimates of the number of bodies retrieved from the bogs is that many
records are presently considered doubtful and uncertain, see Hirst, The Bog Bodies etc.

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of peat bogs, which are made up of accumulated layers of dead moss. It is also important that the
temperature, at the time of the deposition of the body in the marsh, is low enough (less than 4° C) to
prevent the rapid decomposition of the body itself4. That should mean that at least the great majority of
the bog bodies (surely those best preserved) was sunk in late autumn, in winter, or in early spring. This
is sometimes confirmed by other clues: the irish Gallagh bog body and other corpses from other places,
for example, were found with a hazel wand tied around their necks, and hazel rods seem to get soft and
pliable only in cold weather5. As for swamp moss,
Sphagnum is a genus of moss which grows in the bog water […]. Growing over plants, trees, and
anything else in the water, the moss creates oxygen poor environments through rapid growth
and cover. Sphagnum mosses also create an acidic environment around them as they absorb all
the calcium and magnesium from the water and expel hydrogen6.
Long time ago, the plains of northern Europe were largely covered by vast swampy expanses. A difficult
environment, but one that could too represent a resource for the populations nearby: marshes, in fact,
offered animals and waterfowl, some vegetable products and also iron ore relatively easy to extract.
Moreover, they could provide some protection from enemy raids7. However, they could also represent
a danger for non-experts: in certain points their bottom could suddenly sink under the foot of those who
were wading through them, with a high and unseen step. Or some other spots could turn out to be
composed of quicksand. The risk of a fatal accident was constantly present. But if we take into account
the fact that the bodies of the Iron Age were generally found by mere chance during peat harvesting
operations in places where once marshes stretched, and that they are quite numerous despite this, the
hypothesis formulated by some scholars, according to which they belonged almost all to people so
clumsy or distracted to fall accidentally into such treacherous traps, seems statistically unlikely: the case,
indeed, could not be so common8. This is also because it can be assumed that at least the adult population
who lived near the marshes were well aware of the risks they ran when passing where the bogs
broadened and paid close attention to the danger. Furthermore, at the time the marshes and the places
where they could be waded were marked by trails of rough wooden effigies, which represented perhaps
shamans and shamanesses. These effigies’ main purpose was perhaps to protect from evil presences
those who passed by, but they could also serve as a sort of “road signs”: they warned passers-by about
the danger that they could run passing outside the marked routes9.
The hypothesis of an accidental death appears even less likely if we take into account the fact that many
of these bodies show signs of a successful attempt to peg them down to the bottom by hurdles made with
branches and weights. Furthermore (and that cuts short the matter), some of them seem to show signs of
atrocious violence before their death, in some cases up to overkilling. In fact, they bear horrific wounds,
such as slashed throats or bodies torn to pieces (although, in many cases it is probably, as we will see,
post-mortem violence). Funerary customs of the time in northern regions generally involved cremation of
4 See C. Fischer, The Tollund Man and the Elling Woman and other bog bodies from Central Jutland, in Bog Bodies, Sacred Sites and
Wetland Archeology, B. Coles - J. Coles - M. Schou Jørgensen (Eds.), Exeter, Short Run Press, 1999, pp. 94-95.
5 For the pliability of hazel rods only in winter, see the statement reported in M. Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods. Human
sacrifice in Iron Age and Roman Europe, Stroud, The History Press, 2014, p. 124.
6 K. Roy, The Moora Mystery: What Happened When a Girl Stepped into the Moor 2,500 Years Ago?, in «Ancient Origins», 12
November 2016, https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/moora-mystery-what-happened-when-girl-stepped-moor-2500-
years-ago-007000 (retrieved 11-04-2021). See too Hirst, The Bog Bodies etc. and M. Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 9-10.
7 See Id., p. 38-42 and 46-49.
8 That of a substantial number of accidental falls is the thesis proposed and supported by C. S. Briggs, Did They Fall or Were
They Pushed?, in Bog Bodies. New Discoveries and New Perspectives, R. C. Turner – R. G. Scaife eds., British Museum Press,
London, 1995, p. 163-182.
9 About these signs see M. & S. Aldhouse-Green, The Quest for the Shaman, London, Thames and Hudson, 2005, p. 119-122
(part. p. 120-122).

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the bodies10. But, unmistakably, many corpses were found intentionally placed in the peat bogs instead
of cremated, as tradition in their communities wanted. This has suggested to scientists that the bodies
had been sacrificed: as criminals, slaves, or simply commoners11. However, the famous Tollund Man was
found with a noose still around his neck but with no other injuries, and it appears he had been carefully
– almost affectionately – laid in the bog (his eyes and mouth had been closed and his body placed in a
sleeping or foetal position). Something that wouldn’t have probably happened if he were a common
criminal.
Miranda Aldhouse-Green and other authors before and after her, have sustained or considered highly
probable the hypothesis of a sacrificial nature for the death of the most of people found in the bogs12. But
some new questions then arise: what were the surely serious reasons that compelled various and different
communities to celebrate this kind of sacrifices? Or, otherwise said, is it possible to recover these reasons
by the reconstruction of the different killing rituals employed, by physical characteristics of the victims
and by other clues? And what was, in any case, the true scope of sinking the bodies into the bogs? We
said: the hypothesis of a mainly sacrificial nature of the bog bodies’ phenomenon has been proposed and
generally well accepted. But, as even Miranda Aldhouse-Green admits, supposedly it does not apply to
all cases13. There is, for example, the possibility that some of the corpses found in bogs belonged to a very
particular genre of criminals. And so, we should to ask ourselves what could have been, for an Iron Age
Northern European population, the difference between the simple judicial execution of such criminals
and a sacrifice carried out with intention of reparation for particular crimes. Tacitus (Germania, 12), about
the legal customs of the Germans of his time (1st-2nd century AD), reveals that criminals were subjected
to different penalties on the basis of the burden of infamy that they sustained.
Distinctio poenarum ex delicto: proditores et transfugas arboribus suspendunt, ignavos et
inbelles et corpore infames caeno ac palude, iniecta insuper crate, mergunt. diversitas supplicii
illuc respicit, tamquam scelera ostendi oporteat, dum puniuntur, flagitia abscondi14.
Historians are today well aware that the information provided by Tacitus on the customs of the
Germans, however precious, is to be used with caution: Tacitus never went to Germany, and his sources
were all second-hand, including works of other writers and tales of merchants and veterans from the
10 See about that, and among many writings, P. V. Glob, The Bog People. Iron-Age Man Preserved, London, Paladin, 1971, p.
105-106, and Ravn, Burials in bogs etc., p. 110.
11 A resume of these opinions in C. Dell’Amore, Who Were the Ancient Bog Mummies? Surprising New Clues, «National
Geigraphic», July 18, 2014, at the web address https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/7/140718-bog-bodies-
denmark-archaeology-science-iron-age.html. See, here, the note below.
12 See Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 191: «It is highly unlikely that all ancient bog bodies were victims of human sacrifice.
Some may have been murdered and deposited in bogs to conceal the evidence of criminal behaviour. […]. But one thing very
evident from study of the bog bodies is the element of theatre in the rituals leading up to and during the killings. The weight of
evidence for religious involvement strongly indicates that sacrificial rites were the main reason for the Iron Age European bog
killings». See, before Aldhouse-Green’s work, P. V. Glob, The Bog People etc., p. 108: «…circumstances of the bog people’s
deposition show nothing in common with normal burial customs, but on the contrary have many of the characteristics of the
sacrificial deposits». See, M. Green, Humans as ritual victims in later prehistoric western Europe, in «Oxford Journal of Archaeology»
17, 2, (1998), p. 169-189, too. For a short survey of the hypothesis of the human sacrifice as cause of bodies sinking in bogs, see
Ravn, Burials in bogs etc., p. 110.
13 After having examined some of the cases of peat bog burials, Ravn, Burials in bogs etc., p. 113, concludes that «Bog bodies are
not a narrowly defined phenomenon. […] The reason that people were given their final resting place in the bog was not because
of one single tradition or one single ritual. In the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, some were due to accidents and others to
murder. Some may have been sacrificed and others may have died of natural causes and were buried in the bog».
14 Cornelii Taciti Opera Minora, recognoverunt […] M. Winterbotton […] et R. M. Ogilvie, Oxonii, e Typographeo
Clarendoniano, p. 43 (paragraph 12). The distinction of the penalty is based on the crime. They hang traitors and deserters from
trees. Instead they sink the cowards, the shirker and the unnaturally vicious are drowned in miry swamps under a cover of wattled
hurdles. The diversity of punishment takes care of this: that just as it is necessary to show crimes when they are punished, it is equally
necessary to hide infamies (translation by S.M.).

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Germanic campaigns15. If the information relating to the «wattled hurdles» used to keep the bodies of
the condemned on the bottom of the marshes would seem reliable (we said that the bodies found in the
peat bogs often show that they were pegged down to the bottom with branches and stakes), the verbs
he uses, suspendunt and mergunt, seem to be of non-univocal interpretation.
1.1 “Suspended” bodies, and “bad trips”
The Latin verb Suspendo can indeed mean ‘to kill by hanging’, but also simply ‘to hang’ (the body of
someone, or something), and also ‘to offer as a votive gift’16. Someone may be attached (suspensus) by
ropes or chains to a tree but not necessarily hanged, and left to die of starvation and thirst, or from the
consequences of injuries and other ill-treatment17. Or else, he (or she) may simply be exposed to the view
(as a warning, or as an offer) after being otherwise – and possibly elsewhere – killed. Tacitus again speaks
of the Germanic custom of nailing to the trees the heads of killed enemies, but he also writes, in truth, of
gibbets reserved in advance for Roman prisoners:
adiacebant fragmina telorum equorumque artus, simul truncis arborum antefixa ora. lucis
propinquis barbarae arae, apud quas tribunos ac primorum ordinum centuriones mactaverant.
et cladis eius superstites, pugnam aut vincula elapsi, referebant hic cecidisse legatos, illic raptas
aquilas; primum ubi vulnus Varo adactum, ubi infelici dextera et suo ictu mortem invenerit; quo
tribunali contionatus Arminius, quot patibula captivis, quae scrobes, utque signis et aquilis per
superbiam inluserit18.
Nine centuries after, indeed, Adam of Bremen talks about an Oðin ceremony that was still held in the
grand temple in Uppsala, Sweden:
Omnibus itaque diis suis attributos habent sacerdotes, qui sacrificia populi offerant. Si pestis et
famis imminet, Thorydolo lybatur, si bellum, Wodani, si nuptiae celebrandae sunt, Fricconi. Solet
quoque post novem annos communis omnium Sueoniae provintiarum sollempnitas in Ubsola
celebrari. Ad quam videlicet sollempnitatem nulli praestatur immunitas. Reges et populi, omnes
et singuli sua dona transmittunt ad Ubsolam, et quod omni poena crudelius est, illi qui iam
induerunt christianitatem, ab illis se redimunt cerimoniis. Sacrificium itaque tale est. Ex omni
animante, quod masculinum est, novem capita offeruntur, quorum sanguine deos placari mos
est. Corpora autem suspenduntur in lucum, qui proximus est templo. Is enim lucus tam sacer est
gentilibus, ut singulae arbores eius ex morte vel tabo immolatorum divinae credantur. Ibi etiam
canes et equi pendent cum hominibus, quorum corpora mixtim suspensa narravit mihi aliquis
christianorum vidisse. Ceterum neniae, quae in eiusmodi ritu libationis fieri solent, multiplices
15 See A. Gudeman, The Sources of the Germania of Tacitus, in «Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological
Association», 31 (1900), p. 93-111.
16 See the heading Suspendo in E. Forcellini, Lexicon totius Latinitatis, edd. G. Furlanetto - F. Corradini - G. Perin, Bononiae,
A. Forni, 1864-1897, vol. IVa (1871).
17 See for this the sacrifice that the Gauls offered to the god Esus: the victims were hung on the trees but killed by stabs (see
M. Green, Dizionario di Mitologia Celtica, It. transl., Milano, Rusconi, s.d., p. 237, heading Sacrificio umano).
18 Cornelii Taciti Annalium libri 1-4, Edited with intr. and notes for the use of schools and junior students by H. Furneaux,
Oxford, At the Clarendon Press, 1892, I, 61, p. 76. Near, lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and also human heads,
prominently nailed to trunks of trees. In the adjacent groves were the barbarous altars, on which they had immolated tribunes and
first-rank centurions. Some survivors of the disaster who had escaped from the battle or from captivity, described how this was the spot
where the officers fell, how yonder the eagles were captured, where Varus was pierced by his first wound, where too by the stroke of his
own ill-starred hand he found for himself death. They pointed out the raised ground from which Arminius had harangued his army,
the number of gibbets for the captives, the pits for the living, and how in his exultation he insulted the standards and eagles.
Translation from Annals of Tacitus, translated into English, with notes and maps by Alfred John Church and William
Jackson Brodribb, London, McMillian and Co, 1884, I 61, p. 31.

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et inhonestae ideoque melius reticendae19.
Nevertheless, it is surely possible that other sacrifices were carried out by hanging, and that the remains
of the sacrificed were then dipped into the bogs. In ancient Sweden, a king was invested with a certain
quality of “luck”, and the fertility of his land depended upon it. The Ynglingasaga (18) says:
Dómaldi tók arf eptir föður sinn Vísbur, ok réð löndum. Á hans dögum gerðist í Svíþjóð sultr
mikill ok seyra. Þá efldu Svíar blót stór at Uppsölum; hit fyrsta haust blótuðu þeir yxnum, ok
batnaði ekki árferð at heldr. En annat haust hófu þeir mannblót, en árferð var söm eða verri. En
hit þriðja haust kómu Svíar fjölment til Uppsala, þá er blót skyldu vera. Þá áttu höfðingjar
ráðagerð sína; ok kom þat ásamt með þeim, at hallærit mundi standa af Dómalda konungi þeirra,
ok þat með, at þeir skyldu honum blóta til árs sér, ok veita honum atgöngu ok drepa hann, ok
rjóða stalla með blóði hans. Ok svá gerðu þeir.
Hitt var fyrr
at fold ruðu
sverðberendr
sínum drótni,
ok landherr
af lífs vönum
dreyrug vápn
Dómalda bar,
þá er árgjörn
Jóta dolgi
Svía kind
of sóa skyldi20.
But the ‘Historia Norwegiæ goes so far as to say:
19 Adam of Bremen, Descriptio insularum Aquilonis, book 4 of Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, B. Schmeidler (Ed.), in
Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Berlin, 1917 (reprinted München, 1977, 1993), caput 27.It should be noted, at this point, that many scholars
believe today that Adam of Bremen never went to Uppsala, that much of his information was unreliable and that perhaps some were invented by
himself or by other Christians of the time for the purpose to discredit and to cast a feeling of horror on the pagan religion, see O. Sundqvist, The
Upsala Cult, in Myth, Might and Magic. Ten essays on Gamla Uppsala, Stockholm, National Heritage Board, p. 37-38. For all their gods there
are appointed priests to offer sacrifices for the people. If plague and famine threaten, a libation is poured to the idol Thor; if war, to Oðin; if marriages
are to be celebrated, to Frikko. It is customary also to solemnize in Uppsala, at nine-year intervals, a general feast of all the provinces of Sweden.
From attendance at this festival no one is exempted Kings and people all and singly send their gifts to Uppsala and, what is more distressing than
any kind of punishment, those who have already adopted Christianity redeem themselves through these ceremonies. The sacrifice is of this nature:
of every living thing that is male, they offer nine heads with the blood of which it is customary to placate gods of this sort. The bodies they hang in
the sacred grove that adjoins the temple. Now this grove is so sacred in the eyes of the heathen that each and every tree in it is believed divine because
of the death or putrefaction of the victims. Even dogs and horses hang there with men. A Christian told me that he had seen bodies suspended
promiscuously. Furthermore, the incantations customarily chanted in the ritual of a sacrifice of this kind are manifold and unseemly; therefore, it
is better to keep silent about them. Translation from Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, Engl. transl. J.
Tschan, intr. T. Reuter, New York, Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 208.
20 Snorri Sturluson,Heimskringla, ed. by Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, Íslenzk fornrit, 26–28, Reykjavík, Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag,
1941–1951, 3 vols., vol. 1, p. 31-32. Dómaldi succeeded his father Vísburr, and ruled his lands. In his time there was famine and
hunger in Svíþjóð. Then the Svíar held great sacrifices at Uppsalir. In the first autumn they sacrificed oxen, but even so there was no
improvement in the season. The second autumn they held a human sacrifice, but the season was the same or worse. But the third
autumn the Svíar came to Uppsalir in great numbers at the time when the sacrifices were to be held. Then the leaders held a council
and came to an agreement among themselves that their king, Dómaldi, must be the cause of the famine, and moreover, that they should
sacrifice him for their prosperity, and attack him and kill him and redden the altars with his blood, and that is what they did. So says
Þjóðólfr: Once it was / hat weapon-bearers / with their ruler / reddened the ground, /and the land’s people / left Dómaldi without life,
/ their weapons bloody, / when the Svíar /seeking good harvests / offered up / the enemy of Jótar. Translation from Snorri Sturluson,
Heimskringla, vol. I [of 3], The beginnings to Óláfr Tryggvason, Engl. transl. A. Finlay – A. Faulkes, London, University College
London, 2016, p. 18-19.

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Hic [Vanlandi] genuit Wisbur, quem filii sui cum omni curia sua, ut citius hæreditarentur, vivum
incenderunt. Cuius filium Domald Sweones suspendentes pro fertilitate frugum deæ Cereri
hostiam obtulerunt21
1.1.2 The Tollund Man
This passage from the Historia Norwegiæ could remind us of the so-called “Tollund Man”, one of the most
famous bog bodies ever. The Tollund Man lived during the 4th century BC, and was found in 1950 on the
Danish Jutland peninsula. When he was found, he was so well preserved that he was mistaken for a recent
murder victim. The cause of death was established to have been hanging better than strangulation, and
scholars now believe the man was a human sacrifice rather than an executed criminal22. His eyes closed
and his body carefully arranged in foetal or sleeping position testify that he could not be a vulgar executed
outlaw, although his burial was not of the traditional type among his people23. Taking into due account the
fact that Tollund Man’s body (even if almost completely naked)24 was treated with much respect, we could
legitimately ask ourselves if he was a king or a tribe-chief sacrificed to ward off hunger and bad luck from
his people, like the aforementioned king Domald. If so, could the Tollund Man have even been a voluntary
sacrificial victim, which increased by this act the gratitude and the respect of his people, manifested in the
affectionate funeral practice reserved for him? It could be so, but I believe that another explanation – and
maybe more likely – is possible, as we will see soon.
Scientists identified the man’s last meal as agruel made from grains and seeds, both cultivated and wild.
Approximately 40 kinds of seeds were computed (many of which were probably uncommon even in the
diet of the time), but the gruel was primarily composed of four types of them: barley, wheat, flax, false
flax, (plus we can find, as remarkable, the presence of the knotgrass plant). What the Tollund Man then
consumed was probably a ritual meal, because the remains of a similar gruel were found in the digestive
tract of other men (and women) from the time, and whose bodies were dipped too into peat bogs25. In
21 Monumenta historica Norwegiæ. Latinske kildeskrifter til Norges historie i middelalderen, Monumenta Historica Norwegiae, ed.
G. Storm, Kristiania [Oslo], Brøgger, 1880, p. 98.Vanlandi fathered Vísburr, who with all his retinue was burned alive by his sons
so that they might all the sooner inherit the kingdom. His son, Dómaldi, was hanged by the Swedes as a sacrifice to the goddess Ceres
[name here employed as equivalent of that of Freyja] to ensure the fertility of the crops. A History of Norway, and The Passion and
Miracles of Blessed Óláfr, Engl. transl. by D. Kunin, ed. C. L. Phelpstead, Exeter, Viking Society for Northern Research –
University College London, 2001, p. 12. See, too, H. Roderick Ellis, The Road to Hel. A Study of the Conception of the Dead in
Old Norse Literature, New York, Greenwood Press, 1968, p. 101.
22 The Tollund Man was found with a noose around his neck, although the cervical vertebrae were not broken as usually
happens in hanging (and that means he had not received any sharp jerk, if really suspended on the rope). But the hyoid
bone is fractured, and the tongue is distended, characteristics often seen in a hanged person (see Aldhouse-Green, Bog
Bodies etc., p. 68-69, and https://archive.is/O4SG#selection-373.66-373.113).
23 Possibly a ritual nudity unites Tollund Man’s to other bodies, even if U. Mannering - M. Gleba - M. Bloch Hansen, Denmark,
in Textiles and Textile Production in Europe. From Prehistory to AD 400, M. Gleba and U. Mannering (Eds.), Oxford and
Philadelphia, Oxbow, 2012, p. 104, and many other scientists consider the possibility that the Tollund Man wore a linen or
vegetal fibre robe, of a type that was very common, at the time, in the northern regions of Europe. A robe which has not
survived in the acidic bog water. When his body was found, apart from the noose around his neck, he wore only a sheepskin
beret and a belt. Another famous bog body, instead, the man from Lindow Moss, wore only a fox fur bracelet.
24 But truly naked? Or his clothes (made of vegetable fibres) had been dissolved? We can observe that among the effects
that the LSD contained in the ergot could have on certain consumers there is often a very strong sensation of heat,
accompanied by intense sweating, which perhaps made nudity desirable even in the middle of winter. Others, however,
felt a completely opposite sensation: a great cold. So, in case Tollund Man (an ergot consumer, as we will see) died in the
winter, it might not be so surprising that he was naked: he was oppressed by an unbearable sensation of heat (see
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD#Clinici).
25 Fischer, The Tollund Man etc., p. 94, does not agree with the hypothesis of a ritual meal: «People had evidently collected
different wild seed to supplement an insufficient diet from the cultivated varieties alone». T. G. Holden, The Last Meals of
the Lindow Bog Men, in Bog Bodies. New Discoveries etc., p. 82, agrees, and wonders: «Is it possible that the Danish examples
[of last meal] from Borremose, Tollund, Grauballe and Huldremose reflect a more fragile agricultural system [compared
to that of the Lindow area, in England] commonly beset by crop failure and that the weed seeds represent attempts to
stretch failing supplies of cereal grain?» M. & S. Aldhouse-Green, The Quest etc., p. 113-114, hypothesize instead that the

