Episode summary:
I travelled to Silkeborg in Denmark to get a glimpse into the past and see the best-preserved human on the planet: Tollund Man. His body is about 2,400 years old and was found in a peat bog in 1950. He is so incredibly well preserved you can see many features we would recognise in a living human. Tollund Man is one of the most amazing cultural things to see and do in Denmark and it is well worth a visit to the museum to say ‘hello’. Just be prepared as it can be an exhilarating experience seeing him lying there just on the other side of the glass.
Listen to a podcast about communing with the long-dead Tollund Man and found out how he was killed. I hope it inspires you to visit wonderful Denmark.
Transcript – S1 E4: Communing with the long-dead in Denmark
This week, especially for a ghostly Halloween, we’re communing with the dead in Denmark.
I’m the last visitor to the Silkeborg Museum on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula. The woman managing the place is putting the souvenirs away as she prepares to close up for the afternoon. She sings softly as she works. The only other tourists in the place thank her and leave.
I’m here to fulfil a lifelong passion: to visit the best preserved human on the planet. He is the remarkable 2,000-year-old Tollund Man. He lies on a bed of peat in a sealed and humidity-controlled glass box. The lights catch his features brilliantly. The folded, coal-black skin, the smooth, expressionless face, the slight furrow on the brow, the nose bent just slightly to the right. He lies on his left side, naked, save for a pointed cap made from sheepskin placed on his head and tied under his chin by leather straps. A leather belt runs round his waist. And around his neck is a braided leather rope tied at one end… in a noose.
Tollund Man, it turns out, had been hanged.
I sit on a wooden stool with my face next to the glass, looking at him lying still on the other side. I don’t know his real name. I don’t know anything about his family or his beliefs. I don’t know if he was a good man or a rotter. All I know is what forensic science has been able to tell us: that he died aged about 40, about 2,400 years ago, in the Nordic Iron Age, and his last meal consisted of seeds and a grain porridge.
The scientists were also able to measure his height at 5′ 3″, or 161 centimetres, but he shrunk a little over the years, which is, of course, perfectly excusable for anyone over the age of 2,000. He was found in 1950 by locals from the nearby village of Tollund as they dug for fresh peat in a bog called – and apologies in advance for my shocking Danish accent – Jæleskovdal.
Global celebrity
The discovery of this man’s wonderfully preserved body prompted both a police investigation and worldwide media coverage. The coppers soon concluded that this was not the missing teenage boy from Copenhagen they were looking for, but someone much older, more than 2,000 years older. But he was so impeccably preserved as to fool people into thinking he died a few weeks earlier rather than two millennia.
Since his discovery, he has inspired poets and artists and both terrified and fascinated me from an early age. But now I’m here with him, I’m a little tongue-tied. What do you say to such an old corpse? Do you tell him about the weather? Or the price of grain? Or maybe how bad the traffic’s got in Silkeborg over the past 2,000 years?
What’s so remarkable and so striking about Tollund Man is his head. It’s blackened and shrunken, but otherwise it holds the face of any Caucasian man who might drive your bus, give you change in the supermarket or come to clear your gutters of leaves in autumn.
It’s a true window to the ancient past. His eyes and mouth are closed and he has the most placid look on his face. He has the countenance of saints whose meek aspects are remembered reverentially in stone busts and triptych paintings. It’s hard not to believe he’s taking shallow, imperceptible breaths. At any moment he looks like he might awake from his long sleep, prise open those time-sealed eyes and cough the earth from his throat.
The noose initially led historians to believe he was little more than a common criminal. Hanged maybe for stealing food or abusing a local chief. But then they looked again. He had not been carelessly thrown in the ground but carefully placed in his boggy tomb, curled deliberately into a foetal position.
He was found with the cap on his head, the belt tied around his waist and the noose carefully arranged. There is some reverence to this burial which has persuaded many scholars to conclude that Tollund Man was perhaps a human sacrifice to the gods of the Iron Age.
The power of the dead
Suddenly the lights in the room go out. They’re on a timer to reduce light damage to the body. My pulse begins to race. I can’t hear the woman in the museum shop any more. I wonder if she’s left me in here by accident, locked up, gone home.
Am I alone with the Tollund Man? I feel an unrecognisable power overtaking me. And suddenly I’m out there on the blasted heath of Jæleskovdal with the Tollund Man as a North Sea wind whips over the flat land and rakes our bare ankles. He casts his arm over the bog as if explaining to me its significance. He’s animated, his face full of expression. I feel cold, vulnerable, surrounded by ghosts, pressed down upon by the weight of ages. It feels like one of those dreams that you fight to escape from but are frozen to the spot.
I want to move and trip the sensor to reignite the lights in the room. I want to call out to the woman in the shop. I want to run back out into the glorious summer sunlight and walk on the warm grass and lie by the river and feel the present Danish day all around me again. But I’m somehow restrained here. My heart pounds with fear and exhilaration as Tollund Man sleeps on through time.
© copyright Matthew Brace
