Murder Victims or Executed Criminals?
The violent, irreverent nature of the deaths suffered by some of the bog bodies; their lack of grave goods- or clothing, evidence of them fighting and being subdued and their marginal, isolated burials, are believed by some experts to suggest they were murder victims. The case for murder is simple: the victims were robbed and stripped of their valuables. Blows to the head and defensive knife wounds occurred as they fought off their attackers who then killed them and dumped the bodies in the bog to hide their crime.
However, the lack of clothing on the bodies is probably because cloth often rots in the bog. Robbers are unlikely to have taken a tunic but left a valuable leather belt and hat on Tollund Man’s dead body. Neither would they have stripped Old Croghan Man but overlooked the intricate leather armband decorated with metal La Tene style motifs he wore to his grave. The mode of death is also often too complicated. Murder, therefore, is not a satisfactory explanation for the majority of the bodies.
The next possibility is execution: of criminals or those who were socially suspect or marginalized. Tacitus provides us with a description of execution amongst the German tribes, which contains elements that find their echo in the deaths of the bog bodies. “The punishment varies to suit the crime,” he explains. “A traitor and deserter are hanged on trees, the coward, the shirker and the unnaturally vicious are drowned under swamps under a cover of wattle hurdles (Germania 12).
Tacitus was writing in the first century AD about an area roughly corresponding with the regions on mainland Europe where bog bodies have been found: Germany, the Netherlands, and southern Denmark. Many bog bodies such as Tollund Man, Lindow Man, Haraldsvar Woman and Yde Girl show evidence of strangulation, which could equate to a traitor’s death. All the bodies fit the notion of ‘drowning’ by nature of their burial- but some were pinned under hurdles. Old Croghan man was anchored in place by staves through his arms. Haraldsvar woman’s killers staved her through the knees and elbows with hurdles that curved over her body and strapped her in place.
However, in all cases, this securing occurred after the main death for drowning was not the primary cause of death. While it is natural that methods of execution varied over tribes, there are other elements to the deaths that suggest that something more than a sentence was being carried out.
The first clue that something more was going on is the significance of the bogs themselves. For bogs may have been marginal, but they were also sacred places.