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addition, in the Tollund Man’s entrails, traces of ergot were found26. Ergot is a poisonous micro-fungus
which grows on ears of barley and rye: it provokes hallucinations, painful seizures and, at higher doses,
even gangrene, coma and death. Was it perhaps given to the Tollund Man (a well-respected king or a
tribe-chief) so that during the sacrifice he did not feel fear for his imminent death? Indeed, I want to
hypothesize another possible reason: the Tollund Man was a shaman and a victim of his duty and of his
vocation27. Ergot was one of the tools of his trade. As told before (note 28), he wore a woolly skin beret,
great variety of seeds and weeds contained in what they consider a truly ritual and shamanic meal could be a symbolic
and large sample of both domestic and wild species that characterized the habitat in which the bog’s people lived, and its
local identity. Nevertheless, even remaining within the framework of this hypothesis, we should remember that cereals
and flax seeds were symbols of abundance among the Norse people, linked to the cult of the gods of fertility. And,
moreover, flax flowers were believed in the Middle Ages to be a protection against sorcery (see M. Grieve, A Modern Herbal,
Dover Publications, Kindle ed., Vol. I, entryFlax, pos. 12866 and ff). As for knotgrass, it begins flowering in May and continues
till September or October. It is mentioned in later European folklore as a plant with strange powers: among these, that of
inducing dwarfism in children (and one must think of the short stature of the Tollund Man). For example, in the Midsummer
Night’s Dream, perhaps the most “magical” of his comedies, Shakespeare makes Lysander say: «Get you gone, you dwarf; /
You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made; / You bead, you acorn!». Some recipes pursued the same goal by mixing drugs
as dwarf elder, daisy juice, various roots and, precisely, knotgrass (see B. K. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around
the World, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001, p. 29). Perhaps it is not entirely idle to quote the following words of the
young sorceress Hermione Granger, one of the main characters in the J. K. Rowling series of books dedicated to Harry Potter:
«This [the Polyjuice Potion] is the most complicated potion I’ve ever seen. Lacewing flies, leeches, fluxweed, and knotgrass.
Well, they’re easy enough» (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). Does perhaps this potion contain an echo of magic folklore
from Mrs. Rowling’s Scotland, so influenced by Norse customs during the Middle Ages? Grieve, A Modern Herbal, (vol. II,
Kindle pos. 1151 and ff.), at heading knotgrass reports that knotgrass found numerous medicinal applications, and among
these, as astringent (an infusion of it is useful in diarrhoea, bleeding piles and all haemorrhages): it was formerly employed
considerably as a vulnerary and styptic. It was also used against kidney disease, it treated wounds and cleaned and healed
old filthy ulcers. The essence was for tertian and quartan, the decoction for colic. In short, a plant that could be considered in
some way magical. The particular composition of the last meal whose remains have been found into some of the bog bodies
could therefore have to do with a ceremony to remove the danger of famine. However, the ears of cereals, flax seeds and
even, maybe, wild weeds such as knotgrass represented, for the Norse, powerful healing powers, and a defence against evil
spells. I believe that the latter was at least a collateral and most welcomed function of the unappetizing last meal consumed
by many bog bodies (see G. Chiesa Isnardi, I miti nordici, Longanesi & C., Milano, 1991, p. 540-541). In case the Tollund Man
was a shaman (and as you will see, I believe so), those ingredients could have been a powerful and “interior” defence against
the evil spirits he would soon challenge. But such a meal could be, on the other hand and even principally, a sort of
“guarantee”. A guarantee mostly for the community, to preserve itself from any future bad intentions of the soul of a magical
operator who eventually died in the course of a shamanic ritual made, e.g., for helping a soul in danger or interrogating spirits
about the outcome of a famine (see, at this regard, below in our text, and at note 40). Fischer notes also that traces of sphagnum
moss are mixed with the porridge and deduces that it was boiled in bog water. This is not surprising, because sphagnum is
since a long time known as a powerful water disinfectant, and, in some Scottish locations, it has been used for centuries for
purifying the water by which whisky is made (see, on that use, T. J. Painter, Chemical and Microbiological Aspects of the
Preservation Process in Sphagnum Peat, inBog Bodies. New Discoveries etc., p. 88, and https://www.nature.scot/peatland-action-
case-study-whats-connection-between-peat-and-drinking-water-catchments, and
https://www.smws.com/blog/knowledge/education/water-make-whisky-come/).
26 No trace of hallucinogenic substance was found in the Lindow Man’s guts, and the last meal he had consumed before dying
was not a gruel but a kind of equally unappetising grilled bread, see G. Hillman,Plant Foods in Ancient Diet: The Archaelogical
Role of Palaeofeces in General and Lindow’s Man’s Gut Contents in Particular, inLindow Man: The body in the Bog, I. M. Stead - J. B.
Bourke - D. Brotwell (eds.), London, British Museum Publications, 1986, p. 99-115, part. 197-114. Lindow Man’s guts contained
instead pollen of mistletoe: see R. G. Scaife, Pollen in Human Palaeofaeces; and a Preliminary Investigation of the Stomach and Gut
Contents of Lindow Man, in Lindow Man etc., p. 131-133, and A. Ross, Lindow Man and the Celtic Tradition, in Lindow Man etc., p.
167-168. This presence of the mistletoe (see mainly Ross’ work) has evocated possible druidic rituals: rituals to obtain fertility.
The difference between the case of the ancient English Celtic Lindow Man and the Danish Tollund Man is not limited to
different recipe and way of cooking of the last meal, nor to the absence of ergot into the Lindow Moss body. It extends to the
fact that the Lindow Man was overkilled, or raged about him before and after his death in various (and more violent) ways.
These ways included not only strangulation, but also blows and stabs. Moreover, his killers appear to have used much less
care and respect for him when they entrusted his corpse to the bog.
27 See M. & S. Aldhouse-Green, The Quest for the Shaman etc., p. 112: moreover, a very «interesting feature of ergotism is its
ability to cause collective delusions: thus one influential sufferer might control and share his or her mind-bending

82
and also wore a belt. We know that shamans of many Siberian tribes attributed to their berets an essential
part of their magical and psychic power28. Among the Norse, a woolly and furred skin beret (or hat, or
hood) was the headdress of a god with shamanic characteristics like Oðin, as well as of human witches,
priests and priestesses. A well fastened belt, instead, was a necessary item to concentrate the psychic
energy of the magic practitioner who had to deal with spirits29. Allucinogenic drugs’ employ (such as
ergot) also fit very well within this framework. Even among the heathen medieval Norse people, one of
the tasks of shamans was to accompany to the Underworld the souls of dead people, or try to bring back
to life the dying. In other cases, they had to descend into the world of spirits to question them about
problems of crucial importance for the community, as the duration of a famine, of a livestock die, etc. All
that, probably, could also include a ritual and “controlled” hanging, that imitated the mythological
example given by Oðin and enhanced the shaman’s “vision”. In fact, into a human being, some calculated
degree of hypoxia (e.g., as a consequence of a ceremonial and simulated hanging) can bring to
hallucinogenic states. They may be similar to the hallucinations experienced by climbers at altitude30. The
visionary effect of the ergot, which is strongly vasospastic, was thus enhanced by hypoxia, a hypoxia by
hanging, of very rapid onset, and one of whose effects are typically hallucinations. It is superfluous to
say that such a ritual practice of hanging or strangulation combined with ergot consume, although
controlled, was for sure an extremely dangerous operation. And, regarding the achievement of a state of
hypoxia, another aspect could be of some significance in the case of the Tollund Man and in other rites
conducted by male shamans. Observers at public hangings have noted that male victims developed an
erection, sometimes remaining after death, and occasionally ejaculated when being hanged. This
phenomenon could probably have been observed already in the most ancient times. As for the erect
experience with others. It is highly possible that the men interred at Tollund and Nebelmose [the so-called Grauballe Man,
see below] were shamans who consciously took ergot in order to transcend worlds and commune with the spirit-forces»
(Id., pp. 112-113). A vasospasm is what characterizes the various forms of ergotism, cf. G. Craig Merhoff et al., Historical
Review and Description of Unusual Clinical Manifestations, in «Annals of Surgery», 180, 5, 1974, p. 774-775. When this
vasospasm touches the cerebral blood vessels, visions can be strengthened due to the consequent cerebral hypoxia. About
the Grauballe Man see here the following paragraph. Not ergot, but mistletoe was found in the digestive system of Lindow
Moss Man. Mistletoe is a magic plant, but a non-hallucinogenic one: it is fatal at certain doses, but at other lower ones it
can serve as anaesthetic, calming agent, and was very well known for curing epilepsy (even if young people who eat too
many berries can aggravate and even provoke convulsive disorders, see M. Grieve, A Modern Herbal etc., entry Mistletoe,
vol. II, Kindle pos. 4740 and ff.). Chiesa Isnardi, I miti nordici etc., p. 97, also speaks of a Norse sorceress who possessed
igniferous mushrooms, perhaps used by her to reach a trance state.
28 See M. Eliade, Shamanism. Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Engl. transl., London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964, p. 154.
29 See Chiesa Isnardi, I miti nordici etc., p. 613-614 and 616-617. N. Ia. Bulatova, The Evenk Alga Ritual of Blessing Matriona
Kurbeltinova in Action, in M. M. Balzer. Shamanic Worlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia, New York, M.E. Sharpe
p. 237-238, so describes the beginning of an Evenk (Tungus) blessing ritual: « The grandson of the shaman, Terenty, her
constant helper during her shamanic activities, prepared a turu for us. A turu is a ritual name for a larch symbolizing the
shamanic tree. Through the turu our souls would travel to the upper world. Three turu were put up in the eastern part of
the tent. This row of larches is called darpe. Terenty tied a long belt to the upper horizontal pole of the tent. He held one
end of this belt during the shamanic activities; the other end was tied to Matriona Petrovna [the shamaness]. This belt
connects the shaman with the Upper World, the world of birds, and Heaven. A [portable iron] stove was brought in and
a fire lit in it. All those present took part in the preparation. The grandmother let her hair down, sat by the fire and said:
“We shall look at their future.” Then she took a spoon containing alcohol and presented it to the fire with the following
words: “Inhale and say if it is possible to perform shamanic activities.” The fire flared up with a whoosh, which meant
that permission to perform the ritual had been given. The kinsmen brought her archi, juniper used for fumigating during
the shamanic ceremony. The shaman put on a gown, an apron, fur and chamois shoes; she tied herself to the belt, put on
a special hat, and asked the juniper to burn. The grandmother was given a drum. The juniper burned, the entrance to the
tent was closed, and the first sound of the shamanic drum was heard – the ceremony of blessing had begun».
30 See E. L. Lloyd. Points: Hallucinations, hypoxia, and neurotransmitters, in «British Medical Journal», 292 (1986), p. 903, and
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_asphyxiation. Hallucinogenic states probably do not arrive purely from a lack of
oxygen Upon examining the studies on hypoxia, it was found that “abnormalities” in the cerebral neurochemistry
involving one or more of the interconnected neurotransmitters, dopamine, serotonin, and beta-endorphin could be
reported in all the conditions associated with hallucinations.

83
phallus, it is of course an evident symbol of fertility, and his presence in prehistoric art often signals a
fertility rite. We can here remember that figures with a huge phallus (o the sexual organ alone) are found
on rock engravings and Norse area stones since the Bronze Age at least. The phallus is linked to the god
of fertility par excellence, Freyr and Freyr was probably that «Fricco cum ingenti priapo», of which Adam
of Bremen tells us that he was revered in the temple of Uppsala31. And yet an erect phallus could also
have an apotropaic function: we certainly know this from the cults produced in the Greek and Etruscan
societies, and later, and with a greater development, in the Roman one. The phallus protected people and
things in dangerous, liminal and passing places. The marshes were precisely dangerous places of
transition (between life and death, between the world of spirits and that of humans…), and a shaman
operating nearby could probably challenge their dangers protecting himself with the ostentation of his
virile attributes32.
But returning to the practice of hanging in the world of the Norse, Scandinavian mythology tells of Oðin,
hung for nine nights on a tree and consecrated to himself, after receiving a spear blow:
Veit ek, at ek hekk
Vindga meiði á
nætr allar nío,
geiri undaðr
ok gefinn Óðni,
siálfr sialfom mér,
á þeim meiði
er manngi veit
hvers hann af rótom renn.33
Scandinavian myths report of two descents into the Underworld to bring the dead god Balder back to
earth: the first one of Hermoðr, a divine hero sent by Oðin; the other of Oðin himself. As evidence of the
difficulty of the operation, it is enough to remember here that neither of these two extraordinary
characters succeeded in his intent. However, the feat was believed to be – at least theoretically – possible
even for more common shamans. So, in the Chronicon Norvegiæ it is said that a shaman tried to take back
the soul of a woman who died suddenly but, during the ritual, he himself fell dead, with a terrible wound
in the belly. A second shaman intervened at that point and managed to resurrect the woman. The woman
reported a vision: the first shaman’s spirit was crossing a lake in the form of a walrus, but at that moment
someone had hit him with a weapon34. That wound was the mortal one that the bystanders saw on his
corpse. Given the dangerous nature of the operation, it is clear that the dead woman the two shamans
tried to resurrect was a very important person: a person for whom it was worthwhile and almost
mandatory to put at stake or even to sacrifice another life. Maybe, the woman’s relatives were rich
enough and willing to pay a substantial fee even to two shamans.
The Chronichon Norvegiæ, like all Norse mythological and historical texts, comes from an already distant
era from that of a still alive and absolutely dominant paganism. One can suspect that often the rituals
and myths that the medieval northern writers (all formally converted to Christianity) bring back had
already been altered and that they were also more or less misunderstood. So, the episode narrated in our
report, with the bloody death of the first shaman, could be the colourful or distorted memory of a self-
31 See Chiesa Isnardi, I miti nordici etc., p. 610-611.
32 See, about all this, C. Moser, Naked Power: The Phallus as an Apotropaic Symbol in the Images and Texts of Roman Italy,
Philadelphia, Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2005-6: Word & Image. 11, 2006, pp. 6-26.
33 I know that I was hanging / on a windswept tree/ nine whole nights,/ with a spear/ and given to Oðinn/ – myself to myself – /on that
tree/ of which no one knows/ from roots of what it originates Text and translation from the Hávamál, the Rúnatal, verse 138. The
Hávamál (“The song of Harr, the exalted”, in Norse) is the second composition of the Poetic Edda, see The Poetic Edda,
volume III Mythological Poems II, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2011 p. 30.
34 See Eliade, Shamanism etc., p. 383.

84
sacrifice of that same shaman, in order to bring back to life a person considered even more important
than himself. Perhaps the shaman was a willing replacement victim: a life should be demanded by gods
for giving back another life, in such a case35. The Tollund Man – allegedly a shaman who made use of
hallucinogenic drugs (ergot), of the essential equipment of his profession (the cap and the belt) and who
resorted even to a ritual hanging which proved fatal to him – could have been the victim of a failed
attempt of “soul retrieving”, whose risks were spontaneously accepted by him. Or maybe he was trying
to know – by his descent in hell – something useful to employ against a famine or epidemic that was
afflicting his people, or against some other threat36. But he had probably been overconfident while he
was performing an imitation of Oðin’s hanging, or badly assisted by his attendants in that crucial
moment. This hanging should have been only symbolic, and should have been stopped just in time, but
something went wrong and the Tollund man did not return back from the Otherworld. If not with a very
slight lifting with the rope quickly followed by a release performed by his attendants, perhaps this ritual
“hanging” took place simply by tying by the noose the neck of the shaman to a low branch of a tree
(whose species was probably not chosen at random: an Odinic ash tree, perhaps?), while the feet of the
“sacrificed” did not rise off from the ground. At that point, however, the man with the noose at the neck
and under the frantic effect of the ergot probably leaned forward or walked around too far and too
hastily, surprising his assistants unprepared in the face of the sudden emergency. The noose tightened
too much or too violently. A similar modus operandi (a man standing tied to a tree by the neck and
resolutely advancing to tighten the noose) is that illustrated by the character portrayed on the left of the
following image: a male figure with a round shield on his right arm. Maybe Oðin in person? Or the one-
handed Týr, called significantly Hangatyr, “god of the hanged”, perhaps in ancient times confused with
Oðin and forced to take up the shield with his right stump to use the left hand for the sword37? The image
is engraved on one of the famous stones of Stora Hammar (Lärbro parish, Gotland, VIII-IX c.).
35 M. & S. Aldhouse-Green, The Quest etc., p. 113, speculate that «Under extreme circumstances, they [the shamans] may
even connived at their own deaths». However, I cannot agree with Parker Pearson’s interpretation of Tacitus’s passage:
from the Tacitian context it is clearly understood that the corpore infames were people considered criminals, and criminals
in a shameful and corporal, way. They could be even shamans, but a shaman is not a common or shameful criminal, even
if he can be a person whose spirit is potentially very dangerous: a possible “revenant”, with whose corpse certain
precautions must be taken such as that of sinking and pegging it into a swamp.
36 At this regard, Roderick Ellis, The Road etc., p. 167-168, remarks: «Mantic wisdom and fertility are not, of course, to be
thought of as completely separate. In any society where agriculture mattered intensely because a year of bad crops meant
suffering and famine, as in Scandinavia, it is obvious that a knowledge of the coming seasons was one of the aspects of the
glimpse into the future which could be of the greatest value. The chief question put to the völva [the foreteller] in Þorfinns
Saga Karlsefnis (IV) is whether the bad harvests and the plague from which the community was then suffering would come
to an end. It is necessary to make a distinction here, however, between the acquiring of knowledge from the living völva
or from the apparently dead, and the influence which the dead in the graves were believed to have over the fertility of the
earth. The living völva might foretell the course of the plague, but in herself she had no powers to make it cease. Similarly,
the dead who speak have no power to control the future, although they can foretell events to come; they are merely
instruments through which the knowledge can be obtained».
37 Chiesa Isnadi, I miti nordici etc., p. 217, reproduces a rock engraving found near Lökeberg, belonging to the Bronze Age
and in which a figure appears without a hand but holding a sword in the left. An image of Týr? Perhaps in prehistoric
times there was some confusion, or overlap, between the figures of Oðin and Týr: some scholars proposed that the
prominent god Oðin may have risen to prominence over Týr in prehistory, at times absorbing elements of the deity’s
domains. For example, according to scholar Hermann Reichert, due to the etymology of the god’s name (Tyr) and its
transparent meaning of “the god” (from the Proto-Indo-European theonym *Dyeus), “Odin [...] must have dislodged Týr
from his pre-eminent position. The fact that Tacitus names two divinities to whom the enemy’s army was consecrated ...
may signify their co-existence around 1 AD “(H. Reichert, Nordic language history and religion / ecclesiastical history I:
The Pre-Christian period, in O. Bundle (ed.), The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the
North Germanic languages, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2002, p. 398.

85
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Sacrificial_scene_on_Hammars_(II).png (detail)
The man (or the god) portrayed appears tied by the neck to a branch, but he apparently does not dangle
from it. He is portrayed, however, with one foot well before the other, as if walking expeditiously. It
would almost seem that such a form of the ritual did not entail particular risks for the person who
performed it. Still, a man very agitated because under the hallucinogenic effects of the ergot may have
tightened the noose around his neck too much by bustling, running madly around, throwing himself
forward too violently, or sliding disastrously towards the ground with all his weight. Of course, this
reconstruction is only hypothetical. In any case, the fact is that, apart from his premature death, the
Tollund Man is much noteworthy for the unusual burial reserved for a man of his historical epoch38.
1.1.3 The Grauballe Man
Grauballe Man was a young man from the 3rd century BC, of about 30 at his death, discovered in a marsh
northwest of Copenhagen in 1952. Since then this is known as the best preserved bog body from Iron
Age. Much as in the Tollund Man’s, traces of ergot have been found into his guts. Indeed, traces more
numerous, and mixed with the toxins of infected barley. So, «Wijnard van even der Sanden argues that
he had ingested such large quantities of these substances that he must have been hallucinating and
suffering convulsions and burning sensations in his mouth, hands and feet… The man was probably in
a coma, or possibly even dead, when his throat was slit»39. At first, before toxicological investigations,
the cause of his death seemed to have been a massive throat-wound that provoked him an unstoppable
bleeding. Furthermore, he would have been violently shot in the skull and in the jaw, and even his leg
would had been broken just before he died. But today the alleged tortures suffered by Grauballe Man
shortly before his death seem to be considered an “archaeological legend”: «In Denmark, a team of
forensic investigators including Niels Lynnerup of the University of Copenhagen has reexamined that
country’s bog bodies a found that some of the damage once interpreted as torture or mutilation was
actually inflicted centuries after death. Grauballe Man […]. Previous x-rays of his body were hard to read
38 «For a long time, possibly the most influential research on Sonderbestattungen has been Pauli’s (1975) study Keltischer
Volksglaube (‘Celtic folk belief’). […]. Pauli categorised two main groups who received different treatment at death. The
first were those who died a mors immatura (children, in some occasions also unmarried women) and the second group
were what he called the ‘dangerous dead’, comprising individuals who were already different during their lifetime (like
shamans, shamanesses, witches, medicine men), or whose circumstances of death were different», E. Aspöck, What Actually
is a ‘Deviant Burial’? Comparing German-Language and Anglophone Research on ‘Deviant Burials’, in E. M. Murphy, Deviant
Burial in the Archaeological Record (Studies in Funerary Archaeology), Oxbow Books, (2008), pos. 661 and ff. And surely, the
Tollund Man was not a child or an unmarried woman…
39 Quoted from Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., pp. 59-60, even if Aldhouse-Green prevents that some other authors are
sceptical about that, see p. 129 too.

86
– the bones, demineralized by acidic bog waters, looked like glass. Now CT scans have shown that
Grauballe Man’s skull was fractured by the pressure of the bog, abetted when a boy wearing clogs
accidentally stepped on the body as it was being excavated. Grauballe Man’s broken leg could also be
the work of the bog and not, as some scholars had thought, proof of a vicious blow to force him to kneel
for execution»40.
Some data about Grauballe Man’s health during the years before his death:
Pain was not new to this individual, since his teeth were in very poor condition, which meant
that he had chronic toothaches. Although Grauballe Man was only around a little over thirty
years of age, some teeth had already fallen out, while others (his wisdom teeth) had never come
in. Adding to his pain, his spinal column was affected by arthritis even at his young age41.
Lange reports:
Lynnerup, archaeologist Pauline Asingh, and other members of the team now interpret
Grauballe Man’s death some 2,300 years ago as a sacrifice to one of the fertility goddesses that
Celtic and Germanic peoples believed held the power of life and death. It could have happened
one winter after a bad harvest, the researchers say. People were hungry, reduced to eating chaff
and weeds. They believed that one of their number had to die so the rest could survive.
Grauballe Man, a strapping 34-year-old, apparently learned his fate a few days in advance:
stubble on his jaw indicates that he stopped shaving42. Then came the terrible hour when the
villagers – perhaps his friends and family – led him into a nearby bog. They picked their way
among holes dug for peat and bog iron, the ore from which Iron Age people forged tools and
weapons. At the edge of a flooded pit, one of them pulled back Grauballe Man’s head and, with
a short knife, slit his throat from ear to ear. The executioner pushed the dying man into the pit.
The body twisted as it fell and was swallowed by the bog43.
This vivid hypothesis does not lack logic and plausibility, but I believe that, if this is true, we could remark
that the sacrifice touched a particularly important person: patterns on his fingers were so clearly delineated
that the scientists determined he had not been used to much manual labour, and so he was, at the moment
of his death, wealthy enough to not have to not have to work personally for his sustenance44. But in truth,
it had not always gone so well for him: as we have mentioned, his teeth and bones showed, in modern
microscopic analyses, that he had suffered interruptions in his development during childhood45. Perhaps
his reasonably good state of health as an adult, compared with the sickly one of his childhood, was due to
an acquired condition of shaman accompanied by a new well-being? A sickly child could hardly have
achieved a prosperity in his adulthood thanks to warlike undertakings or tenacious work in the fields. But
suddenly, in consideration of his specialstatus, did he be chosen to relief a serious misfortune for his people,
such as a famine? As Caesar explained in the VI book of De bello Gallico, the Celts (and, supposedly, their
German neighbours) sacrificed men to save others from serious and impending dangers. A shaman able to
enter, just before dying, in contact with the chthonic spirits thanks to the ergot could surely have been a
valuable-enough victim to satisfy a bloody request of angry divinities.
40 K. E. Lange, Tales from The Bog, in «National Geographic», September 2007, cons. at
https://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/12330/12626747/myanthropologylibrary/PDF/A_NG_23_Lange_522.pdf, p. 1.
41https://www.webcitation.org/6J8ovWqZi?url=http://bogbodies.wikispaces.com/Bog+Bodies+of+Iron+Age+Europe, and
see Glob, The Bog People etc., p. 42.
42 It is interesting to note that even the Tollund Man does not seem to have been too accurately shaved before his death:
«He was clean-shaven, but there was very short stubble on the chin and upper lip», Glob, The Bog Bodies etc., p. 21. Was
there, in cases such these, a ritual reason? [this note is ours].
43 Lange, Tales from The Bog etc., p. 1.
44 See Glob, The Bog People etc., p. 42 and 113.
45 See Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 72.

