The Windeby Girl, discovered in northern Germany, is one of the many bodies discussed in Bodies from the Bog. Photo taken from the cover.

The Landesmuseum of the Schloss Gottorf on the outskirts of Schleswig, Germany, displays an enormous Viking ship and a number of complete bog bodies ("moorleichen" in German) as well one partially preserved head.

The two most famous bodies are known as Windeby I and Windeby II. Windeby is an estate near Schleswig that contains a small bog. In 1952, the owners decided to cut the peat and sell it for fuel. Shortly, workers discovered the body of a fourteen-year-old girl who became known as Windeby I. Although the peat-cutting machinery had already severed one of her legs, a foot, and a hand, work was stopped immediately to study the discovery.

P. V. Glob described the girl's position in the peat:

She lay on her back, her head twisted to one side, her left arm outstretched.... The right arm was bent in against the chest, as if defensively, while the legs were lightly drawn up, the left over the right. The head, with its delicate face, and the hands, were preserved best: the chest had completely disintegrated and the ribs were visible.... The hair, reddish from the effects of the bog acids but originally light blond, was of exceptional fineness but had been shaved off with a razor on the left side of the head.

Her eyes were blindfolded with a strip of cloth woven from brown, yellow, and red threads. She had drowned in the first century AD and her death was not an accident--her body was anchored by a large stone and branches from a birch tree. Glob imagined her being "led naked out on to the bog with bandaged eyes ... and drowned in the little peat pit, which must have held twenty inches of water or more."

A short time after the discovery of Windeby I, a man's body (now known as Windeby II) was found sixteen feet away. Unlike Windeby I, he had been strangled first and then placed in the bog. Sharpened, forked branches had been jammed into the peat around him to make sure that he stayed put.

The three other bodies displayed in separate dioramas are men from Damendorf, Rendswühren, and Dätgen. All are named for the areas where they were discovered and, like Windeby I and II, all were sacrificed. But the most interesting item discovered from nearby peat bogs is probably the one from Osterby: a man's head, which was wrapped in a cape made of deerskin. Although peat workers searched for its body, none could be found, and scientists speculate that the Osterby head alone was used as a sacrifice. It has a full head of hair, arranged in an unusual style: one section of hair was twisted and woven into a figure-eight knot--without the use of a fastener.

©James M. Deem. This account is taken from How to Make a Mummy Talk (Houghton Mifflin, 1995; Dell, 1997)