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It has been fifteen years, so I must allow for the possibility that I remember it wrong.

What I remember of that encounter on a cold day in London is this:

After wandering through an exhibit on Yemeni silver and the cringe-worthy display of the Elgin marbles (in front of which there was a stand with pamphlets, each printed with a statement of the British government's inimitable right to everything they have ever stolen), I had made my way to the second floor of the British Museum, where the ancient art of those difficult islands lives. By the time I stood in that gallery on that day, I had populated a long mental list of things I desperately wanted to see: the Battersea shield; the Sutton Hoo hoard; (I had already seen the Alfred jewel at the V&A).

What I remember is that, after gazing delightedly upon the organic curves of the shield dug up from the Thames, and admiring a pile of interlocked torques wrought from wires of gold, silver, and electrum, I had moved on to a case of more modest Iron Age finds, bits of wood and non-precious metal, when abruptly I was confronted with something that looked like a bundle of sticks and leather, in the same case with several other objects. I startled; this was another thing I had come to see, but I had somehow expected to find it—or rather him, or at the very least them—in his own room, or in his own display, perhaps one with more than a tiny card to indicate that this was Lindow Man, the remains of a human individual found in a bog near Manchester in 1984.

LM died at the turn of the last millennium, when he was about twenty-five. His face was neatly barbered and manicured and his hands didn't show signs of doing much hard labor in life. He died an unpleasant death. He was certainly bashed in the head and the back of the neck; he might have had his throat cut; he might have been strangled; he might have been drowned. With the exception of some of the blunt force trauma, it's not always easy to tell which injuries happened before death and which were inflicted by his many centuries in the bog.

His demise has popularly been interpreted as a human sacrifice, for a variety of reasons: the remoteness of the place he was found in the era of his death (though the Irish and the Britons built extensive wooden trackways across their native bogs from the Neolithic onward); the excess of force used to kill him (except, again, it's not clear how many of his injuries happened before his death and how many were depredations of the great weight of moss which gradually collected over him); and, I think most compellingly, the parallels with other folk who have been found in the bog after deaths of seemingly ritualized violence, particularly Grauballe Man (whose throat was cut so dramatically that he was almost beheaded) and Tollund Man (who was put in the bog with the noose used to hang him still around his throat) in Denmark.

(Except, of course, that both of those men died some three hundreds years before and some seven hundred miles away from LM, a distance and a time which it's hard to put into context. Does the death of a person in Virginia in 1700 tell me much about the culture of a person who died in Massachusetts yesterday? Well, maybe? Given the soft tissue preservation of faces and hair, it's more possible to guess at the ethnicity of many bog bodies than most sets of bones. Scientists can sample the contents of their stomachs and use strontium analysis to see what they ate and where, geographically, most of that food came from. But—to return to our U.S. context—what if that Virginian spent most of their time with Algonquin-speaking natives or was part of a marginal German-speaking Christian sect? What if the person who died yesterday was a convert to Islam or Buddhism? There are vast amounts of culture which are not biologically detectable in someone's cadaver.)

When I look at the out-of-focus photos I took of what is left of the guy, I see that my memory is confused: LM was in his own case, though there are two other cases directly adjoining it, one which seems to have a book in it, and the other which I can't see. The placard says LINDOW MAN, with no obvious explanatory or educational text. There is no other warning that one is about to see a corpse, let alone a corpse which looks like it's been hit by a bus. The acid of the peat bog dissolves the bones but tans the skin, hair, and organs, leaving a sort of bag of a person, who is most often flattened by the gradual deposition of more spaghnum moss atop their corpse through the next hundreds of years. (Tollund Man is perhaps the most striking counter-example. His preserved face looks like it is sleeping, the only distortion his cheek smooshed against the ground like a pillow.)

I remember that I didn't like it: it seemed cold and cruel and totally consonant with the kind of institution who would print a pamphlet telling the entire nation of Greece to go fuck themselves.