87
Or, was the Grauballe man a shaman incurred in the dissatisfaction or hatred of his tribe for reasons we
cannot determine today, and therefore sacrificed? Or else, a self-sacrificed volunteer for the purpose of
removing a threat from the community? Aldhouse-Green writes:
Archaeological evidence for self-sacrifice in the European Iron Age is not easy to come by.
However, Parker Pearson has made an interesting suggestion which serves to link some human
remains, that were arguably victims of sacrifice, with an observation in Tacitus’s Germania. The
Roman writer comments that “…the shirker and the disreputable of body are drowned in miry
swamps under a cover of wattled hurdles.” (Germania XII). Parker Pearson wonders whether some
of these individuals were perhaps ‘special’ people, even sacrificed shamans […] and whether
some of the bog-bodies known from northern Europe might, indeed, be prophets or seers
themselves. He argues that the deformed or disabled – as were the Yde girl [for her, see below in
this text], with her deformed spine, the woman of Zweeloo, who had exceptionally short forearms
and the two men from Dojringe, one with a short right arm and spina bifida and the other with a
short left arm – form a high proportion of these watery burials […] and that it may have been
these people that were perceived as being touched by the spirits and were therefore chosen to be
shamans. It is of especial note that the Grauballe Man […], whose throat was slit before his
deposition in a Danish marsh, had ingested a quantity of ergot, a substance that would cause
hallucinations and then convulsions […], a feature that may mark him as a shaman, seeking to
achieve an altered state of consciousness in order to gain spiritual access to the Otherworld. […]
the Norse god Oðin’s one-eye disfigurement […] signalled his special supernatural status and,
what is more, he underwent a form of self-sacrifice by being hung on the World Tree, in order to
gain perfect wisdom46.
I can agree with Parker Pearson, and with Aldhouse-Green herself, about the possibility that a shaman
could sometimes be (self-)immolated in order to save another person or a whole community. However,
I do not think that, in the Grauballe Man’s case was exactly the way it was. Before concluding this
paragraph, I would like to propose an alternative hypothesis: Grauballe Man was a shaman, and he too,
like the Tollund Man, died not from a predetermined self-sacrifice, but from a tragically badly executed
ritual. Perhaps he used a partly different technique from that combination of drug and asphyxiation
utilized by his colleague (for the Huldremose Woman see the next paragraph). Grauballe Man, perhaps,
only resorted to drugs: a stronger dose of ergot, mixed with the toxins of infected barley (ustilago hordei,
or covered smut of barley). A relatively frequent use of the active substance of the ergot can lead a shaman
as well as a more modern and prosaic “tripper” to subsequent poorer psychotropic experiences,
experiences lower in “quality” and duration. This drawback is sometimes dangerously remedied with
increased doses of ergot (or purified LSD), which in the end can prove fatal. It may be that during his last
ritual the Grauballe Man exaggerated in taking ergot (and infected barley), and so went on an
“overdose”. Ended up in a coma (or already dead), probably after convulsive ergotism characterized by
repeated grand mal seizures, he was considered in any case doomed by the dwellers of his village. Really
dead or not already so, his throat was deeply cut by someone of his fellow villagers and his head almost
detached. This mutilation, as well as the pegging of his corpse down in the bog (and perhaps the fracture
of his right leg), was probably post mortem, and belonged to the kind of mutilations that served to make
the spirit of the dead unable to harm the living (even the total or partial hair cut was, in definitive, a kind
of mutilation, and for that see below in our text, paragraph 2.1.4).
1.1.4 The Huldremose Woman
Compared with the Tollund Man’s, that of the Huldremose Woman is another very interesting and,
under certain aspects, even more mysterious case. Her body, as the Tollund Man’s, emerged from a
46 Aldhouse-Green, Dying for Gods etc., p. 194.

88
Danish bog, in the by now chronologically far 1879. She lived around 210-41 BC47, and was more than
forty years old when she died, but, although forty was rather an advanced age at the time, allegedly she
did not die of oldness48. In fact, we are not sure of the causes of her death49. Her right arm appears to
have sustained a deep cut wound, but this wound could have occurred after death or even while being
dug up50. Prior to her death, she had perhaps broken her right leg, but this had been allowed to heal,
although it left her with a limp51. One possibly life-threatening piece of evidence is the woollen rope that
encircled Huldremose Woman’s neck, which secured – before her death – her hair. However, since this
cord left nary a mark of strangulation, it has been speculated that the rope was only symbolic. So,
although there are many clues to the mystery of Huldremose Woman’s death, conundrum remains.
47 See U. Mannering - G. Possnert - J. Heinemeier - M. Gleba, Dating Danish textiles and skins from bog finds by means of 14C
AMS, in «Journal of Archaeological Science», 37 (2010), p. 266.
48 The History site Historik Viden, Danmark sais: «The woman was more than 40 years old when she ended up in the bog.
She was an old woman by Iron Age standards of life expectancy»
(https://web.archive.org/web/20120724065701/http://natmus.dk/en/historisk-viden/danmark/oldtid-indtil-aar-
1050/aeldre-jernalder-500-fkr-400-ekr/kvinden-fra-huldremose/).
49 Ravn, Burial in bogs etc., p. 112 remarks: «The political leadership sometimes differentiates itself by employing different
burial customs. This is especially clear in the Roman Iron Age [...]. Perhaps the individuals who died natural deaths and
who are buried in the bog with a wealth of grave equipment (e.g. the Huldremose I-woman and the Corselitze
Hovedgaard-woman), should be regarded as part of the political leadership that, due to an unknown association with the
bog or its characteristics, has been buried at a different place than ‘normal’».
50 On the basis of other studies, Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods etc., p. 51, and Ajdhouse-Green., Bog bodies etc., p. 134,
gives credit to the hypothesis that this woman’s arm was cut when she was still alive. The site Historik Viden, Danmark
(https://web.archive.org/web/20120724065701/http://natmus.dk/en/historisk-viden/danmark/oldtid-indtil-aar-
1050/aeldre-jernalder-500-fkr-400-ekr/kvinden-fra-huldremose/) says: «A violent cut with a sharp tool had almost severed
her right upper arm before she died». But then, in a contradictory way, the same site asserts in another tab: «Medical
analysis has shown that the woman from Huldremose received a violent cut to the right upper arm. It was previously
believed that the cut to the arm was the cause of death and the woman died as a result of subsequent loss of blood.
However, later examinations have not confirmed this theory and it is also possible that the injury occurred much later,
perhaps during peat-digging in the bog» (https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-period-until-
1050-ad/the-early-iron-age/the-woman-from-huldremose/how-did-the-huldremose-woman-die/). H. G. Gill-Robinson,
The Iron Age bog bodies of the Archaeologisches Landesmuseum, Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig, Germany, PhD Thesis,
Department of Anthropology University of Manitoba, [Winnipeg], 2005, p. 66, for her part relates: «The right arm
presented a number of interesting anomalies. The lower portion of the arm had been amputated, perhaps twice: once
above and once below the elbow; the elbow area is missing […]. The lower part of the arm was excavated and remains
with the body. The right hand was damaged during peat cutting, partially severing the fingers. The cut was clean and
relatively recent, when compared to the cut marks at the amputation sites»). Another hypothesis can be formulated, I
think: part of Huldremose Woman’s right arm was removed immediately after her death which occurred for other reasons.
And this in order to prevent his spirit without peace from causing harm to the living. Regarding these special and
purposeful mutilations, see below in the text.
51 See Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods etc., p. 159, and Historik Viden, Danmark, https://en.natmus.dk/historical-
knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-period-until-1050-ad/the-early-iron-age/the-woman-from-huldremose/how-did-the-
huldremose-woman-die/. But Gill-Robinson, The Iron Age etc., p. 67, does not agree with this hypothesis: «Although
the right femur had an abnormal curvature that had previously been interpreted as a healed fracture, the radiography by
Brothwell et al. (1990a) demonstrated that the bone deformation was caused by the pressure of the peat».I have found on
the net the following comment: «Stranger and more interesting than mere signs of status is the clear evidence that a
significant proportion of bog bodies bore physical deformities that would have marked them out as “different” in life. Yde
girl suffered from pronounced curvature of the spine, and stood no more than 4 ft 6 [1.37m], small even for those times.
Kayhausen Boy had a malformed hip that would have made it impossible for him to walk without assistance […]. The
body known as Lindow III, found in northern England, possessed vestigial extra thumbs. Zweeloo Woman, a Roman-era
mummy found in Drenthe, an inland province of the Netherlands, had been a dwarf»,
https://mikedashhistory.com/2016/09/04/the-bodies-in-the-bogs/. See below in the text. We could suspect that the Tollund
Man was perhaps considered “different” (and so suitable for a shamanic “career”) because of his very short stature even
for a man of his time (1.61 m approx., although this may depend today on a shrinking of his build due to the special
environment in which his body was kept). About the possible meaning of physical impairments or oddities in the case of
the ancient bodies retrieved into the bogs, see here, in this text, the notes 118 and 128.

89
However, this woman could have been linked to witchcraft or to shamanic magic, this by virtue 1) of her
physical condition (the impairment to the right leg, if it was acquired some time ante mortem); 2) of her
possible death (hanging? strangulation?)52; 3) of the fact that her hair was cut and wound round her neck
(about this hair cutting, see below)53; 4) of the composition of her last meal; 5) of the fact that his body
was sunk in a swamp that at least in the early Middle Ages must have been well known as a place
dedicated to spirits and frequented by human seeresses54, and 6) of the characteristics of some clothes
and objects that were found with her. As for clothes and objects, in fact, Huldremose Woman wore a
woollen skirt and a scarf, as well as two skin capes, laid over her body. Underneath her left arm, a bird
bone fastener pinned the scarf in place. The inner cape had apparently had a long and hard life, since it
was well worn and patched in number of points. Analysis of Huldremose Woman’s leather cape and
woollen scarf and skirt show that the clothing had been made outside of Denmark. These results match
with those of other – chemical – analysis which have demonstrated that she had travelled long distances
before her death(see below, in our text and notes, for references).
It was found that, on the Huldremose Woman’s worn inner cape, «one of the patches did not cover a
hole. Instead it contained a fine worked bone comb, a thin blue hairband and a leather cord, all wrapped
in a bladder. Clearly the patch cannot be interpreted as a pocket, as it had to be cut open in order to get
the things out. The sewn-in objects have probably functioned as amulets»55. The woman had, moreover,
a ring on her finger and two amber beads around her neck56. The worn cape with its amulets recalls, even
better than the Tollund Man’s beret, a shamanic headdress: the woman could perhaps have afforded a
newer one, but the one she wore probably had a worth that went far beyond the pure economic value.
Amber beads were always considered energy catalysts, the psychic thread that connects individual
52 A hanging as a form of symbolic death. See the text above, and see Eliade, Shamanism etc., p. 380, where it is said that a
symbolic hanging of the candidate characterized many Germanic initiation rituals and not only those. Consider again the
case of the hanged Tollund Man.
53 We must remember that the Tollund Man too had shortly cropped hair, see Glob, The Bog People etc., p. 22.
54 Huldremose refers to the word hulder orhuldra. «A hulder (or huldra) is a seductive forest creature found in Scandinavian
folklore. Her name derives from a root meaning “covered” or “secret”. In Norwegian folklore, she is known as huldra
(“the [archetypal] hulder”, though folklore presupposes that there is an entire Hulder race and not just a single individual).
She is known as the skogsrå “forest spirit” or Tallemaja “pine tree Mary” in Swedish folklore, and ulda in Sámi folklore.
Her name suggests that she is originally the same being as the völva divine figure Huld and the German Holda. […]. A
multitude of places in Scandinavia are named after the Hulders, often places by legend associated with the presence of the
“hidden folk”. Here are some examples showing the wide distribution of Hulder-related toponyms between the northern
and southern reaches of Scandinavia, and the terms usage in different language groups’ toponyms»
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulder#cite_ref-4).
55 Historik Viden, Danmark, https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-period-until-1050-ad/the-
early-iron-age/the-woman-from-huldremose/the-huldremose-womans-clothes/. As for the comb, in later times (High
Middle Ages), in the Norse and Anglo-Saxon areas, it represented a talisman or of love or protective. In these more recent
cases (650-700ca AD) the object was engraved with inscriptions in runic alphabet, see, M. MacCleod - B. Mees, Runic
Amulets and Magic Objects, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2006, p. 23-24, 73 and 187. Another comb, the so-called Vimose
comb, found in Funen, Denmark, dates back to around 150–160 AD and contains one of the first examples of runic
inscriptions: it bears the word harja, “warrior” [a personal name?], see A. de Benoist, Runes and the Origins of Writing,
Arktos Media Ltd (Kindle Edition, pos. 247 and ff.). Did it be a lucky object to fix into the hair especially in battle, in order
to protect its owner, a warrior named Harja? Or the name Harja was just a note of ownership? M. Gimbutas, Il linguaggio
della Dea. Mito e culto della Dea madre nell’età neolitica, Ital. tr., Milano, Longanesi & C, 1990, p. 300, underlines the magical-
symbolic character of the brush/comb in the Neolithic Age and reports on how some European farmers still today use a
comb as protection against diseases and other calamities, and for curative purposes.
56 A ridge in Huldremose Woman’s finger may indicate it once bore a golden ring before it disintegrated in the bog, see
Historik Viden, Danmark, https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-period-until-1050-ad/the-early-
iron-age/the-woman-from-huldremose/the-huldremose-womans-clothes/. Chiesa Isnardi,I miti nordici etc., p. 658-659, says
that the golden ring represents a dominion over time and space, over spirit and matter: matter intended as the fruit of
divine wisdom uncontaminated by greed. The ring makes a pact between man and god, or between man and man with
the divinity as a witness: it becomes a visible sign of a consecrated alliance. The possession of a ring guarantees divine
powers, but it can lead to ruin if one turns it to the service of greed.

90
energy to cosmic energy and the individual soul to the universal soul. In the fourth chapter of the Saga of
Erik the Red, the dress and ornaments of Þorbjorg, a sorceress, are so described:
…she was dressed in such wise that she had a blue mantle over her, with strings for the neck,
and it was inlaid with gems quite down to the skirt.On her neck she had glass beads [Italics mine].
On her head she had a black hood of lambskin, lined with ermine. A staff she had in her hand,
with a knob thereon; it was ornamented with brass, and inlaid with gems round about the knob.
Around her she wore a girdle of soft hair, and therein was a large skin-bag, in which she kept
the talismans needful to her in her wisdom. She wore hairy calf-skin shoes on her feet, with
long and strong-looking thongs to them, and great knobs of latten at the ends. On her hands
she had gloves of ermine-skin, and they were white and hairy within57.
When the Romans introduced glass to northern Europe, it received the same name as amber (Germanic
Latin glesum), because glass was a substance that possessed, like amber, the power to separate from
contact but not from sight: a power linked to the concept of the Otherworld58. Another clue which could
indicate that the Huldremose Woman was a person considered endowed with supernatural powers is
perhaps the fact that her last meal had been a particular kind of porridge:
The final meal was determined to be composed of, “...a mixture of approximately 3 parts rye
grain (possibly with some wheat) to 1 part corn spurrey seed” […]. There was also a large
amount of weed seeds, as seen with Grauballe Man and Tollund Man. Holden [T. G. Holden,
Food remains from the gut of the Huldremose bog body, in «Journal of Danish Archaeology» 13,
(1999), p. 52] also reports that the grain combination is similar to the composition of a dry, coarse
bread was eaten by impoverished people in the Shetlands during the 19th century; perhaps the
weeds were used to stretch plant resources in times of food shortage59.
According to the Historik Viden Danmark site too, Huldremose Woman’s last meal consisted of coarsely
ground rye with a large number of seeds from the weed spurrey. Although corn spurrey is now
considered a weed, and although in excessive quantities it can be harmful to grazing animals due to its
high oxalate content, in prehistoric times it was cultivated by the populations of Northern Europe from
Northern Germany to Finland as a very nutritious edible plant, and as a plant fodder (it was believed
that it increased milk production). In more modern times its cultivation has been abandoned because the
57 J. Sephton, Eirik the Red’s Saga: A Translation, Liverpool, Marples,1880, p. 12-13.
58 See for that Chiesa Isnardi, I miti nordici, p. 72 and 517. M. Hayeur Smith - K. P. Smith - K. M. Frei, ‘Tangled up in Blue’: The
Death, Dress and Identity of an Early Viking-Age Female Settler from Ketilsstaðir, Iceland, in «Medieval Archaeology», 63:1 (2019),
writing about beads of various materials and sizes found in the grave of an Icelandic Viking woman, and remarking that the
largest of them is made of amber, say (p. 104): «Although they are more common in the graves of women than men, beads
are found across Iceland in burial contexts suggestive of virtually every social or economic rank represented by other offerings
indicating wealth or status. There may be as few as one bead and nothing more, or full, multi-coloured necklaces like the one
from Ketilsstaðir. In contrast, beads are extremely rare in Norwegian burials. The colours represented in this woman’s
necklace may have been individually important, but perhaps its multi-coloured appearance was more stylistically or
symbolically significant: all known women’s necklaces from Icelandic Viking-Age burials combine beads of varying shapes,
colours and styles rather than emphasising homogeneity or single colour families. Yet, the presence of beads made from
materials such as jet, lignite, and amber may also reflect beliefs that specific beads and stones could carry amuletic properties.
Amber references Freyja’s famous necklace, the Brisingamen, described in some instances as being made of golden amber or
from gold itself. Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda states that Freyja was associated with all beautiful things such as precious
jewellery, and that the tears she wept for her lost husband were gold. The presence of amber, and perhaps also the gilded
beads, may therefore provide significant links between the Ketilsstaðir woman’s adornment and attributes of Freyja, goddess
of love, fertility, women’s magic and death».
59 Gill-Robinson, The Iron Age etc., p. 68. For a similar “recipe” see above, note 30. It could be interesting to remark that
spurrey leaves may contain compounds called oxalates, which can be toxic at certain doses
(http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/WEEDS/corn_spurry.html).

91
collection of its very small seeds makes it less profitable than other plants60. I wonder if the use of edible
plants that apparently did not stand out for particular magical values but for their nutritional power
cannot be seen, in a ritual meal of such an epoch, as an attempt to propitiate the crops and income of beef
cattle and milk. If so, we could assume that the Huldremose Woman was required to interrogate the
spirits about a famine or a livestock death that had affected the community (see here note 41). But a large
amount of weed spurrey could have another explanation: some people is particularly sensible to the
oxalate and, if you are so,
Besides experiencing discomfort in your gut, you could also develop neurological symptoms.
Those include brain fog, mood swings, constant confusion, poor memory, anxiety, aggressive
behavior, or nervousness. Asthma or shortness of breath are also likely. Skin problems, such as
eczema, psoriasis, or skin rashes are also side effects of leaky gut. Chronic muscle pain,
hormonal imbalances, joint pain, or fatigue are also very commonly experienced when leaky
gut is developed61.
Although we have no evidence that the Huldremose Woman had a particular sensitivity to oxalate, we
also have no evidence to the contrary, and so it may be that she “worked” with the combined neurological
action of food high in oxalate, of other drugs, and of a (badly?) controlled strangulation. So, in her case
too, one day, near the swamp of Huldremose, the situation could have tragically gone out of hand to her
assistants and herself. Dr. Keith Kantor states:
I am often asked if high oxalates affect substance abuse, since that is one of my specialties. The
answer is yes. Since high oxalates are found in the urine of substance abuse patients we know
this is true. Since we know high oxalates cause leaky gut and mineral deficiencies and cause
serotonin to work poorly it is easy to see why. High oxalates affect the insulin mechanism by
causing the above problems. Two things can happen when the insulin mechanism is affected.
It can cause urges for sugar and simply carbohydrates or cause the cells to release the sugar
they are holding. In both cases this stimulates the opiate receptors which then release chemicals
to cause a dopamine response, just like drugs or alcohol. This makes it harder to stop taking the
abused substance and raises the relapse rate drastically62.
Concerning a possible use of other drugs, Miranda and Sthephen Aldhouse-Green say that the
Huldremose Woman’s last meal contained some infected barley63. Indeed, the bibliographic reference
they provide to support this claim would appear incorrect64. Anyway, barley infected with Ustilago hordei
spores (covered smut of barley) would seem to produce a hallucinogenic substance, which has been
found, together with the ergot, in the stomach of Grauballe Man too65. I repeat: the bibliographical
reference to the Huldremose Woman’s use of infected barley I dispose of is uncertain, but in the event
that she really consumed it, this would strengthen the hypothesis of a ritual use of drugs. And the
(relative) frequency with which potential drugs are found inside the digestive system of men and women
immersed in bogs would seem to exclude – or make it unlikely – the hypothesis of fortuitous
contamination. Animal hair and remains of animal tissue were found in Huldremose Woman’s stomach,
60 See http://www.luontoportti.com/suomi/en/kukkakasvit/corn-spurrey.
61 See M. & J. Lam, Oxalate Sensitivity and AFS https://www.drlamcoaching.com/blog/oxalate-sensitivity-and-afs/.
62 N.A.M.E.D., https://namedprogram.com/elimination-of-oxalates-for-post-traumatic-stress-disorder/.
63 M. & S. Aldhouse Green, The Quest for the Shaman etc., p. 113.
64 That is given as G. Hillman, Plant Foods in Ancient Diet: The Archaelogical Role of Palaeofeces in General and Lindow’s Man’s
Gut Contents in Particular, in Lindow Man: The body in the Bog, I. M. Stead - J. B. Bourke - D. Brotwell (eds.), London, British
Museum Publications, 1986, p. 99-115.
65 If I understand correctly R. G Scaife, Pollen in Human Palaeofaeces; and a Preliminary Investigation of the Stomach and Gut
Contents of Lindow Man, in Lindow Man: The body etc., p. 133.

