Heaney ( 1972: 36) captures this beautifully in ‘The Tollund Man’: the fen’s ‘dark juices working / Him to a saint’s kept body’. The slightly glossy, madder-brown hue produced by the peat thus lends such remains a sense of antiquity, even permanence. Yet the bog has inevitably altered and stained these remains they are described by Low as ‘rolled up in their own leather’ (cited in Anderson 1879: liii) or ‘tanned and dried in a remarkable manner’ (Lukis 1892: ix). They are ‘entire and uncorrupted’ (Leigh 1700: 65), found as ‘in a common posture of sleep’ (de la Pryme 1870: 983), ‘as fresh as if death had occurred the preceding day’ (Gear 1883, cited in Cowie et al. From the earliest antiquarian letters to the poetic evocations of Heaney, the words used to describe bog bodies conjure their remarkable yet unsettling power.
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