It has been seven years, and so I must allow that I don't remember things so well. I was in Ireland for one week, to see friends and reassure myself that I was still a person, even with my then-new jobs in retail and food service, and I found my way to the Irish National Museum of Archaeology in Dublin. (Previously I had only visited the Irish National Museum of Country Life, in Castlebar.)

I remember the approach to the two gentlemen more than I remember their actual bodies. They were sequestered in their own gallery, and within that room were two small enclosures, each one curved like a shell, or the inside of an ear: a secret. Standing inside each was like entering the side-chapel of a cathedral: quiet, dark, clearly sanctified.

I didn't take pictures.

I think of the bodies of Catholic saints, those pieces of bone and hair and occasionally blood which render all things which touch them holy, and I think of how, historically, one indication of eligibility for sainthood was a body remaining intact, inviolate after years in the tomb.

I think of the encounter between an Irish medieval peasant, cutting turf to burn as fuel, and an unexpected hand, dark, leathery, nails smoothly shaped, lines of the knuckles perfectly preserved, protruding from the peat, and I wonder where that hand fit, in a mythology of saints and things which came before saints.

Or would that peasant have been suspicious and hostile of that beautifully manicured hand, as most Irish people have been of the visible markers of kingship and domination scattered throughout their landscape – Norman towers and English manors which have been left to crumble? Irish archaeologists have put forth the idea that both Old Croghan Man (in life a giant, well-fed man of over six feet tall, now survived by only his legless, headless torso) and Clonycavan Man (a much slighter fellow, who nevertheless had styled his hair with a pomade made of resins imported from the far-away Mediterranean) were not hapless victims of sacrifice, but contenders for kingship who lost their bids and were done away with. They experienced horrible violence, but they may well have meted out the same violence before they met their ends.

(I admit, shamefully, that I do not remember Gallagh Man at all, though I took a photo of the informational placard outside where his body is displayed. He was discovered in 1821 by the O’Kelly family in County Galway and then regularly exhumed as a sort of sideshow attraction for visitors over the course of the next eight years; his remains are now skeletal.)

Seamus Heaney, in his poem Punishment, addressed a bog body from Windeby, blindfolded, scalp shaven, and naked, as “little adulteress,” murdered for some sort of sexual impropriety.

Except the famous Windeby body might be malnourished boy of 12 or 13, and the blindfold might be a headband that slipped down over his eyes. I, too, can imagine a horrible fate for him. Maybe he did die as part of a ritual meant to propagate some supernatural force, but how was this child chosen to be discarded? Because he was disabled? Because he seemed small and effeminate? Because he had already been the victim of a crime?

We don't know.

It has been a few weeks, and already my memory is a little shaky on all that was said. I had worked six days in a row and dragged myself out of bed on a Saturday morning (not early enough to bicycle to the event, it must be said) to attend Readercon, a local-to-me convention for speculative fiction books. One panel on the schedule had stood out to me: The Bog Body Motif in Trans SFF. Speaking were authors Ann LeBlanc* and Sonya Taaffe; moderating was dave ring.

They started with Izzy Wassterstein's poem, “Came Back Wrong.”

“A cold wind slices at the bog,

but you barely notice, your skin leathered

over bone & sinew.

The moon's an old friend.”

The bog transforms.

The bog transforms a long-ago death into a person whose face we can look into. It preserves some hint of the choices made by an individual over who they would become: hairstyles, tattoos, piercings; but that hint is fragile, and when a body is raised from the bog, there is a limited amount of time to keep oxidation and evaporation from claiming what little knowledge we might have.

The bog transforms an ending into an eternal life of sort, though one wonders what the people who became the bodies would think of the world they were excavated into. Whatever they were—and we cannot know! we cannot know!— they have become something else entirely in the present, whether freakshow exhibit or revered ancestor.