92
indicating that meat could have also been part of the meal66. However, the traces of animal hair and
tissues present in the digestive system of the woman would not seem to be so many, and for a similar
case, that of Grauballe Man, Glob speculates that animal hair and tissues had somehow accidentally
included in the meal67.
Here beside we can see a modern reconstruction
of the main clothing items worn by the
Huldremose Woman: the dress consists of a long
blue-coloured suit and a large red shawl68.
Karin Margarita Frei has said: «At first we
thought this must be a witch – now we think
she’s a very fine lady with expensive jewelry and
expensive clothes and underwear»69. There is no
doubt that the Huldremose Woman was a very
wealthy and elegant woman, but surely this does
not conflict with the hypothesis previously
formulated by Margarita Frei herself and her
colleagues, that she was also a witch.
Huldremose Woman’s clothes,
from
https://en.natmus.dk/historical-
knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-
period-until-1050-ad/the-early-
iron-age/the-woman-from-
huldremose/the-huldremose-
womans-clothes/
Moreover, we have seen that Þorbjorg, the witch of Erik the Red’s Saga, also dressed in a rather similar
way, and no doubt, in terms of elegance, she too cut quite a figure. We read above that Þorbjorg wore «a
blue mantle over her» (as well as a hood and other clothing parts in lambskin and fur). Chiesa Isnardi
explains that, for the Norse, the red represents the sudden and heady manifestation of a previously
contained and dominated force70. The symbolic analogy red = blood is confirmed where she speaks about
a red robe defined, in an ancient saga, a “sacrificial garment” (Vatnsdœla Saga, 26). Red as the colour of
magic appears instead in the Goðrúnarkviða (II, 22). The blue, for its part, represented the passage from
real to imaginary. The blue cloak allows man to enter another dimension and makes him invisible,
separated from the living and manifest forces of nature: for this reason, the blue cloak or cape are magical
objects, which place the wearer in an inaccessible dimension. A symbolism of blue equivalent to
darkness, and therefore to the forces of evil, is found in the Laxdœla saga (chapter 76), where it is a matter
of a witch’s tomb: there, blue bones were found together with a pin and a magic wand71. At this regard,
66 Historik Viden, Danmark, https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-period-until-1050-ad/the-
early-iron-age/the-woman-from-huldremose/the-last-meal-of-the-woman-from-huldremose/
67 See P.V. Glob, The Bog People. Iron-Age Man Preserved, London, Paladin, 1971, p. 43.
68 Dyed clothing was, at the epoch, a sign of wealth. For Huldremose Woman clothes, see Glob, The Bog People etc., p. 95-
96, but specially see U. Mannering, Iconic Costumes: Scandinavian Late Iron Age Costume Iconography (Ancient Textiles), Oxford
– Haverton (PA), Oxbow Books, 2017, Kindle Edition, pos. 3292 et ss.: «The clothing consisted of two skin cloaks, a woven
checked skirt with a leather string gathering the waist and a rectangular scarf that was wrapped around the neck […]. A
recent examination of this find has revealed that the woman also wore an undergarment made of linen beneath the skirt,
although the shape of this is not known». U. Mannering, Textile and Clothing Traditions in Early Iron Age Denmark, in
«Origini», 40 (2017), p. 121, says: «Most textiles were dyed with plants giving yellow and green colours while blue and
especially red colours are less frequently occurring». This can depend on two causes: the first, that the blue and, especially,
the red colours were difficult to obtain and fix to the fabric, and therefore only a few people could afford them; the other,
that they were colours reserved for a particular category of people, those that had to do with magic and spirits. It seems
to me that the one of these causes does not exclude the other.
69 See C. Dell’Amore, Who Were the Ancient Bog etc.
70 Chiesa Isnardi, I miti nordici, etc., p. 470 and 492.
71 About all this, see Id., p. 471. In Iceland, M. Hayeur Smith - K. P. Smith – K. M. Frei, ‘Tangled up in Blue’ etc., have
thoroughly examined the tomb and the remains of a woman of Viking age. These are their conclusions (p. 121): «In
choosing items to display with her body, we note that her community’s choices were not haphazard. Blue was used to dye
key elements of her clothing, she had five blue beads, and the stone placed in or near her hands was chalcedony of an
unusual light-blue colour. Blue is a common colour in Viking-Age burials. Penelope Walton Rogers identified textiles dyed
deep blue with indigo or woad in Norwegian and Danish Viking-Age cemeteries. In Iceland, too, blue is a colour
commonly associated with death and burial. Blue is a colour mentioned frequently in saga literature, and the philologist

93
most interestingly, on the Huldremose Woman’s breast lay right a stick of willow. This remembers of the
later Norse use of seiðr [magic] staffs.
The question as to exactly how seiδr staffs were used within a seiδr ritual is a difficult one as we simply
do not know. However, seiδr staffs it seems from the sources were in the main quite large and ornately
fitted with brass set in gemstones.
ok hvn hafdi staf i hendi ok var a knappr hann var bvinn md mersingv ok settr steinum ofan vm knapping.
And she had a staff in her hand with a knob on the top, adorned with brass set.
No man shall have in his house staff or altar, device for sorcery or sacrificial offering or whatever
relates to heathen practice.
Eiδsivaþingslov 1:24 in NGL 1.38
1) Stafrs: an attribute of the vǫlva [seer, sibyl: in Old Norse, vǫlva means “bearer of the wand” or
“bearer of the magic stick”: the note is mine] used in the course of summoning varδlokkur spirits
as well as for divination.
2) Seiδrstafrs, attributed to a practising vǫlva but usually very ornate and large. There exist three
references in the sagas to the stafrs wielded by the vǫlur [sorcerer] and the spækonna [prophesy
woman]. The most detailed of these occurs in Eiriks saga rauδa [Erik the Red’s Saga].
3) Járnstafr… belonging to spirit beings of the dreamtime and giants.
4) Stafsprota… used by spákonas in facial attacks on an enemy or to rob them of their memory and
instil confusion.
5) Vǫlr… attributed to a practising vǫlur and has phallic connotations.
6) Gandr/Gǫndul…. working of sexual magic, summoning gandir spirits for aid in clairvoyance or
prophesy as well as night riding to inflict harm on another
7) Gambanteinn or gamban twig…. was a slender wooden pole or staff possibly with fuþark [runic
alphabet] runes carved on it (twig of potency, twig of power) made from a freshly cut sapling is
alleged to possess he power to drive a person to insanity, causes sexual submission followed by
uncontrollable lust. Three runes are used here causing burning pains to affect the genitals causing
sexual itch and irresistible desire. The runes are translated as Extreme Lust, Burning [with genital
connotations: author’s note] and Unbearable sexual need. Ref: Skirnismal
8)Tamsvǫndr or taming wand was a wand described in theSkirsnismal. The tamsvǫndr is described
thus as capable of inducing the bearer’s sexual will and prowess domination over its female
victim who has no say or choice to resist her sexual partner: Tamsvendi ek þik drep / en ek þik temia
mun, / mær, at minom munom. “With a tamng wand I touch you / for I will make you tame, / girl, to my
wishes72.
But let we come back to the particular Huldremose Woman’s willow stick or wand. The willow or wicker
is the tree of spells. It was sacred in Greece to Hecate, Hera, Circe and Persephone, all mortuary aspects
of the pre-Indo-European Triple Goddess, and was highly revered by witches. Culpeper, in his Complete
Kirsten Wolf has argued that blue and black semantically overlapped, with the termblár used to refer to a range of colours
from the black of ravens to a range of lighter and darker blues. In the Norse worldview these were not only the colour of
ravens, but of Hel, the goddess of the realms of the dead, and of Oðin, not only king of the gods but also a master of death.
In the Laxdaela Saga, among others, blue is worn by those intent on killing, and wearing a blár headdress was an expression
of grief. While cloth may have been dyed blue simply because woad grows well across Scandinavia and northern Europe,
Walton Rogers suggests that blue may have been a colour reserved for burial and death, and the differential placement of
blue clothes in women’s burials, relative to men’s, supports this conclusion». If I am allowed to make an addition, blue, as
well as the colour of burial and death (in the Gylfaginning, a part of the Prose Edda, Hel, the Loki’s daughter and the infernal
divinity, is described as half blue and half flesh-coloured), could also be the colour worn by those who had to deal
professionally with the powers of the Underworld. Something like black from late European Middle Ages onwards: black
was the colour of mourning, of funerals, but also of the of priestly clothes (the priests, those who celebrate funerals and
are “dead” to the world) and even of black masses and diabolical rituals.
72 Quoted from https://rigsvenson.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/staffs-of-sorcery/

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Herbal, wrote that «The Moon owns it»73. The witch’s broom still today, in the English countryside, is
made of an ash stick, sprigs of birch and wicker wickers: the ash as a talisman against drowning, the
birch because by chasing away evil spirits some remain entangled in the broom, the wicker in honour of
Hecate. Druidic human sacrifices were offered with the full moon in wicker baskets; the funeral flints
were in the shape of a willow leaf. The willow (heliké in Greek) gave its name to Helicon, the home of the
Nine Muses, orgiastic priestesses of the Moon Goddess. Its leaves and bark contain salicylic acid and
were known as remedy for rheumatic cramps, which were once believed to be witchcraft. Finally, still in
modern times the sieve sailed to their Sabbaths74.Given the clues that corroborate the hypothesis that the
Huldremose Woman was a sorceress, and given that probably she did not suffer intentional violence
before she died, these questions seem legitimate: «Perhaps did she die (as maybe the Tollund Man, and
the Grauballe Man) during a risky magic or shamanic ritual? Did she die from poisoning, e.g. from an
excessive ingestion of infected barley? Was she indigenous or, as new studies show, she travelled and
was native of another region?»75. In any case, people, as much as it respected her, must also have been
afraid:
The left forearm, which crosses over the chest, was distorted and flattened. It was suggested that
the deformity of the left arm may have been due to a tight strap that held the arm in position
while the bone demineralized post-mortem (Brothwell et al. 1990a [Brothwell DR, Liversage D,
Gottlieb B. Radiographic and forensic aspects of the female Huldremose body, «Journal of Danish
Archaeology», 9 (1990) p. 157-178]). [...] During the re-examination, fine hair stubble was
observed over most of the scalp. Although it was possible that the hair had been lost during
excavation and cleaning, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) imaging of the hair showed that
it had been cut close to the scalp with a sharp edge76.
In particular, the close-to-the scalp cropping of her hair (see later in our text) would seem to demonstrate
a fear that the restless soul of the woman could somehow cause harm to the living77.
73 N. Culpeper, Culpeper’s complete herbal: consisting of a comprehensive description of nearly all herbs with their medicinal
properties and directions for compounding the medicines extracted from them, London – New York – Toronto – Cape Town –
Sydney, W. Foulsham & Co., 1880, p. 390.
74 About all this see R. Graves,La Dea Bianca. Grammatica storica del mito poetico, Ital. transl. Milano, Adelphi, 1992, pp. 198-200.
75 M. Frei – M. Gleba – I. Skals – H. Lyngstrøm, The Huldremose Iron Age textiles, Denmark: an attempt to define their provenance
applying the strontium isotope system, in «Journal of Archaeological Science», 36 (2009), p. 1970, say: « Our study implies that
the Huldremose Woman wore some kind of undergarment that was manufactured from plant fibres with an origin from
Precambrian terrains, possibly compatible with the most radiogenic Sr isotope ratios of wool woven into the Huldremose
II garment, and therefore of a non-local provenance. The existence of this undergarment was previously not known. In
contrast, the wool thread from the Huldremose Woman’s scarf shows a local origin. The Huldremose Woman was thus
wearing garments of both non-local and local provenance. So, either the plant fibre ‘‘undergarment’’ was a traded object
or she had been abroad and brought the raw material/or undergarment with her to Denmark. There is also the possibility
that the Huldremose Woman herself emigrated from outside Denmark as the skin analysis seems to show, but further
analyses are needed in this field in order to verify her true origin.». Humans absorb strontium through food and water,
and it’s especially prevalent in our teeth and bones – though many bog bodies are found without teeth and bones because
of the acidic conditions: «“You sacrifice something that is meaningful and has a lot of value. So maybe people who
travelled had a lot of value”, Frei told National Geographic at the Euroscience Open Forum in Copenhagen in June
[2014].». But I suspect that the Huldremose Woman was a sorceress or a shamaness so famous that she was required, for
her performances, even by communities far from the one where she was born and resided. Or, alternatively, she had to
migrate from her homeland for some unknown reason. This would perhaps explain also why the community where she
died (which could not know her well and consequently could not be sure of her soul’s reactions after her death), took
many precautions regarding her corpse, such as sinking her into the bog, immobilizing her left arm and shaving part of
her hair, if not even severing her right forearm: see the text, above.
76 Gill-Robinson, The Iron Age etc., p. 66 and 67-68.
77 Chiesa Isnardi, I miti nordici etc., p. 362, relates that in the Eyrbyggja Saga (chapter 53) a witch named Þorgunna returned
from death to haunt men in the form of a seal. Id, p. 71, tells that in Norse medieval sources the spirits of the deceased
seers are said to go to Hel, the Underworld located in the north: a cold, humid and rainy place from which they can be

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1.1.5 The Elling Woman
Just 60 meters from the point where the Tollund Man will be found in 1950, in 1938 a Danish peasant
discovered the corpse of a woman. She was placed on her left side with her head facing north and her
feet pointing south78. Analysis with forensic techniques and with radiocarbon 14, performed many years
later, established that the corpse had belonged to a young woman of 25-30 years of age, who lived in the
3rd century BC. Like the Tollund Man, the woman (later called Elling Woman) had died by hanging:
«There was no evidence ofintra-vitam skeletal trauma. A deep groove was noted around the neck, which
was suggestive of hanging as a cause of death. There were no other signs of violence»79. Maybe, her body,
like Tollund Man’s, was not jerked when it was hanged, because, even if the corpse is very poorly
preserved, the autopsy cited by Gill-Robinson would seem not to mention evident damages to the
cervical vertebrae. Instead, Gill-Robinson says: «The facial area had been completely destroyed», but
from her information I am not able to know if this destruction is due to an immediately post mortem
human action or to the weight of the materials accumulated in the course of the centuries over the body
sunk in the swamp80. If this facial mutilation was done deliberately and shortly before her burial in the
bog (that was likely the Borremose Woman’s case, her very much more ancient peer, of 770 BC ca), such
a disfigurement could have been a sort of damnatio memoriae, with a degradation and a denial of
identity.81. But, indeed, I believe that any eventual violence against the face of the Elling Woman, as in
the case of the Borremose Woman’s, was the expression of the desire to protect the community which
buried her from any harmful acts performed by a spirit wandering without peace82. After all, the face,
recalled with magic. Witches were especially dangerous because they knew the art of going to and from Hel already before
their death. Hel, daughter of Loki and goddess of the Underworld, was the goddess of witches: «Related early Germanic
terms and concepts include Proto-Germanic *xalja-rūnō (n), a feminine compound noun, and *xalja-wītjan, a neutral
compound noun. This form is reconstructed from the Latinized Gothic plural noun *haliurunnae (attested by Jordanes;
according to philologist Vladimir Orel, meaning ‘witches’), Old English helle-rúne (‘sorceress, necromancer’, according to
Orel), and Old High German helli-rūna ‘magic’. The compound is composed of two elements: *xaljō (*haljō) and *rūnō, the
Proto-Germanic precursor to Modern Englishrune. The second element in the Gothic haliurunnae may however instead be
an agent noun from the verb rinnan (“to run, go”), which would make its literal meaning “one who travels to the
netherworld”.)
Proto-Germanic *xalja-wītjan (or *halja-wītjan) is reconstructed from Old Norse hel-víti ‘hell’, Old English helle-wíte ‘hell-
torment, hell’, Old Saxon helli-wīti ‘hell’, and the Middle High German feminine noun helle-wīze. The compound is a
compound of *xaljō [...] and *wītjan (reconstructed from forms such as Old English witt ‘right mind, wits’, Old Saxon gewit
‘understanding’, and Gothic un-witi ‘foolishness, understanding’)», https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hel_(being). M.
Aldhouse-Green, Crowning Glories: Languages of Hair in Later Prehistoric Europe, in «Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society»,
70, 2004, p. 302, suspects that an at least symbolic (if not actual) garrotte inflicted to the Huldremose Woman with her own
hair could signify an «abnegation of external responsibility, and with the presentation of an act of seeming self-
destruction». As far as I know, the practice of tying a strand of dead woman’s hair around her neck itself is a perhaps
unique practice. I believe that the Huldremose Woman’s death occurred by accident (another magical operation that ended
badly). And the lock of hair tied around her neck was not only an additional exorcism (the sorceress was “bound by
herself”), but it had also a symbolic meaning, that is, a kind of “memento” for the spirit of the dead woman: those who
sank the woman’s body into the bog wanted perhaps to remind her in this particular way, and for their greater safety, that
they had no responsibility in her death, and that she had died by her own mistake, self-strangling herself, out of pure
misfortune.
78 https://web.archive.org/web/20120329203103/http://www.tollundman.dk/ellingkvinden.asp
79 Gill-Robinson, The Iron Age etc., p. 64.
80 Ibid.
81 See Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods etc., p. 53.
82 In some cases, the destruction of the face seems to be accompanied by scalping or shaving of at least part of the head
(about shaving of a part of the head see below, in this text). Wrapped in a woollen garment,the Borremose III Woman
«was a plump woman laid face downward with her head to the east, with one leg drawn up to her waist. Although her
hair was of medium length, the back of her head had been scalped and her face was crushed, probably by a heavy blow.
Her body was laid on a bed of tiny white cottongrass flowers which the marsh ecology indicates were probably picked
from another part of the bog», M. Parker Pearson, The Archaeology etc., p. 68. Gill-Robinson, The Iron Age etc., p. 64-65, for
her part, communicates some different details: «The individual appeared to have been overweight at the time of her death.

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like the whole head or just the hair, was considered the seat of an individual’s personality, will and life
force. Treating about the mutilation and cutting off of Apsyrtus’ extremities performed by Jason in the
fourth book of Apollonius’ Argonautica, Reinhart Ceulemans says:
[Jason] mutilates the deceased in order to deprive him of the possibility of revenge. At the basis
of this ritual lies the Greeks’ fundamental belief that a dead person arrives in the underworld in
exactly the same condition as on the moment of his death. The primitive idea that the person
comes back in his full corporality also seems to play a part. According to this view, when one
mutilates the body the deceased will be unable to retaliate. In that way, the mutilation is a security
measure against the ‘living corpse’ that returns to haunt and punish the murderer. The mutilation
of the body is assumed to effect a corresponding mutilation of the ψυχή so that the ghost,
deprived of his extremities, would be powerless to take vengeance on the murderer83.
Here Ceulemans evidently refers to a very archaic costume, almost forgotten in the time of the classical
Greece, and very close to that Indo-European cultural root that may have generated analogous macabre
and apparently cruel behaviours among the peoples of Northern Europe during the Iron Age and
before84. I do not believe the Elling Woman was killed deliberately: perhaps, she was another victim of a
The body was dated to 770 BC + 100 years. […] When living stature was calculated on the basis of the skeletal material, a
height of 143 cm was calculated; it is unlikely that the figure was accurate. […]. The hair was red from the acidic
environment of the peat and still attached to the scalp. There was no evidence for scalping and no defense wounds to the
hands or lower arms. […] Three pieces of tissue that had been selected for analysis […], but never examined, were
identified as brain tissue, an ear and a collapsed eye with eyelids […]. There was no evidence of haemorrhage in either the
eye or the ear tissue samples; the severe cranial damage was deemed to be post-mortem. Furthermore, given the poor
preservation of the abdominal region, it was suggested that the body may not have been immersed in the peat for some
time after death, allowing decomposition to begin». Assuming that the description provided by Parker Pearson is correct,
and that the woman was in fact scalped and received a devastating blow on the post mortem face, could this be the sign
that she was considered particularly dangerous? Even the flower bed on which her body was laid is an interesting and not
so common detail (as far as I know: for now I have only found news about the unfortunate Windeby Boy, see the chapter
dedicated to him below: flowers were strewn around his body, see M. & S. Aldhouse-Green, The Quest etc., p. 114). The
colour of the perianths of cottongrass perhaps recalls this plant to the Norse symbolism of white, which is extremely rich
and varied: hvítr, ‘white’, is the name given to the sacrificial victims (and in fact the Borremose Woman might have been
sacrificed); but it is also very much the symbol of those who are about to undergo a change of condition that will lead them
to a higher level of life, as that of those who perform the initiatory work from the outside. White is a supernatural colour
that moves away from everyday life: in this it is parallel to blue, which likewise detaches people from the real world (see
here the text of the paragraph dedicated to the Huldremose Woman). The frequent connection of these colours in Norse
texts is not accidental. Glob, The Bog People etc., p. 72, after recalling the discovery of Søgaard Fen, also quotes some Nordic
fairy tales in which magical properties are attributed to cottongrass, such as that of countering the evil spell that had
transformed the children of a king into wild swans. White also has a nefarious connotation: it is the colour of death and of
spirits, colourless because they are denied to the light (see Chiesa Isnardi,I miti nordici etc., p. 468 and 470). In the Shetland
islands, colonized by the Vikings, the bog cotton, or ‘cotten sedges’ - called lukki-minnie’s oo – is said to be very unlucky to
pick and bring indoors (even if babies, on the Scottish mainland, were kept dry from their urine with this “cotton”),
http://www.plant-lore.com/cottongrass/. On a bed of cottongrass also lay the corpse of a 30 / 35 years old man found, also
in Denmark (Søgaard Fen), in 1942. The corpse wore a cap, three leather capes and leather sandals (clothing that we have
already met several times, and which might have, in some cases, particular meanings). Cottongrass blooms from
midsummer until September. During this period, it could be collected to make mattresses and pillows, according to a long-
lasting custom in the Nordic countries. It is not necessary, therefore, that the cottongrass used to make a carpet in order to
receive the dead on the bottom of the marsh must have been just picked, and that the corpses had therefore been sunk
during the summer, the flowering season.
83 R. Ceulemans,Ritual mutilation in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. A contextual analysis of IV, 477-479 in search of the motive
of the µασχαλισµός, in «Kernos», 20 (2007), 12, put online on 24 May 2011, consulted on 02 May 2020,
http://journals.openedition.org/kernos/173; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/kernos.173. Glob, The Bog People etc., p. 105,
alludes to the mutilations of many bog bodies; and Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods etc., p. 50-55 and passim, reports
several concrete cases.
84 However, the issue of the disfigurement of corpses in archaic Greece (but also, for example, in medieval Wales) and of
his reason, had been treated long time before Ceulemans’s work by J. G. Frazer, The Fear Of The Dead In Primitive Religion,

