On the morning of 6 May 1950 the Danish peat-cutters Viggo and Emil Højgaard were working in the Bjældskovdal bog near Silkeborg, central Jutland, when they uncovered a human face two and a half metres below the modern surface. The face was so well preserved — closed eyes, light stubble, faint smile — that the Højgaard brothers were convinced they had found a recent murder victim. They notified the local police. The police called the National Museum of Denmark.
The archaeologist P. V. Glob of Aarhus University arrived the next day. What the Højgaards had found was an Iron Age corpse approximately 2,400 years old.
The body
Tollund Man (named for the nearby village of Tollund) was about 40 years old at death and 161 cm tall. He had been deposited in the bog naked except for a leather belt and a sheepskin cap. The cap was tied under his chin with a chinstrap. Around his neck was a braided leather noose, two cords thick, with a sliding knot. The noose had not been removed before burial. It had cut into the skin of the neck, leaving a clear ligature mark.
He had been hanged.
The body was deposited face-down in a foetal position. The eyes had been closed and the mouth had been gently shut by someone before burial. The deposition was careful. Whoever had hanged him had also arranged him in the bog with what looks, in the archaeological record, like respect.
Carbon-14 and what was in his stomach
Glob’s team carbon-dated the body in the 1950s and again in 2009 with refined techniques. The death date is between approximately 405 and 380 BCE — the late pre-Roman Iron Age. The radiocarbon precision is better than for almost any other bog body because the rope, the skin, and the stomach contents can be cross-checked against each other.
The stomach contents were exceptionally well preserved by the bog’s anaerobic chemistry. Tollund Man’s last meal was a porridge of approximately 85 percent barley and oats with admixed flax and knotgrass seeds, eaten between 12 and 24 hours before death. The 2021 reanalysis by Karin Frei and colleagues at the National Museum of Denmark identified microscopic fish vertebrae and (separately) eggs of the parasitic worm Trichuris trichiura, indicating a level of intestinal-parasite infestation common in Iron Age agricultural populations.
The meal was substantial but ordinary. It was not a ritual feast.
What the bog deposition means
Approximately 500 bog bodies of the Iron Age period are known across Northern Europe. They cluster in northern Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, England, and Ireland. The pattern of deposition — naked or near-naked, often hanged or strangled, often deposited in a bog rather than buried in a cemetery — has produced two competing interpretations.
The traditional ritual sacrifice reading (most prominently in Glob’s 1969 The Bog People) draws on the Roman ethnographer Tacitus’s Germania, which describes the Germanic peoples drowning convicted “cowards and unwarlike men” in bogs as punishment. Under this reading, the bog bodies are either human sacrifices or judicial executions of social outsiders.
The competing prosaic reading, more common in 21st-century scholarship, observes that bog burial may simply have been one available burial method for individuals (executed criminals, suicides, the socially marginal) who were excluded from cemetery burial for reasons that may not have been religious in any strict sense.
Either reading is consistent with the physical evidence. Tollund Man’s face does not tell anyone which.
He is on display at the Silkeborg Museum in central Jutland. The head is original; the body shown alongside the head is a reconstruction. The original body shrank dramatically during 1950s conservation, before modern bog-body preservation techniques were developed. The head was treated separately and remains essentially as the Højgaard brothers found it.
His expression remains the small, calm half-smile that convinced the peat-cutters they had found a recent murder victim, seventy-six years after the discovery and approximately 2,420 years after the hanging.