And I, with my too-literal brain, burst into the questions section of this incredibly poetic and nuanced panel with perhaps an inevitable corollary to the bog bodies I had seen, in this time when the federal government of the United States is trying to legislate the trans body out of existence, with a comment:

I have trans friends who had fled the United States to start new lives in Ireland, to be transformed by the peaty soil into a new kind of citizen. I have no trans friends who have tried the same feat in the United Kingdom, a country where J.K. Rowling and a host of other self-made monsters have made it their life's work to purge the right of transformation from the legal and social framework.

I have done so much reading for this newsletter (see the attached bibliography), hoping at some point that my hazy thoughts would become clear and I would understand where the lines of transformation, of autonomy, of gender, of memory, of honor braid together coherently. I've brought up bog bodies in every conversation I've had for the past two weeks (and I'm sorry to everyone who knows me in person! Welp!)

One of the articles which raised the most interesting questions, but unfortunately did not give me any clearer answers, was Jerry O'Sullivan's “Ethics and the Archaeology of Human Remains,” from the Journal of Irish Archaeology, in which the author tries to wrangle with the question of what to do with human remains uncovered in excavation by surveying multiple professions. He is mostly concerned with presumably Christian remains taken up from Irish churchyards, but the questions he asks are particularly stark when applied to Iron Age bog bodies.

What did the conscious people who once occupied this flesh want to happen to their bodies? What did they believe awaited them? What did the people who put them in the bog believe and want?

O'Sullivan clearly imagines a context in which those who bury a body are those most invested in that person's last wishes; a child burying their parents, a spouse burying a spouse. How do we react—how do we intervene—when the person with the shovel wants to debase the dead, wants to misidentify and misrepresent who they were? Most of the bog bodies were buried naked, with virtually nothing to identify what kind of lives they led, stripped of items which would tell us their profession, their kin ties, their personal histories. We are left only with the puzzle of “Came Back Wrong”:

“. . . I harbor a fantasy:

after I die, carve ritual marks into my flesh,

bury me in a bog. Let my body

be a puzzle they'll never solve. As it is for me.”

How do we honor the bodies of people we don't understand?

*whose splendid cheese-heist-in-space novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese, I had the great good fortune to blurb.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Not all of the sources I read ended up in this newsletter, but for the sake of completeness they're here.

Aldhouse-Green, Miranda J. Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe's Ancient Mysteries. London: Thames & Hudson, 2015. Note: I don’t really recommend this one, but I skimmed it for basic accounting of facts about the most famous bodies.

Connolly, R. C. “Lindow Man: Britain’s Prehistoric Bog Body.” Anthropology Today, vol. 1, no. 5, 1985, pp. 15–17. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3032823. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

Jones, D. Gareth, and Maja I. Whitaker. “The Contested Realm of Displaying Dead Bodies.” Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 39, no. 10, 2013, pp. 652–53. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43282856. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

“Kingship and Sacrifice: Iron Age Bog Bodies and Boundaries.” Archaeology Ireland, 2006. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/archirel.35.1. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

Lobell, Jarrett A., and Samir S. Patel. “Bog Bodies Rediscovered.” Archaeology, vol. 63, no. 3, 2010, pp. 22–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41658776. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

O’Sullivan, Aidan. “Exploring Past People’s Interactions with Wetland Environments in Ireland.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature, vol. 107C, 2007, pp. 147–203. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40657902. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

O’Sullivan, Jerry. “Ethics and the Archaeology of Human Remains.” The Journal of Irish Archaeology, vol. 10, 2001, pp. 121–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30001673. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

Pearson, Mike Parker. “Lindow Man and the Danish Connection: Further Light on the Mystery of the Bogman.” Anthropology Today, vol. 2, no. 1, 1986, pp. 15–18. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3032903. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

You wouldn’t know it, but I also write romance novels! You can see what I’ve written on my website!

Readers and pals: do you have any thoughts on bog bodies from the European Iron Age?

In contemplation,

Sharon