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very dangerous shamanic ritual. But the people who formed her community could still have had reason
to fear her as a sorceress or a shamaness: the excess of psychic energy that these individuals possessed,
even if controlled and well-directed by them when they were in life, could become dangerous after their
death85. Elling Woman’s corpse had been carefully laid on its side, in a pit dug into the swamp. Like the
Huldremose Woman, she kept most of her (well made) clothes: a sheepskin cloak and cowhide that had
been spread under her legs86. The cloak
… had been made by using a very fine thread just like the one used for the Tollund Man’s cap. In a
few places it had been repaired with a thick leather string – probably a repair that had been done in
the village. The delicate stitches […] can only be done by someone who had received special training.
The neck band of the cloak was very well-preserved, and it was possible to tell that it had had some
kind of clasp or fastening. Based on many other finds we know that this kind of cloak was the most
common item of clothing during the early Iron age. It was used by both men and women. They would
often wear two on top of each other – the one next to the skin would have the fur side turned inwards
whereas the other one would have the fur side turned outwards. Thus, the two cloaks would keep
the person both warm and dry when it rained87.
As the Tollund Man, she wore a belt around her waist: a woven belt. No internal organs had survived,
so it was impossible to determine what was her last meal and a possible presence of drugs88. Her
preserved hair shows that they were neither shaved nor ripped off. Indeed, they are still today styled in
a 90 cm long braid, which was tied into an elaborate knot89. Various details are to be considered: her
burial in the swamp (instead of a normal cremation or a burial in the ground); the respect that was
brought to her corpse, despite the disfigurement of her face; the presence of the belt, and of the cloak,
London, MacMillian & Co, 1932-1934 (2 vols.),vol. 2, p 81-83. Among the information Frazer that provides there is one that
relates to a miniature of the Ambrosian Iliad in which Ulysses holds Dolon’s head in his hand, whose feet and hands have
also been removed. The Ambrosian Iliad (Ilias Picta, signature F. 205 Inf.) is what remains of a manuscript that contained
the entire Iliad, dating back to around the year 500 and today unanimously believed to have been made in Alexandria,
after this attribution had been supported by authoritative scholars. In the XII century the miniatures were cut out and
pasted on a paper code of Calabrian-Sicilian origin containing material from the Homeric corpus. The Trojan Dolon,
captured by Ulysses and Diomedes, was beheaded by Diomedes after he had vainly begged to spare him: the Trojan’s
severed head did not immediately exhaust the vital functions, but rolled in the dust while still talking. That a severed head
rolls away while still speaking, it seems almost a topos of the Homeric literature (see here the note 124), linked to a custom
held towards people dangerous for their magical virtues: Dolon, whose name in Greek means ‘deception’, wears a wolf
skin and a marten hat, both considered synonymous of cunning mixed with fraudulence, and, consequently, with
deception. But the disguise and the identification with an animal is typical of shamans. And Dolon is exceptional also
because he is a descendant of Hercules, the half-god. Frazer seems to connect the fear of the return of the murdered in the
form of revenants with that of the vampires, who are also considered, in many places of Europe, as spirits without peace.
Until a fairly recent time, even to the corpses of suspected vampires people cut the head, placing that part of the body
between the legs of the corpses themselves.
85 According to the thesis that guides the entire work of Frazer,The Fear of the Dead etc., “primitive” thought always looked
with anguish on the spirits of the dead: even those who had been good and friendly with everyone in life could
considerably worsen their disposition once they die. Hence the need to direct them to the Otherworld and to ensure that
they remained there; or, in any case, to take precautions so that they do not wander on earth with bad intentions.
86 It is noteworthy that this corpse, as the Windeby Boy’s and the Haraldskaer Woman’s, was entrusted naked to the
swamp, and that its clothes were placed under its legs, while the Huldremose Woman was fully dressed. It may be that
the Elling Woman was in fact naked or wore, at the time of her death, only clothes made of vegetable fibres that have now
dissolved. But if this depended on different ways in which the two shamanesses officiated their rites, it is not known at
the moment.
87 https://web.archive.org/web/20120329203103/http://www.tollundman.dk/ellingkvinden.asp
88 See Gill-Robinson,The Iron Age etc., p. 64. This could mean that the Elling Woman died in a hot season, when the bodies in
the swamps are less well preserved and when people dressed in cooler clothes of vegetable fibres, which dissolve more easily
in bogs. Id. p. 65, remembers about that: «given the poor preservation of the abdominal region, it was suggested that the body
may not have been immersed in the peat for some time after death, allowing decomposition to begin».
89 See Gill-Robinson, The Iron Age etc., p. 64.

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which (even if worn) indicated, for its accurate workmanship, a high social status90; her death by hanging.
All this would be compatible with the hypothesis that the woman was, like her neighbour, the Tollund
Man, a shamaness who probably died from a “professional accident”, from ritual practices (hanging? a
combined action of drugs and hanging?) pushed too far and gone out of control. However, for us her
case is, if possible, even less clear, given the current conditions of her body.
1.2 Submerged bodies
As for mergo, the other verb employed by Tacitus in the paragraph 12 of Germania, actually means ‘to
drown someone’, but also ‘to dip him’, ‘to do him sink’. It is true that in later times, during the Middle
Ages, the so called “Drowing pits” came into legal use in Scotland: it was enacted at the parliament
assembled in Forfar in 1057 by king Malcolm Canmore that every baron should sink a well or pit, for the
drowning of criminal females, (while a gibbet being used for males). Sometimes, these pits were in
proximity of swamps and fens. About this custom, we can quote this hypothesis:
It is not clear why men were more likely to be hanged and women drowned in a fen, river, pit,
or murder hole. However, it may relate to ideas of decency or because it was a less violent
death91. In Norse law the reason was that men were sent to Wodan, and women were given to
Ran (a sea goddess) or Hel. In Norse tradition the pit and gallows stood on the west of the moot-
places or the prince’s hall ready for use92.
Moreover, we are informed that, until in modern times, incestuous people were buried alive in bogs in
Hebrides islands, following laws attributed to the ancient Viking legal custom93.
90 A cloak, especially if blue or dark, was a magical object, if worn by certain people. It allowed them a journey of
knowledge into the afterlife (see Chiesa Isnardi,I miti nordici etc., p. 611-612). So intimate was the link between the shaman
and a certain item of clothing (for the beret, see here note 28 and text; for the cloak, see here above, the chapter on the
Huldremose Woman) that he could not throw it away without risk, because his magic power was concentrated in it. For
this reason, probably, and not because she could not afford another one, the Elling Woman (a shamaness?) did not get rid
of it, although that was old and worn.
91 Regarding the death penalty by drowning, perhaps considered less violent than that by hanging, read this part of the
drowning entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911 edition): «As a form of capital punishment, drowning was once
common throughout Europe, but it is now only practised in Mahommedan countries and the Far East. Tacitus states that
the ancient Germans hanged criminals of any rank, but those of the low classes were drownedbeneath hurdles in fens and
bogs. The Romans also drowned convicts. The Lex Cornelia ordained that parricides should be sewn in a sack with a dog,
cock, viper and ape, and thrown into the sea. The law of ancient Burgundy ordered that an unfaithful wife should be
smothered in mud. The Anglo-Saxon punishment for women guilty of theft was drowning. So usual was the penalty in
the middle ages that grants of life and death jurisdiction were worded to be “cum fossa et furca” (i.e. “with drowning-pit
and gallows”). The owner of Baynard’s Castle, London, in the reign of John, had powers of trying criminals, and his
descendants long afterwards claimed the privileges, the most valued of which was the right of drowning in the Thames
traitors taken within their jurisdiction. Drowning was the punishment ordained by Richard Cœur de Lion for any soldier
of his army who killed a fellow-crusader during the passage to the Holy Land. Drowning was usually reserved for women
as being the least brutal form of death-penalty, but occasionally a male criminal was so executed as a matter of favour.
Thus in Scotland in 1526 a man convicted of theft and sacrilege was ordered to be drowned “by the queen’s special grace.”
In 1611 a man was drowned at Edinburgh for stealing a lamb, and in 1623 eleven gipsy women suffered there. By that date
the penalty was obsolete in England. It survived in Scotland till 1685 (the year of the drowning of the Wigtoun martyrs).
The last execution by drowning in Switzerland was in 1652, in Austria 1776, in Iceland 1777; while in France during the
Revolution the penalty was revived in the terrible Noyades carried out by the terrorist Jean Baptiste Carrier at Nantes. It
was abolished in Russia at the beginning of the 18th century». However, we can suspect that the author of the entry
sometimes confuses the death penalty by drowning with that by propaginatio, consisting in lowering the condemned man
with his head downwards into a hole, which was then filled with earth in order to make him die smothered. (This note is
ours).
92 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drowning_pit#cite_ref-Northvegr_5-0
93 T. Pennant, Tour in Scotland, and voyage to the Hebrides, London, White, 1774-1776 (2 vols.), part II, 1776, p. 421: «Incestuous
persons were buried in marshes alive».

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1.2.1 Why the bogs?
I believe we can assert that people whose bodies were recovered in the Northern European peat bogs
generally did not die of drowning but mostly from intentionally inflicted injuries and wounds, or by
ritual (self-)hanging or strangulation, or, sometimes, by a drug overdose: anyway, the great majority had
already died before being deposed into the swamps. Written sources of other ages are not very clear: they
speak of people “sunk” into the marshes, but do not specify if they were after being killed. But what
could be the reason why some corpses (including the ones we have met so far) were deposed into the
swamps, even if they were not those «cowards, shirkers and unnaturally vicious» remembered by
Tacitus, or vulgar criminals? Many scientists believe that the Northern European people of the Iron Age
were well aware of the effects of the waters and marsh beds on the bodies immersed in them94. Although
the bones were subjected to a demineralization process and the muscles were greatly reduced in
consistency and volume, the skin was tanned by the acidic and oxygen-free environment in which the
body had been thrown. Furthermore, in that same environment, there were no scavenger animals that
could injure the corpses. The result of all this was that the bodies were extraordinarily well preserved
and for a very long time, so much so that they have come down to our days. However, as we said, the
most common funeral practice at the time of the Iron Age bog bodies was cremation, followed only long
after by burial. Both of these practices involved the destruction (faster in the first case, less in the second)
of the corpses. So, why were certain people abandoned, after being killed, in an environment that would
have kept their remains almost intact indefinitely? And why, indeed, the men of the time tried in every
way to peg them down to the bottom of the marshes with the use of hurdles and stakes, in order to
prevent them from emerging and so remaining exposed to atmospheric agents and necrophage animals?
Unlike in most cases, it was evidently important that these corpses remained preserved: indefinitely, or
for as long as possible preserved. Why? Perhaps, we can venture an answer after exposing the beliefs of
the Norse peoples regarding the soul and its relations with the body: beliefs that perhaps were already
proper to the era and territories we considered, including the Celtic ones: beliefs belonging to the
common substratum Indo-European (see the archaic Greek customs). We can remember that the Norse
concept of the soul held that it was composed of several separate parts:
1) hamr: outer appearance, conceived of having a life force element that could be manipulated
magically.
2) hugr: soul or spirit via the mind, emotions, will. The hugr was generally conceived of as leaving the
body on death, potentially only after the body was fully destroyed through decay or immolation.
When the body had been broken down, the soul could start its journey to the realm of the dead95.
3) fylgja: fetch/follower. A spirit tied to the core soul aspect of a living individual; much like an astral
double. The fylgja could also travel away from the body during life.
4) hamingja: potentiality or fate. The hamingja could leave the person during life, and be inherited by
another member of the lineage after death. Through magical practices, such as spa [oracular magic]
or seidr [oracular but also evil magic] some aspect of the mind could leave the body during moments
of unconsciousness, ecstasy,trance, or sleep96.
According to what we have just read, preventing a corpse from quickly decomposing in the earth or
dissolving thanks to the fire also prevented, in fact, the dead man from starting his journey to the other
world: his mind, his will and his emotions (his human personality, in a word) remained tied and captive
in his own corpse. Morten Ravn says:
There are a number of examples that destruction of the body was necessary in connection with
the transition from living to dead. It can be pointed out in this connection that cremation is also
94 See for example Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 56.
95 See B. Gräslund, Gamla Uppsala During the Migration Period, in Myth, Might and Man. Ten Essays on Gamla Uppsala, ed. G.
Friberg, Stockholm, National Heritage Board, 2000, p. 11 (the note is ours).
96 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Norse_paganism

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a destruction of the deceased’s body. Whether cremation, skeletonising, removal of limbs or other
violence is used, the destruction releases the soul from the body and also makes it impossible for
the dead to return to the world of the living97.
But this could happen only (and, alas, not always) with ordinary people, who died in peace with the
world, or who were not inherently dangerous by their “special” nature once they had died. The problem,
for those who had killed or sacrificed a person, or indirectly caused his death, was that the soul of the
deceased, once his body had dissolved, could not take the path of the Kingdom of the Dead but wander
on the earth, in search of revenge. The Tollund Man, e.g., was respectfully treated after his death; but, as
he had probably died during a necromantic rite in which his consciousness and feelings were altered, it
was necessary for his people to remove his hugr from the desire to remain as a ghost (and an evil one)
here, in this world. According to the conception of the ancients, the swamps, with their uncertain border
between water and land and with their deadly pitfalls, were an intermediate space between the kingdom
of the living and that of the dead98. Indeed, bogs bottom was the vault of Hell itself99. With other people,
97 Ravn, Burials in bogs etc., p. 112. Frazer, On Certain Burial etc., p. 64-65, wrote about the ancestral fear of the death: «The
importance attached by the Romans in common with most other nations to the due performance of burial rites is well
known, and need not be insisted on. For the sake of my argument, however, it is necessary to point out that the attentions
bestowed on the dead sprang not so much from the affections as from the fears of the survivors. For, as every one knows,
ghosts of the unburied dead haunt the earth and make themselves exceedingly disagreeable, especially to their undutiful
relatives. Instances would be superfluous; it is the way of ghosts all the world over, from Brittany to Samoa. But burial by
itself was by no means a sufficient safeguard against the return of the ghost; many other precautions were taken by
primitive man for the purpose of excluding or barring the importunate dead. Some of these precautions I will now
enumerate. They exhibit an ingenuity and fertility of resource worthy of a better cause. In the first place, an appeal was
made to the better feelings of the ghost. He was requested to go quietly to the grave, and at the grave he was requested to
stay there. But to meet the possible case of hardened ghosts, upon whom moral persuasion would be thrown away, more
energetic measures were resorted to. Thus among the South Slavonians and Bohemians, the bereaved family, returning
from the grave, pelted the ghost of their deceased relative with sticks, stones, and hot coals. […]. The Chuwasché, a tribe
in Finland, had not even the decency to wait till he was fairly in the grave, but opened fire on him as soon as the coffin
was outside the house. Again, heavy stones were piled on his grave to keep him down, on the principle of “sit tibi terra
gravis.” This is the origin of funeral cairns and tombstones. As the ghosts of murderers and their victims are especially
restless, every one who passes their graves in Arabia, in Germany, and in Spain, is bound to add a stone to the pile. In
Oldenburg (and no doubt elsewhere) if the grave is shallow the ghost will certainly walk. One of the most striking ways
of keeping down the dead man is to divert the course of a river, bury him in its bed, and then allow the river to resume its
course. It was thus that Alaric was buried».
98 For example, Lerna swamp was reputed to be an entrance to the Underworld, and archaeology has established it was a
sacred site older than Mycenaean Argos, see K. Kerenyi, Gli Dei e gli Eroi della Grecia, Ital. trans. Milano, Garzanti, 1978, 2
vols., vol. 2, p. 159. The equivalent in Old English mythology of the Lernaean Hydra is the monstrous Grendel, a character
of the epic poem Beowulf, and the perfect essence of pure evil. Seriously injured by Beowulf, Grendel will die in his marshy
den. An equally bloodthirsty creature is Grendel’s mother: she is represented as a monstrous and gigantic woman who
lives with her son in an underwater cave hidden in the maritime swamp, from which they emerge at night to commit their
crimes. In a sort of Herculean descent to the Underworld, Beowulf will then go to meet the ogress, succeeding in killing
her. For his part, J. G. Frazer, The Fear Of The Dead In Primitive Religion, London, MacMillian & Co, 1932-1934 (2 vols.), vol.
2, pp. 47-50, shows how water, among various ancient and modern European peoples, was considered a barrier that
hindered the return of the dead in the form of dangerous ghosts. For example, the Wends (a group of Slavic tribes that,
since medieval times, had settled in the area between the Oder River on the east and the Elbe and Saale rivers) led the
corpse of the dead across a river, and various German populations have until recently maintained the habit of pouring
water between the corpse and the house from which it is departing: water is an insurmountable obstacle for the ghost.
Green, ritual etc., p. 177, for his part, considering sacrifice the main reason for the burial on earth or the sinking in water
of most of the bodies found in northern Europe bogs, says: «The ritual immersion of human bodies, whether in dry or wet
locations, can be conceived as liminal placement with the grave, pit or marsh representing the interstices between earthly
life and the Otherworld. The interment of a sacrificial offering underground or underwater involves both giving and
separation which [...] are essential factors in the definition of a sacrificial act».
99 «There was […] a belief that these regions were spooky, that they held the entrance to the underworld of the damned or
the “undead”, and to “hell”, and that evil spirits were up to mischief there. It was said that the most dangerous of them
would be where the ground was the least safe. At night the evil spirits would dance as jack-o’-lanterns (swamp-gas flames)

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who died more serenely or whose mood guaranteed better the living people, the same people could risk
destroying their corpses by fire: it was reasonably certain that they would take quietly the path to the
Underworld. Other persons, on the other hand, had died not yet “sated with life” (mostly adolescents
and young people), or were known as dangerous in life, or had over-mighty souls, and their fellow
countrymen could not afford to let them escape from the chthonic deities: they had to be accompanied
them forcefully to the threshold of the Kingdom of the Dead (the bottom of the marshes, devoid of animal
life), and make sure that they remained there, pegging and burdening their corpses. Hilda Roderick Ellis
calls our attention to a mythological episode of the Baldrs Draumar: Oðin descends to Hel to interrogate
the soul of a seeress still prisoner into its corpse whose grave is just on the east side of Hel’s hail. The
seeress is not at all enthusiastic about that visit: she complains that it will cause her various physical
sufferings having to do with water and humidity («Snowed on with snow, beaten with rain, / Drenched
with the dew...»). She proves hostile, but she cannot help answering the questions of the god.
The poem as it stands is a series of problems; why, for instance, is the völva’s grave placed inside
Hel, the realm of the dead? There is no indication that we are to view this as a second death, and
that the seeress has, in the words of Vafþrúðnismál, ‘died out of Hel’. One would hardly expect it
to be necessary both for Othin to take the road to the realm of the dead and for the inhabitant of
the grave to be roused up to meet him, unless the place where they meet is to be regarded as a
kind of half-way station between the Realm of the Dead and the realm of the living100.
This conception of the “half-way station” seems perfect to me to illustrate the thought of the Iron Age
Germanic peoples regarding the bottom of the marshes.
1.2.2 Witches, shamans and freaks
So, there was a kind of people who were at least potentially dangerous both alive and dead: people
suspected of having to deal with magic powers and shamanic practices. It was easy to infer that an evil
influence of a “natural born” witch or of a shaman was the cause of death or disease or famine, or of
other woes apparently inexplicable except as a consequence of evil eye or evil spells. As long as the
community was not forced to face too serious problems, these people “marked by the gods”, who were
believed to have to do with magic and the spirit world, were tolerated, and the community itself even
sought to obtain from them healings and other benefits. However, when a village or a tribe faced with
an unsustainable situation attributable to supernatural powers, these people, instead of being used to
interrogate the gods as in other cases, could easily become scapegoats, or special sacrificial offerings to
appease angry deities. Considering their physical and psychic characteristics, partly different from those
of normal human beings (characteristics that made them closer to the nature of gods and spirits), and
considering the probability of their revenge after death, especially if they had been sacrificed against
their will, it was imperative to prevent their hugr from wandering the earth by continuing to do harm to
the living. We can imagine that even dipping and pegging them down on the bottom of the bogs could
not be enough to avoid the danger, given their powerful charge of energy. So, to make them remain
harmless, they had to be shorn, and even mutilated, beheaded or defaced (see above, where we have
discussed about the treatment reserved by Jason to Apsyrtus, who was Medea’s brother and – according
some other sources – Hecate’s son, and so closely connected with magical powers). But how could
witches, sorcerers, shamanesses and shamans be identified by the society of that distant era? In later
times, and in other traditional cultures, such individuals were often recognized on the basis of bodily
over the bog. During the day, however, they would appear as bubbling, suddenly bursting, bubbles, rising up to paralyse
the persons passing by with its dreadful sight, and thereby easily entrapping the person in its power», K. E. Müller,
Sacrifices in traditional cultures, in The Mysterious Bog People, C. Bergen - M. J. L. Th. Nickus – V.T. van Vilsteren, Zwolle,
Waanders Uitgevers, p. 36 (quoted from Aldhouse-Green, Crowning Glories etc., p. 301).
100 Roderick Ellis, The Road etc., p. 152.

