We’ll never have the actual execution date, of course, but April 26 in 1952 was the date that researchers in Jutland hauled out of a peat bog the 3rd century BCE body of Grauballe Man, so spectacularly preserved that his fingerprints could still be taken. His throat slashed, Grauballe Man is thought to have been subjected to either an execution or a ritual sacrifice, and his body dumped into this oxygen-sparse slough so congenial to natural mummification.
The Grauballe Man
By Seamus HeaneyAs if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weepthe black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heellike a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan’s foot
or a wet swamp root.His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.
The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throatthat has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.Who will say ‘corpse’
to his vivid cast?
Who will say ‘body’
to his opaque repose?And his rusted hair,
a mat unlikely
as a foetus’s.
I first saw his twisted facein a photograph,
a head and shoulder
out of the peat,
bruised like a forceps baby,but now he lies
perfected in my memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassedon his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.
These same bogs have yielded other eerily well-preserved time-travelers from antiquity, including Tollund Man (believed to have been hanged in the 4th century BCE) and Elling Woman (believed to have been hanged in the 3rd century BCE). Peat bogs ranging from Ireland and England to Germany and the Low Countries have overall yielded numerous other specimens, ranging up to 10,000 years old — quite a few of them victims of evident violence.
On this day..
- 1831: Atanasio, shot for some buttons
- 1916: Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Patrick McIntyre and Thomas Dickson, by Captain Bowen-Colthurst
- 1947: Hisao Tani, for the rape of Nanking
- 1875: William Hole, family tragedy
- Feast Day of Popes Cletus and Marcellinus
- 1784: Angelo Duca, primitive rebel
- 1926: Shao Piaoping, journalist
- 1945: Sigmund Rascher, feared science
- 1843: Ewen Cameron, black bean leftover
- 1901: "Black Jack" Tom Ketchum, who was left in three pieces
- 1861: Paula Angel ... but why?
- 1478: Pazzi Conspiracy attempted ... and suppressed