The Windeby Puzzle by Lois Lowry

Author:Lois Lowry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

History

I confess. It was excruciating for me to write the final paragraphs of Estrild’s story. Yet it had been clear, from the beginning, from the body found in the bog, how the story would end for her.

I found it intriguing, and I enjoyed going to the old documents, to the photographs, to read the theories and then to put my own imagination to work on the puzzle of the first-century girl. We all know what to do with puzzles, of course—during the recent pandemic a lot of us found our dining room tables covered with jigsaw pieces. It’s just a matter of finding the bits of color, the hints and clues that allow us to put the pieces together. And that’s what I did.

But once I did that—connected the pieces and imagined her story—Estrild became real to me. I admired her ambition and smiled at her stubbornness. She had a remarkable grit, much more than I had had at thirteen. When the time came for her to die, I had to look away. I didn’t accompany her into the bog. It made me too sad.

Could this imagined story have been, in fact, the real story of the Windeby Girl? My guess is no. Although we admire tales of early feminism and strong young woman (Joan of Arc from the fifteenth century has even become a saint!), the rules for females in that very early history, the first century, the Iron Age, were probably never challenged. Women had a role: a hard one, that of having many babies, burying most of them, nourishing the ones that survived, making their garments and their food, teaching their daughters the necessary skills, and feeding the husbands and growing boys who would go off to hunt the meat and protect the villages and fight the tribal enemies. They probably complained now and then. But there wouldn’t have been time or energy or any encouragement for even the gentlest rebellion. So Estrild’s story is a made-up one. It is fiction. I hope you rooted for her anyway.

But that isn’t the end. Along the way I discovered a new and important puzzle piece, something that would reshape the narrative.

The true story of the bog body that had been known as the Windeby Girl changed quite dramatically in the early twenty-first century when a professor of anthropology at the University of North Dakota, Dr. Heather Gill-Robinson, was given a grant to study some of the peat bog mummies in Germany. It had been fifty years since the Windeby Girl had been unearthed. Now new tools—DNA studies, CT scans, 3D imaging—were available to scientists.

Eventually, as a result of her research, Dr. Gill-Robinson reported that in fact the body discovered at Windeby was a boy. She theorized that he was approximately sixteen years old, in poor health, suffering from malnutrition, and likely had died of natural causes. His long blond hair had not been shaved, but probably had been wrenched from his head by the peat-cutting equipment that had uncovered him.

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