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“marks” or physical defects, or strange behaviours, or particular sexual inclinations101.
There is plenty of evidence in the classic literature for the ancient linkage between seers or divine
beings and disability: blind Teiresias as depicted, for instance, in the Greek dramatist Sophocles’
plays Antigone and Oedypus Tyrannos, was a prophet whose ability to ‘see’ the future was
enhanced by his inability to see in earthworld […]; the Norse god Oðin one-eye disfigurement
[…] signalled his special supernatural status102.
Scientists have long noted that many of the individuals found in peat deposits exhibit traces of congenital
impairments or physical defects and particularities. However, these people were not small children: they
were adults or sub-adults. This is an incontrovertible indication that these individuals were not
eliminated at birth or just when they began to demonstrate their defect, but probably when some serious
crime of magical nature was attributed to them, or when their community believed it was necessary to
sacrifice them. The Norse drowned (or sank) evil men, and sorcerers in the bogs. According to the
Vatnosdœla saga (chapter 28), a perverse man found death in a swamp, and according to Theodoricus
Monachus’ Historia de Antiquitate Regum Norwagensium, Queen Gunhild of Norway was lured to
Denmark by the Danish king Harald Bluetooth and then «drowned and sunk in miserable fashion in a
terrifyingly deep bog». Queen Gunhild appears, in many Norse legends, as a dangerous witch and an
expert in black magic103.
1.2.3 A question of hair (and heads)
Sometimes it seems that at least a part of some bog bodies’ hair had been shaved or cropped just before
they were killed or immersed in the marshes. The hair thus cut was often carefully placed next to the
corpses in the swamp pits, where it was found again in modern times, very well preserved. Some scholars
speculate that those partially shaved heads may have been a means of emphasizing a state of impropriety
or shame104. Others, like Miranda Aldhouse-Green, say that human hair appears, sometimes, to have
been deliberately dedicated to the spirits of marshes, although certain people were consigned to the
marsh hair intact105. Other scientists think instead that some corpses were indeed not partially shaved,
but that the hair simply fell off a part of their head subject to particular chemical phenomena or to
mechanic accidents. Even if I do not have chemistry competencies to exclude it, this hypothesis looks me
unlikely if too generalized. This hair loss is only found in some of the bog bodies, and these bodies had
mostly belonged or to physically abnormal people or to people suspicious of particular behaviour: a
behaviour outside the norm and variable but, in some cases at least suspected106.In 1835, the bog body
of a woman (known today as the Haraldskaer Woman) was discovered, naked, in the Gunnelsmose
(“Gunnhild’s bog”) on the Haraldskaer estate in Denmark107. At the time of its discovery, this was
believed to be the corpse of the infamous Queen Gunhild of Norway. The so-called Queen Gunhild is
101 As for the Norse nomenclature of the various forms of magic, we find the termtrolldómr which means “magic”, but also
“monstrosity” (“troll” means both “ogre” and any kind of monsters), see Chiesa Isnardi,I miti nordici etc., pp. 96 and 108 n. 6.
102 Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods etc., p. 194.
103 Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla (Harald Harfager’s Saga, chapter 34) relates that the very beautiful Gunhild lived, during
her youth, in a hut with two Finnish wizards, and learned magic from them. The Historia de Antiquitate Regum
Norwagensium is a 12th century Latin historiographic text by the Norwegian monk Theodoricus Monachus. The story
begins with Harald I Fairhair, first king of Norway, and ends with Sigurd I known as the Crusader, who died in 1130. It
was written between 1176 and 1188, the year in which the Archbishop of Nidaros Eystein Erlendsson died, to whom the
work was dedicated. The work deals with the Norwegian kingdom from its birth until the start of the Norwegian Civil
Wars, traditionally located after the death of Sigurd I.
104 See Parker Pearson, The Archaeology etc., p. 70.
105 See Aldhouse-Green, Crowning Glories etc., p. 304.
106 See Id., p. 303 and ff. Even the Tollund Man had shortly cropped hair (see Parker Pearson, The Archaeology etc., p. 67),
while, allegedly, men of his epoch wore longer hair.
107 M. Aldhouse-Green, Boudica Britannia Rebel, war-leader and Queen, London-New York, Routledge Taylor and Francis
Group, 2006, p. 95-96.

103
actually a woman from 490 BC ca, who died from strangulation or hanging at 45-50 years of age after a
comfortable life in which she did not suffered for malnutrition and enjoyed instead excellent health108.
The presence of a long lock of hair near her corpse, for reasons I immediately go to explain, was perhaps
because she was herself considered by her people a witch or in any case a person with magical powers.
Revered, well treated and well fed, but possibly also feared (and who knows? maybe even secretly hated)
when she was alive, as a result of some misfortune or some uncanny event for which she was found guilty,
it was perhaps decided to kill her. Or, on the contrary, she was a queen or a religious leader, and so «She
may even have volunteered herself as a supreme offering in order to safeguard the future of her people» in
a moment of danger and distress109. Or, otherwise, she died perhaps from the unfortunate outcome of a
shamanic ritual held in a manner similar to that which we hypothesized in previous paragraphs. A ritual
which also included a principle of strangulation (the very faint groove around her throat might indicate
that her death was not wanted). In 2000 the body was re-examined by the Department of Forensic Science
at the University of Aarhus110, and they found that her stomach content revealed a last meal of unhusked
millet and blackberries111. We have to remember that, with blackberries, an intoxicating drink is still made,
the blackberry wine, obtained putting the berries to macerate in boiling water with the addition of a few
other ingredients. Such a drink, unfiltered, could perhaps have been enough strong to produce an altered
state of consciousness. To which, in the alleged Haraldskaer Woman’s last rite, the effect of a controlled
strangulation would have been added in order to potentiate it112.
James G. Frazer already stressed the antiquity and the spread of the belief that a man’s strength resides
in his hair, and if his hair is cut, the man might die or weaken113. The biblical story related to Samson is a
good example of this belief and of its antiquity. We can remark that Snorri Sturluson, in The Prose Edda
(Skáldskaparmál, chapter 43), tells that Sif, the wife of Thor, had magnificent golden hair, which Loki cut
off one day. A furious Thor threatened to kill Loki, but Loki convinced him to spare his life on the
condition that he find an even fairer head of hair for Sif. Thor consented, and off Loki went to procure
Sif’s new hair114.In medieval and early modern Europe, it was believed that the power of witches and
108 See Id., p. 94-95.,
109 Id., p. 97.
110 See Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods etc., p. 202.
111 See https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/09/19/haraldskaer-woman-one-human-remains-pre-roman-iron-age/
112 And not only this: «Blackberries were in olden days supposed to give protection against all ‘evil runes,’ if gathered at
the right time of the moon. The whole plant had once a considerable popular reputation both as a medicine and as a charm
for various disorders», Grieve, A Modern Herbal, Vol. 1, Kindle, poss. 4519 and ff. And that’s not all: blackberry pips have
also been found in the digestive system of the Zweeloo Woman (see Holden, The Last Meals etc., p. 81). Zweeloo Woman
had been, in life, dwarf and deformed because she was suffering from dyschondrosteosis, a rather rare disease. This
predisposed her to be considered “chosen by the gods”, and to become a shamaness (see note 128). The causes of her death
are unknown, but the presence of remains of blackberries (perhaps due to the ingestion of blackberry wine) would seem
to tell us about the preparation for another shamanic ritual, which ended badly like others. Although, perhaps, this time
death occurred a few hours after the end of the ritual itself (the blackberry seeds had already reached the intestine). In
other words, she could have died from a hangover. This is all the more likely because she suffered from a liver parasitosis,
caused by Dicrocoelium dendriticum: the eggs of the parasite were embedded in her liver parenchyma see N. Searcey et al,
Parasitism of the Zweeloo Woman: Dicrocoeliasis evidenced in a Roman period bog mummy, in «International Journal of
Paleopathology», 3, 3 (2013), p. 224-228, part. p. 228.Dicrocoelium dendriticum is a parasite for which «in heavier infections,
bile ducts and the biliary epithelium may become enlarged in addition to the generation of fibrous tissue surrounding the
ducts, and as a result, causing an enlarged liver (hepatomegaly) or inflammation of the liver (cirrhosis)»
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicrocoelium_dendriticum). An abuse of alcohol with such a pathology (cirrhosis) could
have been fatal.
113 See J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion, London, MacMillan,1906-1915 (12 vols.), vol. 2, p. 158.
See Chiesa Isnardi, I miti nordici etc., p. 602, too: like nails, hair is a part of the human body that does not undergo a process
of deterioration and putrefaction after death: this, together with their constant growth, makes it the symbol of an element
that escapes transience and possesses qualities details. Hair is the manifestation of the vital energies of man just as the
woods are of the earth.
114 H. R. Ellis-Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, 1964, p. 84, has suggested: «This reference to Sif’s golden hair,
as paltry as it is, is nevertheless the most meaningful detail we know about her. Many scholars have suggested that this is
a symbol of a field of flowing grain ripe for the harvest. […]. Thus, it would make sense for Sif to be a goddess of the

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wizards resided in their hair and that nothing could harm these people as long as they kept their hair
unshaved. Frazer offers many examples of cases of shaving operations applied to alleged witches and
warlocks, and which could also be extended to other body hair115. But why, then, were the heads of bog
bodies generally not entirely shaved? Probably because, during the Iron Age, it was not always and by
every people considered necessary. And European folklore abounds in old myths and fairy tales according
to which the evil wizard can be killed or reduced to impotence simply by tearing to him a few hairs, or even
just one116. At the beginning of the modern era, it seems that a sermon was delivered in the church of North
Berwick by Satan himself, who wanted to comfort his followers by assuring them that no harm could
happen to them as long as they would haveall their hair and they would not have shed tears117.
It is a well-known fact that the ancient Celts, like the Scythians and also the Norse, believed that the
whole human head was the seat of particular powers and of its owner’s soul. Among the Celts and
Scythians, as well as among other ancient Asian and European peoples, warriors were in a certain way
head hunters. In fact, they removed the head to the killed enemies, and the head so severed was
preserved in various ways, sometimes even in expensive balms. By that it was believed not only to be
able to exhibit precious trophies, but also to acquire particular powers and/or to control the spirits of
deceased enemies. This, of course, firstly for the purpose of evading their revenge. Taking off a person’s
head meant determining his absolute death118. Or better, the beheaded probably could not rest in peace,
and was rendered, at the same time, powerless: he remained prisoner in a sort of limbo without being
able to take revenge and to find a definitive and satisfactory rest in the afterlife. This can explain why,
during the Middle Ages, among the Balts, the last pagans of Europe, the comrades of warriors who died
fertility of the earth, a role also occupied to varying degrees by other Norse goddesses such as Freya, Gefjun, Fjorgyn, and
Jord. Sif’s being especially associated with the vegetation on the surface of the earth, which is suggested by the nature of
her hair, is also corroborated by the fact that a species of moss (Polytrichum aureum) was calledhaddr Sifjar (“Sif’s hair”) in
Old Norse. Despite how little we know about her, then, Sif seems to belong to one of the most archaic, and most exalted,
roles of divinity in the mythology, religion, and worldview of the pre-Christian Norse and other Germanic peoples»
(quoted from D. McCoy’s website https://norse-mythology.org/sif/). The goddess of fertility Gefjun aside, the other gods
connected with Sif belong to the Vanir lineage, those probably pre-Indo-European divinities connected since the beginning
with the fertility of the earth and the fecundity of men and animals. It is perhaps not useless to remember here that the
Vanir were also connected to the practices of magic: it was Freja who taught magic arts to the Asir, and Odin then became
very expert in it (see Chiesa Isnardi, p. 95). And what Sif suffered from Loki has the appearance of a magical act.
115 See Frazer, The Golden Bough etc., vol. XI, p. 158-159.
116 See, for example, Id., vol. XI, p. 103, where the myth of Pterelaus is told: Pterelaus would die only when a golden hair had
been torn from his head; or the myth of Nisus, destined to lose his strength and his life if he lost his purple lock of hair.
117 See Id., vol. XI, p. 159.
118 «Among unusual funerary practices noted at Guilden Morden, Cambridgeshire, were the charred remains of a
decapitated probable male. The individual’s arms and lower legs also appear to have been removed and his skeleton was
discovered lying in thick layers of charcoal. The latter finding was interpreted as an indication that his body had been
burnt in situ. A nearby burial contained a disabled woman whose head had been severed as a consequence of a sideways
cut and placed at her feet […]. Another woman from the cemetery had her head removed in a similar way and placed in
her lap. It is too tempting to quote Lethbridge’s […] own words: “I suggest, though this may appear fanciful, that this lame
woman had been decapitated after her death to ensure that her spirit – perhaps bad-tempered owing to her infirmity –
should not walk and haunt her relatives. The method of laying a ghost by decapitating the corpse was of course well
known in later times, and is often mentioned in the sagas … one wonders if both of these women had been witches”», A.
Taylor, Aspects of Deviant Burial in Roman Britain, in E. M. Murphy, Deviant Burial etc., Kindle pos. 2426 ff. A case of
beheading intended to prevent the revenge of the dead, in the form of ghost, can perhaps be found in the episode featuring
Leodes, in the Odyssey, XXII, 391 ff. Leodes was one of the Proci (Penelope’s suitors), devious pretenders to the throne of
Ithaca, when Ulysses, the king, was engaged in the Trojan war: he was also a haruspex, endowed with foresight. Once
back home, Ulysses had to deal with the suitors who had settled in the palace wanting to marry his wife Penelope in his
absence. Helped by his son Telemachus and faithful servants he started a great massacre in the palace hall. One of the
Proci to whom Odysseus reserved the worst fate was Leodes who, having seen the carnage, threw himself at his knees
begging to be spared, but the king of Ithaca, deaf to his prayers, picked up the sword of Agelaus (a suitor killed shortly
before by the Achaean hero), and with this he cut off Leodes’ head which fell to the ground while still speaking. The
different nature and powers of Leodes (haruspex and fortune teller) could make him a revenant. This is why Ulysses
reserves him the apparently most gruesome death amongst the Proci: beheading.

105
or were so severely wounded in battles to be considered doomed, cut off the heads of those unfortunate
and tried to bring them back at home. And the relatives of those to whom the enemies had managed to
remove the head were willing to pay heavy ransoms to get that back119.
1.2.4 Lindow Man III
The third corpse found in the English marshes of Lindow Moss (Lindow III), which belonged to a man
of about 35 years (and that died in the 1st century BC/AD as well as that of the same epoch, Lindow I),
stands out for having been beheaded120. But not only for that: he was special in other ways, too. His
surviving right hand possessed a vestigial extra thumb, and his sixth digit would originally have been
present on both hands. As Miranda Aldhouse-Green observes, this marked him out as different, odd, a
deviant from normal physicality. So, she wonders if this did account for his beheading121. I think it is
exactly so. It was probably believed he had an innate contact with otherworldly, magical powers122.
A modern case can illustrate this assumption: rumours and speculations have always surrounded
the life of Anne Boleyn, King Henry VIII’s second wife since 1533 and beheaded three years later.
There is, in particular, a mystery about this queen: the claim that she had six fingers on one of her
hands. The story of Anne Boleyn’s extra digit most likely originated in a book by the Catholic
propagandist Nicholas Sander (1530? – 1581). Writing a few decades after Anne Boleyn’s death,
Sander noted that the young queen «…had a projecting tooth under the upper lip, and on her right
hand, six fingers»123. He also claimed the she had an unsightly cyst on her neck, which she tried to
hide by wearing dresses and jewellery that covered her throat. Sander’s reliability has often been
called into question. Sander never saw Anne Boleyn in person, and critics argue that it’s unlikely
that such a woman would have captured the affections of a man like Henry VIII. More importantly,
Sander had a personal feud against her daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, whose religious policies had
forced him into exile. In the medieval era, moles and other bodily imperfections were often viewed
as signs of devilry and witchcraft, so Sander may have painted an unflattering picture as a way of
denigrating both Anne Boleyn and her royal offspring.I do not believe that the cause of Lindow Man
III’s death can be established with sufficient certainty: his own beheading may have occurredpost mortem,
119 See, about all this, M. Green, Dizionario di mitologia celtica, it. trans., Milano, Rusconi, s.d., entries testa and teste,cacciatori
di; M. Aldhouse-Green,Bog Bodies etc., p. 122-123; Chiesa Isnardi, I miti nordici etc., p. 600-601; J. Chevalier – A. Gheerbrant,
Dizionario dei simboli, Ital. trans. Milano, Rizzoli, 1986, heading testa; For the Balts, S. Melani, Crudeltà rituale, crudeltà
strumentale e violenza nelle guerre di inizio secolo XIII per la conquista della Livonia e dell’Estonia, in «Settentrione. Nuova serie»,
17 (2005), p. 128 and 130.
120 Many other similar cases have been registered. For example, the skull of Dätgen Man was found in 1959 in a peat near
Dätgen (Northern Germany), placed about 10 feet [3m] from his body. And Glob, The Bog People etc., p. 73 and 86, quotes
the discovery in Danish marshes, in different periods (1859 and 1948), of two heads severed from the body (the bodies
have never been found). If in the first case (that of the head of a young woman) we are not sure that it is a particularly
ancient find, the other (that of a male head with long hair braided and gathered in the so-called “Swabian knot”, the same
we find on the Dätgen Man’s head) is without any doubt belonging to the Iron Age: the hairstyle corresponds perfectly to
the description of that, made by Tacitus, as typical of the Swabian warriors.
121 See, about all that, M. Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 122-123.
122 Id., p. 157, says: «Shamans are said to be born to their role, as is evident in certain marks distinguishing them from
ordinary people. For instance, a shaman may be born with more bones in his body – e.g., teeth or fingers – than other
people. He does not become a shaman simply by willing it, for it is not the shaman who summons up the spirits but they,
the supernatural beings, who choose him», https://www.britannica.com/topic/shamanism/Selection., and, among the Shor,
a Turkic people, «Children were often prepared for shamanic activity from an early age. According to the Shor, the future
shaman was supposed to be born with a “mark” from the god Ul’gen-an “extra bone.” This might be a prominence on the
finger or toe, or even a dimple on the ear lobe. Elders, noticing the “mark,” pointed it out to the parents, who consulted a
shaman. A seance was held in order to learn from the chief spirit of the locality—the owner of the mountain—whether the
child would become a shaman [kam]. “The spirit generally ‘confirms’ this, and it is instilled in the child from tender years
that he is a future kam.”», V. N. Basilov, Is the Shaman Sane?, in M.M. Balzer, Shamanic World etc., p.8.
123 N. Sander, Rise and Growth of Anglican Schism [1571], Engl. trans., London, Burns and Oates, 1877, p. 25.

106
as a measure taken by his fellow villagers to prevent the return of his ghost, as we have seen above124.
The real reason for his death might therefore to be searched again in another ritual that ended badly,
although whose type is, in this case, even more difficult to conjecture, given the state in which the body
has come down to us. At last, modern tests reveal that Lindow III’s corpse leads on him a residue of
heavy metals, suggesting that Lindows III’s body was decorated with mineral-based paints at some time
in his life. Pyatt et al125, and Aldhouse-Green126, relate this to the rich literature of the classical era about
body art among the northern peoples, especially among the Britons. Then they conclude hypothesizing
that a similar type of painting may have played a role in ceremonial killings (Aldhouse Green)127, or
remarking (Pyatt et al) that body painting was probably a phenomenon not restricted to warriors in battle
or to women, but it might be extended even to the priestly caste128.
1.2.5The Yde Girl
She was around 16 years of age at the time of her death, and life had not been generous with her. Nor
was death. She had suffered from a severe form of scoliosis and at the time of her death stood no more
than 4 ft 6 [1.37m]. Her spinal defect, in addition to stunting her growth, had consequences on her
walking: she walked with a lurching gait and suffered constant pain129. The Yde Girl (coming from the
1st century AD and found in found in the Stijfveen peat bog near the village of Yde, Netherlands) is
known today to a wider audience than that of the Ancient History specialists thanks to the splendid wax
reconstruction of her face, reconstruction carried out by the aid of techniques used by forensic medicine,
and then widely diffused by the media.
The scientist who reconstructed her face,
Richard
Reave, gave her an exceptionally high forehead
(almost abnormal, we could say), a pensive if not sad
look, fine facial features and magnificent reddish
blonde hair. About the latter, we know that on the
right side of the head her hair was torn off, and then
placed in the swamp together with the corpse. This
turned out to be dressed in a poorly made, woollen,
black robe; it is possible that she belonged to a low
social status, unless the robe had been made to wear
for ceremonial reasons before her killing130. The
cause of her death was strangulation with her own
wool belt. A particular sign of hatred towards her
(almost a kind of overkilling) could be represented
by the stab wound
– not fatal – inflicted on her neck.
Unless (and this is much more probable) the girl was
sacrificed in the manner described by the Bernese
glosser who, in the 9th century AD, compiled the
Commentaries on Lucan’s
Pharsalia
.
Yde Girl,1992 facial reconstruction by Richard
Neave, on display at the Drents Museum in the
Netherlands.
124 Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods etc., p. 57, quoting Turner, hypothesizes that the Lindow Man III could have been
drowned and then beheaded. Id., Bog Bodies etc., thinks that he could have been ‘doubly’ killed.
125 See Pyatt et al, Mobilisation of Elements from the Bog Bodies Lindow II and III and Some Observation on Body Painting, in Bog
Bodies. New Discoveries etc., p. 70-73.
126 See M. Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 123.
127 See Ibid.
128 See Pyatt et al, Mobilisation of Elements etc., p. 123.
129 See, for all this, at least Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 17-18 and 153-154. However, W. A. B. van der Sanden, Bog
Bodies on the Continent: Development since 1965, with Special Reference to the Netherlands, in Bog Bodies. New Discoveries etc., p.
155, a few years earlier had defined that of the Yde Girl as a form of «mild scoliosis».
130 For this hypothesis, see M. Aldhouse-Green, Crowning Glories etc., p. 303: «The worn garment […] may symbolize low
status, whether inherited, ‘achieved’, or associate with an untimely and deliberate ‘ritual’ killing (whether punitive or
sacrificial or a combination of the two)».

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According to that commentator, the Gauls hung sacrificial victims from the trees in order to propitiate
the god Esus, then stabbed them and left them to die for the loss of blood. However, apart from the fact
that she belonged to a non-Gallic but Germanic people, the correspondence between the death of the Yde
Girl and the ritual described in the 9th century is not perfect, because the cause of death was in her case
strangulation, and not bleeding. The observation made by Aldhouse-Green regarding the “multiple
death” inflicted on Lindow Man is very interesting and suggestive: this type of death was perhaps
reserved for people who “lived more than one life”, that is homosexuals (in which there was a double
life, at the same time manly and a womanly), shamans, shamanesses and witches (who had trade with
the world of men and with that of spirits)131. These two categories of people (homosexuals and
shamans/shamanesses) could sometimes overlap, as we will see. As for the evil witch (the so called argri
konu, in the Viking Sweden), I think the people of the time carefully distinguished between her and jinx
on one side and shaman/shamanesse on the other. It could be said that shamans/shamanesses and good
witches exercised magical powers in an “authorized” and beneficial way, and they could be also lavishly
rewarded for so: the Huldremose Woman – if she was a shamaness – was surely wealthy. In general, they
had a life free from lack of food and obtained a respectful burial, after all, albeit in that no man’s land
between the world of the living and the world of the dead that were the bogs. Evil witches and jinxes, on
the other hand, were mainly attributed the power of the evil eye. Although identifiable by physical traits
that could have made them shamans, for some reason they had not acquired the most comfortable status
of the latter, and indeed, they had sometimes suffered from hunger and disease, because their people
(perhaps their own parents), even without coming to hate them openly, suspected them. They were also
the easiest scapegoat for their tribesmen’s misfortunes. For them too, and even more so, there was a burial
in the marshes. In the case of the unfortunate Yde Girl, we probably came to her murder as she was
considered an eye-biting witch, and not because – for example – she was considered a homosexual, an
adulteress or an unchaste (let we see the fact that part of her hair was torn; and we can observe her
deformity, that probably qualified her as a witch or a supposed jinx)132.
1.2.6 “Moora” Girl
Another unfortunate girl from the Iron Age tries today to tell us her story. In year 2000, peat harvesters
near Uchte, Lower Saxony, Germany, unearthed a corpse. The police, immediately notified, believed it
belonged to a girl who disappeared in 1969 and who was never found again. The naked remains were
identified by forensic doctors to be that of a young girl between 16-19 years of age at the time of her
death, but they did not belong to any she-teenager from the current century. In January 2005 a worker
dug up a shrivelled hand near to the place of the previous discovery. The police were called again, and
then the investigation definitively established that it was a corpse more than 2,500 years old. The girl was
immediately dubbed “Moora” for being found in a moor. Although not so much as her peer, the Yde
Girl, Moora was very short in stature, reaching only 150 cm in height. Later radiocarbon dating showed
the scientists that the corpse was of a girl who lived over 2,500/2600 years ago, at the beginning of the
Northern European Iron Age. The peat harvesting machine had badly damaged the archaeological find:
«During the harvesting of peat for nurseries, the machine’s blades sliced up the ancient girl’s body like a
salami. We have 100 parts; around 90 per cent of the skeleton», declared to a popular archaeology
magazine Henning Haßmann, the state archaeologist of Lower Saxony133.
In an article published in the newspaper Die Welt of 05-04-2006, when a multidisciplinary research on the
131 Id., p. 132.
132 Tacitus, Germania, XIX, remembers that «…the punishment for which [adulteress] is prompt, and in the husband’s
power. Having cut off the hair of the adulteress and stripped her naked, he expels her from the house in the presence of
her kinsfolk, and then flogs her through the whole village. The loss of chastity meets with no indulgence; neither beauty,
youth, nor wealth will procure the culprit a husband». Indeed, the Yde Girl had been (partly) shaved, but she had been
killed too, a punishment that seems to have been foreseen neither for adulteresses nor for unchaste young women, who
perhaps suffered from an even more scorching punishment: social ostracism.
133 See https://www.world-archaeology.com/world/europe/germany/germany-iron-age-bog-body/ (6 September 2005).

