Why did He have to Die?

We have no written records from the time period when the Tollund Man was alive in Denmark, but around the same time in the Roman Empire in Italy there were people who could read and write. One of them was Cornelius Tacitus who wrote down the accounts he heard from people who went to Northern Europe to trade goods. The traders told him about the wild tribes - which is how the Romans regarded them - who lived up north.

Among other things Tacitus wrote: "They hang traitors and renegades in trees, cowards (yellow), combat evaders (afraid to go to war) and unnaturally immoral people they lower into filthy swamps and cover them with branches". Another account written down by Tacitus describes how a Germanic tribe, the Semnonans (from the northern part of Germany), sacrificed human beings.

Both accounts apparently apply to the Tollund Man and many of the other bog bodies. However, Tacitus wrote down the accounts approximately 400 years after the Tollund Man had died. If any of the information Tacitus provides us with is true in regards to the Tollund Man then it is probably the second of the two accounts. Because one thing is certain - the people who hanged the Tollund Man were not on bad terms with him - despite the fact that they actually hanged him! It is impossible to imagine that they would have carried him to the bog and carefully placed him in the sleeping position in which he was found, if they had regarded him as a criminal.

Sacrificial scene on Gundestrupkarret. Big picture. Photo: Lennart Larsen

We cannot say for sure who this god (or these gods) was but the distribution of bog bodies in Denmark reveals that they appear in the areas where people used to dig peat in the iron age. Therefore it is easy to imagine that these people are offerings to the god(s) in return for the peat that was taken from the bog.

A huge silver vat or cauldron, Gundestrupkarret, which was sacrificed to the bog Rævemosen in Himmerland in the northern part of Jutland, displays a sacrificial scene where a person is drowned in a vat. The vat was made in Southern Europe and must have been extremely valuable. But only the best was good enough for the gods, and it was sacrificed around the same time as the Tollund Man was sacrificed.