Fen, Bog and Swamp by Annie Proulx

Author:Annie Proulx
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

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I was once in Banff at the same time as the traveling exhibit The Mysterious Bog People. Central to the exhibit was Richard Neave’s 1994 facial reconstruction of Yde Girl. Every one of the excavated objects displayed interested me, but the background music of an ancient lur, the great bronze horn made by prehistoric people, caused a shiver down the spine; the sullen bray sets up vibrations in one’s bone marrow and we can guess its mournful roars reverberated through the bogs.

Thousands of preserved bodies have turned up especially in the raised and blanket bogs of northwest Europe, the oldest dating back eight thousand years to the Mesolithic. The old way of hand-cutting turfs was slow and finding a body while doing the work was upsetting. The archaeologist van der Sanden wrote:

“The peat cutter who chanced on Yde Girl with her long red hair believed he had come face to face with the devil himself. Utterly dismayed he fled from the site and didn’t return to work until the next day.” Had a lur sounded then the poor man might have fallen insensible beside Yde Girl.

Van der Sanden tells us of one of the most curious collectors of bog body information, the German archaeologist Alfred Dieck (1906–1989), who gathered material on body finds in northern European bogs from 1939 until 1986. Dieck, badly wounded in WWII and taken hostage by the Americans, continued to compile statistics for the rest of his life. He surveyed museum collections, went through files and newspapers, collected samples of hair and clothing and even interviewed peat cutters. His final count was 1,850 bog bodies. He wrote more than a hundred articles and created a vast catalogue and collection of information on bodies disinterred from bogs but, says van der Sanden,

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