108
corpse of “Moora” had only quite recently begun, various hypotheses about her presence in the swamp and
about her death were indicated as possible. For example, the hypothesis of a death by accident: it seemed
conceivable that “Moora” had left accidentally the safe track on the moor, or that she had slipped down.
Otherwise, she was a criminal punished in the swamp, or she was a sacrifice134. Only six months after the
finding of her right hand, which convinced the police that it was not a modern case of crime, some people
thought that “Moora” entered the swamp following deliberately a difficult path that forced her to hop from
hump to hump, the dry islands covered with heather and stunted trees (hypothesis proposed by Alf
Metzler)135. At this point, however, other questions remained without convincing answers: why did she go
alone to such a dangerous and difficult to reach place? And why had she gone there naked? Indeed, some
scientists think it is possible to conjecture that she was found naked not because she was so at the time of her
death, but because the particular acidic composition of the water dissolved her clothes, made of linen or other
vegetable fibres. We must remember that, for a good conservation of the bodies fallen or thrown in the
marshes, the water has to be at a temperature not higher than 4° C, and this occurs in cold seasons, when it is
very unlikely that someone endowed with reason and free of his actions will go around naked or dressed
only in light clothes. Clothes so light as to completely dissolve without leaving a trace. Was she immersed in
the warm season? Probably it is so: apart from the damage suffered during the peat harvesting operations,
Moora’s corpse is not entirely well preserved. But, perhaps, the most important questions are: how did she
die? And why? Alf Metzler, we said, supposed that Moora could have died of an accident: she fell into the
moor and there she drowned. And Metzler again did not exclude that she committed suicide. Some other
people believed that Moora had gone to gather bird eggs. Metzler, at last, proposed another curious
hypothesis: she had gone to harvest bilberries (the Bog Bilberry, Vaccinium uliginosum) – a plant known for
some heady and intoxicating properties136. And the harvesting of those berries agrees with a hypothesis of
another kind: the girl was an herbal witch (a kräuterhexe), or an herbal healer. Eggs are usually laid by birds
in spring, and bilberries are ripe in late summer only: this might agree with the fact that Moora was dressed
in light clothing made of vegetable fibres. However, at the time of her death and in part even before, the girl
seems to have suffered from various and serious illnesses, among which some that could make her walking
and her own standing very difficult and painful. And it would have been especially difficult, for her, to walk
along a rough and dangerous swamp path. On the other hand, the fact that the girl’s body was heavily
damaged by the machinery used to collect the peat makes it hard to firmly establish the cause of her death.
Therefore, one could even wonder if the girl was brought by a boat (dead or still alive) to the point of the
swamp where she was found 2,500 years later. In this case, if she had been still alive, the hypothesis of a
murder or of a sacrifice would be particularly likely, and the hypothesis of a suicide would lose, even more
dramatically, its strength.
Moora’s body – as Yde Girl’s – speaks of severe hardships, disease events, hard work, repeated abuses and,
moreover, of starvation. As for the autopsy tests and those related to the pathologies suffered by the girl when
she was alive, the whole can be summarized as follows:
134 See https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article208752/Moorleiche-Moora-bekommt-ein-Gesicht.html. See, almost one year
before the World Archaeology article, another article published on the German newspaper «Der Spiegel», 27-06-2005: the
ideas of an accident (by Alf Metzler, the Excavation Director) or of a sacrifice were then proposed:
https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-40872462.html. But W. Van der Sanden, Bog Bodies: Underwater Burials, sacrifices
and Executions, in The Oxford Handbook of Wetland Archaeology, Oxford, 2013, p. 409, writes: «‘Mora’ […] lived in the 7th
century BC. As the skeleton and the (scarce) skin remains show no signs of violence, researches assume that she lost her
way in the vast bog and died there alone. So this interpretation concerns neither an execution nor a sacrifice (K. Püschel
and A. Bauerhochse, pers. comm., 2008)». We will soon see how Moora’s story can be otherwise reconstructed.
135 See again «Der Spiegel», 27-06-2005.
136 «Die auf Hoch- und Zwischenmooren wachsende Moorbeere (Rausch- oder Trunkelbeere, Sumpfheidelbeere; Vaccinium
uliginosum L., englisch: bog whortleberry) ist blaubereift, ähnelt der Heidelbeere und ruft beim Genuß gelegentlich
Vergiftungserscheinungen hervor (Übelkeit, rauschartige Erregungszustände, Schwindel, Sehstörungen). Dies wird
möglicherweise durch einen häufig in der Beere schmarotzenden Pilz (Sclerotina megalospora) verursacht. Alle hier
genannten Vaccinium-Arten bilden zusammen eine zu den Kieselpflanzen zählende Gruppe»,
https://roempp.thieme.de/lexicon/RD-16-03999 (non-free access chemical science site).

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She was left-handed. It is thought that Moora experienced intense physical labor and likely
repeatedly carried heavy loads, like water jugs, while roaming through the marshland. According
to Saring Dennis from the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, Moora sustained at least
two partial skull fractures that gradually healed themselves. Moora also suffered long periods of
sickness associated with the hardships of long winters. The bone growth lines showed that during
her childhood and adolescence, Moora suffered from chronic malnutrition. Moora was also
diagnosed to have a benign tumor at the base of her skull, which led to the spine curvature and
chronic inflammation in the leg bones. However, Moora’s cause of death is unknown. It was only
determined that Moora was naked at the time she was deposited into the bog137.
These data must be interpreted and integrated. I think we can start from the two fractures found on
Moora’s skull. In my opinion, they are probably the cause, although indirect, of her death: in fact, the
fractures, as we read just above, healed some time or shortly before she died138, but they had to show
their severe collateral consequences only time after their origin. The violent assault suffered by Moora
was perhaps due to her physical “diversity”: a diversity that probably made her an object of fear and
concern for many of her fellow villagers. Moora had only a slight scoliosis in the lumbar vertebrae, but a
much more pronounced scoliosis in the upper vertebrae. In other words, she was humped, and perhaps,
as still in modern Italian folklore, a humped woman was considered, among Moora’s people, a bearer of
bad luck (we must remember that the Yde Girl too, centuries later, will be probably killed or sacrificed
just for this reason). Moora was also left-handed, another feature that has always been related to bad luck
and evil eye139.
Let’s try to imagine what might have been happened in the last times of Moora’s life. One day, about a
year or so before his death, Moora gave perhaps the impression of staring at someone longer than he (or
she) was willing to tolerate from a suspected jinx like her. The reaction of the man (or the woman), who
felt endangered by Moora’s evil eye, was left to two violent blows to the girl’s frontal bone, with a blunt
object140. Moora at that time did not die, and probably someone (her family?) took care of her. But, at last,
she died after about a year more or less, a time which was a true ordeal for her141. In addition to the signs
of these fractures, into her skull was found by modern scientists an unusual shape of the dorsum sellae142.
137 https://peoplepill.com/people/girl-of-the-uchter-moor/. For a more extensive display of these data and for a clarification
regarding the methodologies by which they were collected, see the essays collected in “Moora” - das Mädchen aus dem Uchter
Moor eine Moorleiche der Eisenzeit aus Niedersachsen II, Andreas Bauerochse, Henning Haßmann, Klaus Püschel, Michael
Schultz (Hrsg.), Rahden / Westf, Marie Leidorf, 2018.
138 See J. Gresky et al, Ergebnisse der paläopatologischen Untersuchung am Cranium der Moorleiche “Moora”, in “Moora” - das
Mädchen etc., II, p. 66. Schultz et al, “Moora” – Die “Biographie” eines Mädchens aus der vorrömischen Eisenzeit, in “Moora” -
das Mädchen etc., II, p. 111, that Moora’s frontal trauma goes back to her 15-18 years and it was well-healed some months
or maybe one/two years before her death.
139 I could not consult “Moora” - das Mädchen aus dem Uchter Moor eine Moorleiche der Eisenzeit aus Niedersachsen I, Andreas
Bauerochse, Henning Haßmann, Klaus Püschel (Hrsg.), Rahden / Westf, Marie Leidorf, 2008, but the results of bone density
analyses concerning her two upper limbs are exhibited on the anthropology site Die Evolution des Menschen - (Mädchen aus dem
Uchter Moor), https://www.evolution-mensch.de/Anthropologie/Mädchen_aus_dem_Uchter_Moor: «Vergleichende
Dichtemessungen der rechten und linken Extremitätenknochen zeigten ein für Linkshänder typisches
Dichteverteilungsmuster». They say Moora was left-handed. As for the superstitions related to left-handedness, we can consult
P.-M. Bertrand, Nouveau dictionnaire des gauchers, Paris, IMAGO, 2011, and more quickly Quel mostruoso universo della mano sinistra,
on the Italian website: //mancinismo.info/rassegna-stampa/quel-mostruoso-un universe-muman-sistra, orLeft handed myths and
misunderstandings, at https://www.anythinglefthanded.co.uk/being-lh/lh-info/myths.html#1
140 See J. Mißbach-Güntner et al, Detaillierte computertomographische Untersuchungen zur Evaluation makroskopisch erhobener
befunden an der Moorleiche “Moora”, in“Moora” - das Mädchen etc., II, p. 53.
141 Cfr. Ibid., «Beide Vertiefungen repraesentieren zum Todeszeitpunkt gut verheilte, also ueber viele Monate oder sogar
Jahre ueberlebte Impressionsfrakturen, die sicherlich nicht die Todesursache waren». But from those fractures a whole
series of after-effects and serious pathological consequences (infections) probably originated, which ultimately determined
(I suspect) the girl’s death.
142 See Mißbach-Güntner et al, Detaillierte computertomographische etc., p. 53-54. The authors say that in this case it is
impossible to determine, on the basis of computed tomography alone, whether this physical particular is due to a neoplasia

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The analysis revealed that Moora suffered, at the time of her death, from a chronical frontal sinusitis, with
vestiges of inflammatory processes in the nose cavities143. This possibly caused her extremely violent
headaches, but this was not the cause of her death either: at the time of death, she suffered mainly from
tuberculous meningitis, as we have here mentioned in the notes 148 and 149. I believe that it was probably
a posttraumatic disease, and another and major consequence of the assault she suffered. Post-traumatic
meningitis is bacterial in nature and so much more dangerous than the viral one: in the presence of a skull
fracture, bacteria such as those of the tuberculosis can infiltrate from lungs or from elsewhere, and the
disease develops perhaps slowly but steady144. However, this development can occur several days or
or to an anatomical variant. Although Schultz et al, “Moora” – Die “Biographie” etc., p. 110-111, define the neoformation of
the Sella Turcica as a slow one, which has probably accompanied Moora since childhood, I wonder if this dorsum sellae’s
unusual shape was due to the (imperfect) healing of her cranial trauma: a trauma that also affected somehow the Sella
Turcica. M. Schultz et al, Ergebnisse mikroscopischer Untersuchungen an der Moorleiche “Moora”, in “Moora” - das Mädchen etc.,
II, p. 79, say: «Wie im mikroskopischen Bild zu erkennen ist, baut sich diese Neubildung [on the dorsum sellae] vollständing
aus reifem Knochengeweben d.h. Lamellenknochen auf, so dass man versucht ist, in dieser Struktur eine morphologische
Varietät und keinem Tumor zu sehen. Die genaue Betrachtung des Dünnschliffpräparates zeigt allerdings, dass im
Schliffbild die ursprüngliche Wandung des Türkensattels noch deutlich zu erkennen ist und dass der nach hinten über die
ursprüngliche Begrenzung des Türkensattels sich vorwölbende Abschnitt, der die eigentliche Neubildung repräsentiert,
aus der Rücklehne des Türkensattels herausgewachsen ist. Das äussere dieser Neubildung wird vollständig von einer
Corticalis umhüllt, die in ihrem Aufbau der knöchernen Rindenschicht normaler Schädelknochen entspricht. Weiterhin
fällt auf, dass die im Inneren der Neubildung befindlichen Knochenbälkchen eine eher ungeordnete Ausrichtung
aufweisen, die nicht dem Bild einer regelrechten Spongiosa (Diploë) des Knochens der Schädelbasis entspricht. Somit
spricht der mikroskopische Befund für das Vorliegen eines sehr seltenet, gutartigen und offenbar langsam wachsenden
Neubildung im Sinne eines “Osteoms”. If we are really in the presence of an osteoma, this could be of traumatic origin (see
at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteoma). The blows inflicted on Moora may not have damaged only the frontal
part of her skull, but could have had repercussions on the rear and on the Sella Turcica as well. We will see that the girl
suffered, at her death, from tuberculous meningitis, and «Basal skull [where the Sella Turcica is localised] fractures are
closely associated with meningitis with or without CSF [cerebrospinal fluid] leakage […]. We recommend that
M[ycobacterium]tuberculosis should be considered as a likely pathogen in posttraumatic empyema in patients with skull
fractures.» (Jiha Kim, Choonghyo Kim, Young-Joon Ryu, Seung Jin Lee, Posttraumatic Intracranial Tuberculous Subdural
Empyema in a Patient with Skull Fracture, in «Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society», 59, 3, (2016), p. 312 and 313. And
moreover: «Tuberculous meningitis, which is meningitis caused byMycobacterium tuberculosis, is more common in people
from countries in which tuberculosis is endemic», https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meningitis#cite_note-Tebruegge-26.
Young Moora had probably contracted (before or not long after her fractures and somewhere into her body) an active or
latent form of tuberculosis. During the long convalescence from the blows, tuberculosis bacteria went in contact –via basal
skull injuries – with the membrane of her meninges, and perhaps also with those of her frontal and paranasal sinuses.
143 It is possible that the two blows suffered by Moora were for her not only a secondary cause for her tuberculous
meningitis, but they also caused the diffusion of tuberculosis bacteria (active or latent) from her lungs or from an exterior
source to various other parts of her skull: to the mandibular and paranasal sinuses, and to the nose cavity included. About
Moora’ infections, see Gresky et al, Ergebnisse der paläopatologischen etc., p. 69-70. «Inoculation [of tuberculosis in paranasal
sinuses] occurs directly via infected micro droplets or, more rarely, from primary pulmonary tuberculosis. Tuberculosis
of the paranasal sinuses is also contagious as pulmonary tuberculosis. The symptoms most frequently reported are nasal
obstruction and rhinorrhoea possibly associated with headache and/or epistaxis», see N. J Shah - V Prashanth – S. Garg -
N. Velimuthan, Primary Tuberculosis of the Ethmoid and Sphenoid Sinuses - A Rare Entity, in «Bombay Hospital Journal», Vol.
52, No. 1 (2010), p. 88-89. For the tuberculosis of the frontal sinuses, see K. Boussouni, I. Taam, M. Fikri, N. Cherif Elkettani,
MR. El Hassani, M. Jiddane, Tuberculosis of the frontal sinus in an immunocompetent patient, at
https://www.eurorad.org/case/13517. and, many years before, J. Thomas, Tuberculosis of the frontal sinus: report of two cases,
in «Journal of the American Medical Association», 65, 4 (1915), whose abstract (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-
abstract/446100) says: «it is likely the tuberculous lymphatic constitution disposes to the chronicity of empyema and that
postmortem findings agree with this experience, proving the relatively frequent occurrence of accessory sinus inflammation
in the tuberculous. Gleitsmann and Collet have collected from several authors the reports of 310 postmortem examinations
of tuberculous cadavers, in ninety-one of which there was found accessory sinus disease.».
144 «Recent skull trauma potentially allows nasal cavity bacteria to enter the meningeal space. Similarly, devices in the
brain and meninges, such as cerebral shunts, extraventricular drains or Ommaya reservoirs, carry an increased risk of
meningitis. In these cases, the persons are more likely to be infected with Staphylococci, Pseudomonas, and other Gram-

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several weeks since the fracture opens, and generally it is not immediately lethal. But, once the disease has
arisen, the pains are generally very violent, and the patient may often suffer from abnormal behaviour,
hallucinations and epilepsy fits or seizures (the feared epilepsy, that Greeks and Latins calledSacred Disease
because they believed it was caused by malignant spirits or by adverse gods). Those crises may have
strengthened in Moora’s neighbours, if known by them, the certitude that she was an evil witch or a
possessed by evil demons, and therefore a very dangerous person. Once tuberculous meningitis developed,
in the absence of effective therapies ,for sure not available in Moora’s times, it was, soon or later, always
lethal. The girl survived enough to have her skull fractures healed145, but in the absence of an adequate
medical treatment for her meningitis and probably in the presence of low immune defences, she was
doomed146. The disease brought her death, but not peace non forgiveness by her people: his body was
brought to the swamp and sunk there, a sign that her villagers feared her return from the world of the dead.
One last consideration before ending our meeting with Moora: we must of course be grateful to scientists
and artists who try to reconstruct the features of the faces of people sunk millennia ago in the marshes.
However, precisely the case of Moora shows us how hypothetical these reconstructions are. I know as
many as seven attempts to reconstruct her face, whose two in plaster147. In the photos of three of these
reconstructions, which I report below, you can see how, together with similarities, there are also
differences of a certain entity. On the other hand, admittedly, the scientists who made the reconstructions
of the features of Moora’s face based on the reconstruction of her skull have used different
methodologies148. For example, Moora’s hair has been preserved, «though we can’t tell if the girl was
blonde or black-haired: the peat turns all hair reddish», as explained Henning Haßmann.
Two 3D face reconstructions of Moora: left by Kerstin Kreutz; right by
Sabine Ohlrogge, based on the reconstructed skull in the middle. One of two digital reconstructions of
Moora by Ursula Wittwer-Backofen
negative bacteria. These pathogens are also associated with meningitis in people with an impaired immune system»,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meningitis#cite_note-Tebruegge-26. See
145 See Schultz et al., “Moora” – Die “Biographie” etc., p. 111.
146 See Id., p. 112. As far as can be seen, the chronically inflammatory process still existed at the time of the girl’s death,
although traces of healing in the form of reduction of flammable components have already been observed. However, as
German scholars admit, this process can have been at least jointly responsible for the girl’s death. As Ibid note, the course
of this type of meningitis can take a long time. Between the moment she received the blows, the time in which meningitis
attacked her skull through fractures probably still not perfectly closed and the time in which the disease took its mortal
courseit could perhaps even more than a year may have passed. A period of terrible suffering.
147 All reproductions of these reconstructions are provided, on glossy paper, in “Moora” - das Mädchen etc., II, in a pocket
fixed on the internal back cover of the book.
148 See E. Jopp-van Well et al, Gesichtsrekonstruktion der Moorleiche aus dem Uchter Moor, in “Moora” - das Mädchen etc.,
II, p. 123-128.

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1.2.7 The Windeby Boy
A case that has puzzled a lot the scientists is that of the Windeby Boy, so called from the Northern
German location where he was found by commercial peat cutters in 1952. Until a recent time, the body
was called the Windeby Girl, since archaeologists believed it to be the body of an about 14-year-old girl,
because of its slight build149. DNA and anatomical tests showed later the body was actually that of a
sixteen-year-old boy150. The body has been radiocarbon-dated to between 41 BC - 118 AD, and now is on
display at the Landesmuseum at the Schloß Gottorf in Schleswig, Germany. The corpse was naked, but
with a cowhide over one shoulder151. Its head looked to have been half-shaven, and a woollen blindfold
appeared as tied across the eyes at the moment of finding. Recent examinations speculate that the hair
over the half of the scalp was not shaven, but had rather decomposed due to exposition to oxygen a little
longer than the rest of the body. We will see soon why I have some doubts about this hypothesis.
Anyway, I can immediately remember that the “blindfold” was in fact a woollen band, made using the
sprang technique152. It seems to me a very plausible hypothesis that the “blindfold” could actually be the
bandage with which the boy used to keep his hair tied back, but I also think it possible that in the last
moments of the boy’s life it was used for something else. The hypothesis prevailing today among
scientists is that the bandage accidentally slipped from the forehead hair to cover the boy’s eyes shortly
after his death. I believe, however, that one cannot get so easily rid of the hypothesis formulated by the
first scholars who applied themselves to the study of the body found in Windeby: they thought that the
boy had been purposely blindfolded153. More than a century ago, James G. Frazer explained convincingly
the ancient meaning of closing (as in Tollund Man case) or blindfolding (as perhaps in Windeby Boy
case) the eyes of a deceased person. The today general practice of closing the eyelids of a dead appears
to have originated during the prehistory with a particular purpose, even if today it is largely ignored and
misunderstood: the ghost had to be prevented from finding his way back home or to his village. It was a
mode of blinding the dead, that he might not see the way by which he was carried to his last home. The
ancient lore that, if the eyes of the dead are not closed, his ghost will return to fetch away another member
of the household still existed in Germany, Bohemia, and England more or less a century ago. In
Nuremburg the eyes of a corpse were bandaged with a wet cloth. In some parts of Russia people placed
a coin on each of the dead man’s eyes (this last custom was already of the ancient Greeks and Romans),
and Jews a potsherd154.
I suspect that Windeby ephebe could be recognized as a sorcerer or shaman, or simply as a jinx, by virtue
of his sexual inclinations (homosexuality) or his still uncertain, and too androgynous, physical
structure155. The shoulder-length hair could perhaps be typical of the boys if not of the men of his people,
but the band that probably kept them collected was – so we can think – a female clothing attribute, and
149 See Glob, The Bog People etc., p. 114, and still Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods etc., p. 119-122.
150 See Gill-Robinson, The Iron Age etc., p. 228-230.
151 Id., p. 236, and Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 24.
152 «Sprang is an ancient method of constructing fabric that has a natural elasticity. Its appearance is similar to netting, but
unlike netting sprang is constructed entirely from warp threads. Archaeological evidence indicates that sprang predates
knitting; the two needlework forms bear a visible resemblance and serve similar functions but require different production
techniques», https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprang.
153 Aldhouse-Green, Crowning Glories etc., p. 304, hypothesizes that the Windeby Boy (at the time of her article still
considered a Windeby Girl) was blindfolded as a form of insult, humiliation and degradation: «Prolonged blindfolding
serves to rob an individual both of sight and identity».
154 See Frazer, On Certain Burial etc., p. 71.
155 We can remember again that to became a shaman was not a free choice: «According to the abundant literature on the
subject and the experience of investigators in the field, no one voluntarily ventures into the shaman role, nor does a
candidate have time to study the role. Such study, however, is not necessary, because those born into a culture with
shamanistic beliefs know them thoroughly, and when the call arrives, the future shaman can learn specific practices by
close observation of active shamans, including the techniques of trance»,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/shamanism/Selection. See, above all and to learn more, Eliade, Shamanism etc., p. 32,
and, generally, chapters three-four (p. 33-144).

