another bog girl

some leathery lecher

Matthias Schulz in Der Spiegel suggests the bog bodies were executed for violations of the moral decency laws, “shameful acts” like (according to Tacitus), cowardice in battle and “lewd” acts (which Schulz identifies for us as male homosexuality). I wonder if the Uchte girl was a coward in battle or a male homosexual. In fairness to Schulz, he does also say the disabled were thus dispensed with, and people also simply sometimes fell in.

So much for all that eerie human sacrifice to pagan gods.

The body was sliced to pieces by a peat harvesting machine. In Atwood’s story, the peat-cutter accidentally sliced off the bog man’s feet, but human manual labor does less damage than the machinery does.