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was perhaps a visible and recognized sign of his particular sexual (and, consequently, spiritual) status156.
Moreover: a birch wand was found placed near the left elbow of the boy’s body. Birch is another magical
plant, sometimes associated with the moon, or the sun and the moon, and in the latter case it is double:
father and mother, male and female. It exercises a protective function, or rather an instrument of the
descent of the celestial influence: hence, the notion of dualism that par excellence belongs to moon’s
manifestation157; hence, its suitability for a “magical” person with an uncertain sexual identity. Again,
still in modern times, birch was considered by the Sudeten Germans and other German-speaking
populations to protect their livestock from the evil magic of witches158. So, planting birch trees in front of
one’s house also served to protect the dwell from witches, according to what was believed in Silesia and
other Germanic lands159. And Robert Graves tells that, in the past, birch rods were used in all Europe to
flog delinquents and madmen, in order to chase from them the evil spirits. The Old Year Spirit too was driven
away by farmers with the help of birch rods160. So, was the birch wand placed over the Windeby Boy’s
body another obstacle opposed to any attempts by his soul to escape from his marshy prison?
In Russia and elsewhere, birch was clearly considered a female tree, because the peasants, in some days,
dressed branches of that plant cut for the occasion as women161. Moreover, in various parts of Europe (for
example in Lithuania), the girls, on particular occasions, were dressed in branches or leaves of birch162. But
elsewhere this custom was reserved for boys163. Indeed, in Brunswick, Germany, a boy dressed in birch leaves
even represented the (feminine) May Bride164. Still in modern times, in Slavic-speaking countries, a sort of
puppet called the Green George, covered with birch leaves and branches (just like a boy, called the same way,
who drove a propitiatory procession in the fields in order to obtain their fertility), is symbolically sacrificed
by drowning165. Relying on all this, one could suspect that in a very ancient age the sacrifice was real, and that
the ambiguous sexuality of certain male teenagers had an importance in the ritual and in choosing of the
sacrificed, as well as the bisexual symbolism of the birch.
Among the Norse, homosexual (or bisexual) behaviours, although object of ridicule, of legal penalties
and public contempt166, were considered proper to some of the gods, among those more strictly connected
with magic and its practices, namely Oðin and Loki. For example, Oðin had magical skills which gave
him great power and which he practiced himself. The Ynglingasaga (chapter 7) explains:
Oðinn kunni þa íþrótt, er mestr máttr fylgði, ok framði siálfr, er seiðr heitr, en af þuí mátti
hannvita ørlog manna ok óorðna hluti, suá ok at gera monnum bana eða óhamingiu eða
vanheilendi, suá ok at taka frá monnum vit eða afl ok geta oðrum. En þessi fiolkyngi, er framið
er, fylgir suá mikil ergi, at eigi þótti karlmonnum skammlaust við at fara, ok var gyðiunum kend
156 Among the objects found sewn inside the inner cape of the Hundremose Woman we can remember that there was a
hairband: perhaps such a female accessory served to (effeminate?) shamans and shamanesses to collect and concentrate
the vital energy of their hair. Once this energy collected, the hairband could become, as in the case of the Huldremose
Woman, an amulet.
157 See Chevalier – Gheerbrant, Dizionario dei simboli etc., heading betulla.
158 See Frazer, The Golden Bough etc., vol. II, p. 55; vol. IX, p. 162, 185.
159 See Id., vol. II, p. 54; vol. XI, p. 20.
160 See Graves, La Dea bianca etc., p. 190. Birch was incompatible with evil spirits: in an ancient English ballad, The Wife of Usher’s
Well, dead children who return to visit their mother in the heart of winter wear birch leaves on their hats, which presumably
warn that they are not evil spirits linked to the earth, but blissful souls on extraordinary leave, see Id., p. 302, note 1.
161 See Frazer, The Golden Bough etc., vol. II, p. 64, 79-80, 141.
162 See Id., vol. II, p. 70, 80, 84 and 93.
163 See Id., vol. II, p. 74-75.
164 Id., vol. II, p. 96.
165 See, for these traditions, A. Cattabiani, Florario. Miti, leggende e simboli di fiori e piante, Milano, Mondadori, 1998, p. 71.
166 «The terms argr,ragr, and ergi all refer to receptive male homosexuality, and carry connotations of cowardice and
effeminacy. They were among the most powerful terms of abuse: under Norse, Icelandic, Swedish, and Langobardian law
one could be outlawed simply for using these words. With this meaning attached to receptive homosexuality, men could
be humiliated by subjecting them to it», D. F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1988, p. 244.

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sú íþrótt167.
Apparently, homosexuals had a role within the worship of the Vanic gods, although perhaps not as
exclusive as someone believes168. The XII-XIII century Christian chronicler Saxo Grammaticus (Gesta
Danorum, VI, v, 10) scornfully reported that some priests of Freyr used effeminate dances and clapping
as the mimes on stage and the unmanly clatter of the bells169. However, Dumézil sees evidence for a
group of priests of Njôrðr and Freyr who were honoured, even if it seem they had engaged in acts of argr
(homosexuality), and who may have coiffed their hair in styles normally reserved for women (as the
Windeby Boy with his woollen hairband), or who may have dressed themselves as women.170. David F.
Greenberg remarks:
… at first [...] stigmatization did not extend to active male homosexuality. To take revenge on the
disloyal priest Bjorn and his mistress Thorunnr in the Gudmundar Saga “it was decided to put
Thorunnr into bed with every buffoon, and to do that to Bjorn the priest, which was considered
no less dishonorable.” Dishonorable to Bjorn, not to his rapists. In the Edda, Sinfjotli insults
Gudmundr by asserting that “all the einherjar (Oðin’s warriors in Valhalla) fought with each
other to win the love of Gudmundr (who was male).” Certainly, he intended no aspersions on
the honor of the einherjar. Then Sinfjotli boasts that “Gundmundr was pregnant with nine wolf
cubs and that he, Sinfjotli, was the father.” Had the active, male homosexual role been
stigmatized, Sinfjotli would hardly have boasted of it171.
But the same scholar had written before:
Alongside these [Tacitus’ and Salvian’s] reports we have others that imply much more positive
views of homosexuality [among German tribes]. Quintilian depicts the Germans as favoring it.
On the day of his baptism, Clovis, king of the Salian Franks from 481 to 511, confessed to this sin
and received absolution for it. Ammianus Marcellinus’s late-fourth-century History has the
Taifali, a tribe associated with the Goths, practicing pederasty with young boys until they earned
adult status by killing a boar or a bear. Procopius implies that the Heruli, whose young men had
to serve their elders until they had proved their courage in battle, had a similar practice. In fact,
men’s societies (Männerbünder) within which pederasty was practiced in connection with the
167 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, ed., vol. I, p. 19. Óðinn knew, and practised himself, the art which is accompanied by greatest
power, called seiðr [‘black magic’], and from it he could predict the fates of men and things that had not yet happened, and also cause
men death or disaster or disease, and also take wit or strength from some and give it to others. But this magic, when it is practised, is
accompanied by such great perversion [ergi] that it was not considered without shame for a man to perform it, and the skill was
taught to the goddesses. Engl. trans., Finlay - Faulkes, vol. I, p. 11.
168 R. Svenson, The Chicanery of Seiðr, 2015, pp. 6-8, part. 7 (https://it.scribd.com/document/374436398/The-Chicanery-of-Seidr-
pdf), believes that too much has been insisted on the equivalence between Seiðr and male homosexuality and that in fact
this character, in its form so decidedly established, was nothing more than a denigration by Christian authors towards the
priests of the ancient pagan cults. However appropriate Svenson’s objections may be, one can imagine that the
“strangeness” of an unusual sexuality could be one of the signs (certainly one among many possible) that indicated an
individual’s magical vocation. Although he refers only to non-European contexts (and although he considers the
phenomenon rare enough outside northeaster Asia), Eliade, Shamanism etc., p. 125 note 36, 153 note 37, 168, 258, 329, 351
and notes 47-48, 352, and 461 speaks of homosexuality and transvestitism as of a striking characteristic of shamanism in
various parts of the world, separated by great geographical and cultural distances. As Id., p. 352, explains, (male)
homosexuality would be the symbol of a union between two cosmological planes – earth and sky – and also of combination
in one and same person of the feminine element (earth) and of the masculine element (sky).
169 The description made by Saxo Grammaticus perhaps resembles too much to those that the scandalized Proto-Christian
authors made regarding the priests of the goddess Cybele: the same reference to the performances of the mimes on the
stage has a marked flavour of classical and bookish culture. However, we should ask ourselves if this cultural reference
was, in his intentions, a deliberate way to distort a spectacle that, what is more, he had known perhaps only indirectly or
if it was the only means he knew to describe an unheard event, relating it to an historic case, albeit known only to learned
clerics.
170 G. Dumézil, Du mythe au roman, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1983, p. 115.
171 Greenberg, The Construction etc., p. 249.

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transition from youth to manhood appear to have been common among the Indo-Europeans […].
Tacitus tells of a quite different practice in his description of the worship of divine twins among
the Naharvali, a people of the northeast region between the Oder and the Vistula, who, it is
thought, later joined the Vandals:
Among the Naharvali a wood consecrated to an ancient cult is to be seen. It is presided over
by a priest dressed as a woman. The gods he tends, it is said, are according to a Roman
interpretation Castor and Pollux: such is the value of these divine persons, and their name is
A leis. They have no statue and offer no sign of foreign influence; it is as brothers, as young
men that they are worshipped.
The kings of the Vandals served as priests in the worship of the two brother-deities172.
But the same Greenberg specifies:
Even a religiomagical context did not secure effeminacy from contempt. In the sagas of an
inconclusive war between two groups of gods, the Aesir and the Vanir, Freya, one of the Vanir,
came to live with the Aesir as a hostage following a negotiated settlement. She taught Oðin, an
Aesir, the magical technique known as seidr: it was by this means that he could fathom the fate of
men and of events still to come, and also to speak to men of their deaths or misfortunes or
illnesses, and also to take away from men their intelligence or strength in order to give it to others.
But the use of this magic is accompanied by so great a degree of effemination (ergi) that men (viri,
karlmonnum) were of the opinion that they could not give themselves up to it without shame, so
that it was to the priestesses (gydjunum) that it was taught.
Except for Oðin and Loki, the Aesir held seidr in contempt. The intensity of feeling against seidr
may be gauged from an episode in another saga, the Heimskringla. When Haraldr of the Shining
Locks learns that his son Rognvaldr Rettilbeini had become a seidr master, he sent another son,
who “burned his brother Rognvaldr together with eighty seidmenn, and this action was much
praised.”173
And finally, Greenberg says even more, which can provide an interesting interpretative key to the story
and the fate of the Windeby Boy:
As war became more important to the Germans, the male warriors and their culture became
dominant, and the status of women declined. Effeminacy and receptive homosexuality were
increasingly scorned and repressed, along with the magical and religious practices associated
with them. The effeminate homosexual came to be identified with the werewolf, the sorcerer, and
the outlaw and was depicted as a foul monster. The English wordsragamuffin, originally the name
of a demon (derived from ragr, effeminate), and bad (originally baedling, effeminate), reflect this
development174.
Nonetheless, the Windeby Boy, while not enjoying the “normal” funeral honours, was buried with respect
into the swamp175. Indeed, if we can believe Miranda and Stephen Aldhouse-Green, even surrounded by
flowers (see note 88). As for the causes of the Windeby Boy’s death, there are different opinions: it was thought
the body had met with a violent death, but a research undertaken by Dr. Heather Gill-Robinson has led to
this theory being disputed. Jarrett A. Lobell and Samir S. Patel wrote that the body «shows no signs of trauma,
and evidence from the skeleton suggests [he] may have died from repeated bouts of illness or malnutrition»176.
172 Id., p. 243
173 Id., p. 244-245. Eliade,Shamanism etc., p. 258, notes that among the Chukchee, although pederasty is not unknown, some
reject, because of shame, a “call” by spirits through homosexuality. Among the Dyaks, on the other hand, some
homosexual shamans take “husbands”, but they become the object of general mockery (p. 351). At another tribe of Dayak,
homosexual shamans are gratified by the derogatory nickname of basir, ‘unable to procreate, impotent’ (p. 352). However,
the condition of manang bali (transvestite shaman among another Dayak tribe) can be attractive, from a material point of
view, to old and childless men.
174 Greenberg, The Construction etc., p. 249.
175 See M. & S. Aldhouse Green, The Quest etc., p. 114-116.
176 M. Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 204.

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Gill-Robinson adds: «… it is possible that the dental infection identified at the right M2 in the mandible may
have contributed to the death of the individual». However, if he enjoyed the name of sorcerer or shaman, we
shouldn’t overlook the possibility that frequent famines (which he himself suffered) could have led his people
to kill him as a valuable sacrificial victim or as a scapegoat, maybe by drowning177. He might also have been
the sacrificial victim of that vegetation renewal ritual we mentioned earlier. Furthermore, even if the condition
of the corpse (very damaged by the action of the machinery that pulled it out of the peat bog) makes it very
difficult to establish the causes of death, the Windeby Boy was found with an oxhide collar around his neck
that could have served to strangle him. But, to conclude, we could wonder if this very young boy (a shaman,
assuming he was such?) did die accidentally he too (an overdose of drugs? an accidental strangulation?)
during a ritual that should have alleviated a prolonged and serious famine that had affected his people and
himself. The flowers scattered around his corpse would have been a sort of emotional tribute to his self-denial.
But the same flowers also fit well with the victim of a vegetation renewal ritual.
1.2.8 Windeby II
The so-called Windeby II, was discovered separated from the first by less than five meters, but he comes
from an earlier era (380–185 BC), and he has nothing to do with the Windeby Boy. Windeby II is a male
body. His bones were decalcified and the clothes he may have worn had dissolved from being in the peat
for so long. But we know that Windeby II’s hair had been cropped178, and he was strangled with a twisted
rope of hazel179. The latter is another important detail: hazel and hazelnuts were believed in medieval
and early modern Germany to offer protection against witchcraft, demons and fairy bewitchment180.
Often it is planted outside the home to do so. In one of the most famous German traditional tales,
Cinderella was said to have planted a hazel in her mother’s grave, where a beautiful tree grew and helped
her fulfil her wishes and protected her. The traditional broom known as a besom, long recognised as one
of the types of broom employed for transport by the witches, is made from birch branches tied to a hazel
handle181. The Cashel Man (2000-1600 BC) and the Gallagh Man (1st century BC), both discovered in
Ireland, for example, had their corpses marked by hazel rods182. Were those corpses considered to have
dangerous magical powers? Or, in their case, were the hazel rods (a symbol of domination over the arcane
and typical wisdom of the Druids in the Celtic countries) only the symbol of their special and sacred
177 See Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods etc., p. 117.
178 See Gill-Robinson,The Iron Age etc., p. 220: «At excavation, Windeby II had hair that had been cut to about 2 cm in length
and described as “stiff”». However, today the Windeby II’s hair are apparently lost, see Id., p. 237: «Although there was a
detailed report of hair from the head of Windeby II (Schlabow 1958c), there is no longer any hair; neither on the scalp, nor
in storage».
179 See Glob, The Bog People etc., p. 119. Glob hypothesizes that the smooth hazel withy round the neck of the Windeby II
man was, as in the case of the Tollund Man’s noose, a sign of sacrifice to the goddess Nerthus. M. Green wonders about a
possible and particular symbolism of the hazel twig garotte and about the symbolic meaning of other parts of the same
plant, see Green,Humans as ritual etc., p. 179-180.
180 See Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, bg. J. Hoops, hs. H. Beck – D. Geuenich – H. Steuer, Berlin, de Gruiter,
1999, vol. 14, p. 36. But Aldhouse-Green,Dying for Gods etc., p. 121 observes that «another individual deposited in a Danish
bog at Undelev, was associated with three hazel rods. […] The presence of hazel may or may not be significant in terms of
ritual activity associated with sacrificial murder, but in this context the words of a lead defixio (curse-tablet) of late Roman
date, dredged up from the river Ouse near the Hockwold Roman temple, at Brandon in Suffolk, is of particular interest».
In fact, there we read that the punishment for the theft of an iron pan is the sacrifice of the guilty «to the god Neptune with
hazel». Certainly, the interpretation of the presence of hazel branches and wands cannot be separated from the context of
their discovery. But in the case of Windeby bodies, the suspicion that hazel was used for an anti-witchcraft ritual remains,
in my opinion, strong. Another magical plant, mistletoe, effective against witchcraft, was believed to be particularly strong
when growing on a hazel tree. It is not useless to remember that Gallagh Man (Ireland) too had been strangled with a hazel
rod (see Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 72; even if Aldhouse-Green, Dying for Gods etc., p. 120 and 124, contemplates
the possibility that he was twisted with willow wands), and this was perhaps done precisely because hazel protects from
“revenants” and black magic.
181 J. Woolf, Britain’s Trees, Pavilion Books, Kindle edition, pos. 493.
182 Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 202. The Cashel Man had probably died from multiple wounds; the Gallagh Man
had died from strangulation.

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authority183? In the first case, they may have been executed on charges of practicing black magic against
their community or against some fellow villagers. In the latter case, they could have been a special
sacrifice, a sacrifice of very important people, to appease the resentment of particularly unfavourable
gods184.
1.2.9 Bodies in couple
Among the bodies of the marshes there are other couples of individuals of the same sex, and apparently
even more strictly tied: among them, the Hunteburg Couple (retrieved in Germany, in 1949, they were
lost during the period of conservation), and the Weerdinge Couple (found in a bog in the Netherlands)185.
The suspicion of a killing in which the possible homosexuality of the two couples perhaps played a role
comes from the poses in which their corpses were found. In the case of the Dutch couple (of the 2nd
century BC - 2nd-century AD), the bodies – both naked – were arranged close to each other, with one of
the two resting on the other’s right arm as in an embrace. As for the other pair (the German one, who
died around 250 AD), the two men were found buried in the same grave and wrapped in cloaks. If the
image here below shows really them in their last pose, they were arranged so that one of the two bodies
has the back of the other, and the resulting pose would appear sexual if not obscene in nature.
The Hunteburg Couple. Today the two corpses are lost and this is a stock photo.
The cause of the death of the Hunteburg couple is uncertain, while the only certainty about the
Weerdinge Couple is that one of the two men was stabbed in the chest and disembowelled. Of course, it
is difficult to assert, in the case they were really homosexual, that the two couples were killed for mere
homophobia – such as that apparently evoked by Tacitus – or because they were suspected of having
attracted disasters by means of the occult and evil powers linked to their particular sexuality. And
perhaps it cannot be completely excluded that at least the Weerdinge couple were a pair of battle
companions who fell together during a clash with the enemies, even if it is true that the military traditions
of ancient Greece (Achilles and Patroclus, the costumes of the Spartans described – for example – by
Plutarch ...) are there to remind us that it is not always easy to distinguish between mere camaraderie
and homosexual practices. But I believe that the hypothesis of the burial of two battle companions fallen
183 See Graves, La Dea bianca etc., pp. 208-210 (C come Coll) and 234-236. The hazel, in Ireland, was one of the seven Lord
trees. According to the laws of the Triads of Ireland, the death penalty was imposed on those who felled two “Lord trees”,
the apple tree and the hazel tree. Hurdles were made with the hazel branches, that is, those artifacts that were often used
to peg corpses on the bottom of the bogs.
184 Aldhouse-Green, p. 49, reports that no bog bodies have been found in the marshes near the Welsh locality of Llyn Fawr,
but masses of hazelnuts, «attesting – perhaps – to the ancient habit of offering foodstuffs as precious metal objects to the
spirits of the lake». It could be so, and we could remember, about this, another Celtic legend (both Welsh and Irish)
regarding a magical salmon, symbol of wisdom and knowledge. This salmon of a Celtic legend (Irish, in truth) had
acquired its wisdom by feeding on the fruits of nine hazel trees that grew next to a well on the bottom of the sea (see Green,
Dizionario etc., under the heading salmone). We could also remember how traces of hazelnuts were found in the guts of the
so-called Lindow Man III, see Holden, The Last Meals etc., p. 80 and 81.
185 See M. Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies etc., p. 203 and 204.

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together can be ruled out for a general characteristic of the bog bodies belonging to the Iron Age: bog
burials were not normal affair: usually, as it has been here repeatedly said, the bodies were burned at
that age, or more rarely inhumated, so that their hugr could soon free himself from the mortal remains
and hurry towards the afterlife186. An honourable cremation is what one might expect for two warriors
honourably dead fighting shoulder to shoulder. Furthermore, especially with regard to individuals of a
certain condition (and the well-groomed nails of the four men seem to show they were such), it was
customary that everyday objects, jewels, and often even living beings, accompanied them in death:
nothing of all this was found next these bog bodies. All this is compatible with the hypothesis of human
(and special) sacrifices, as Glob and Miranda Aldhouse-Green maintain, or with that of judicial
executions: hardly with a normal burial187.
186 See Id., p. 44-45.
187 Glob, The Bog People etc., p. 81, reports: «Two bodies together, a man’s and a woman’s, were recovered at the end of June
1904 at Werdingerveer in the province of Drenthe, in Holland. They lay, naked and on their backs, rather more than 18ins.
Down at the junction between the grey and the red peat. The woman rested on the man’s outstretched right arm. Only his
skin was preserved. He was 5 ft 10 ins. tall and in the region of the heart there was something that looked like a wound.
The woman’s hair was long and very fine and a shiny brown in colour, has was her skin. This discovery is preserved in
the museum at Assen». The posture in which the Drenthe couple was found is the same as the other Dutch (but of the
same sex) couple, that of Weerdinge. In both couples, at least one of the two bodies shows evidence of a serious and fatal
injury. The two couples were buried in a bog, which was rather unusual, and not only because the burial had taken place
there, but also because it was a double burial. Both couples may have been killed for punishment for sexual offenses:
homosexuality in the case of the Weerdinge couple, adultery in the case of Drenthe’s. Their embrace could be a form of
pity for their unfortunate love, but, more probably, also a form of eternal mockery or accusation.