He lay about sixty metres out from solid land, under two and a third metres of peat, curled on his side in a foetal position as though someone had arranged him there. Perhaps someone had. He wore a pointed cap of sheepskin and wool, fastened under the chin with a hide thong, and a smooth hide belt at his waist. Nothing else. Whatever else he had been dressed in, if anything, the bog had taken.

The chemistry that kept him is specific and slow. Sphagnum moss acidifies the water and resists its own decay through tough phenolic compounds in its cell walls; below the surface there is almost no oxygen, and in the Danish climate the whole mass stays cold. Skin, hair and soft tissue survive under those conditions. Bone usually does not — the acid dissolves it. The bog is a preservative that works backwards from what a grave normally leaves behind.

The 1950 autopsy concluded that he had died by hanging rather than strangulation, and the evidence was in the marks the rope had left. Furrows ran beneath his chin and up the sides of his neck. At the back, where a knot would have sat, there was no impression at all — exactly the pattern a hanging noose makes and a garrotte does not. A re-examination in 2002 supported the original reading. His cervical vertebrae were undamaged, which is unusual in hangings, but radiography showed his tongue distended, and that is not.

He was about forty years old and measured 1.61 metres as preserved, though the bog shrinks a body and he was probably taller in life. Radiocarbon dating places his death somewhere between roughly 405 and 380 BC, in the Pre-Roman Iron Age.

His stomach and intestines were opened in the 1950s and their contents have been re-examined since with better methods, most thoroughly in an analysis published in 2021 that combined plant remains, pollen, microscopic residues, steroid biomarkers and proteins. Twelve to twenty-four hours before he died, he ate a thick porridge: mostly six-rowed barley, pale persicaria seeds and flax, with small quantities of some forty other cultivated and wild plants. Protein analysis indicates fish was part of the meal too.

The same work found eggs of whipworm, tapeworm and Ascaris. He carried intestinal parasites, as most people in the Iron Age presumably did. Strontium isotopes taken from his femur and his hair — the hair short enough to record only his final year — vary so little that he seems to have spent that year in Denmark, moving at least thirty-two kilometres in his last six months. It is an ordinary life, described in the language of mass spectrometry.

Nobody can say why he was killed. Two readings compete, and the evidence supports both weakly. The case for ritual sacrifice rests on the care taken with him: the deliberate arrangement of the body, the closed eyes and mouth, the particular meal. The case for judicial execution rests on the noose and the simple fact that people in every era have hanged other people for reasons that had nothing to do with the gods.

What is certain is that he did not die alone and unnoticed. Someone put the rope on him, and someone carried him out into the bog and laid him down with his knees drawn up. Denmark has yielded more than five hundred bog bodies and skeletal remains from the Iron Age. Whatever this was, it was a practice, not an accident.

Here is the part visitors are rarely ready for. In 1950 nobody in Denmark knew how to conserve an entire body of waterlogged organic tissue. The forensic examiners made a hard call: preserve the head properly, and let the rest go untreated. The body duly desiccated and its tissue disappeared. In 1987 the Silkeborg Museum built a replica torso and limbs around the surviving skeletal material, and that is what he lies on today.

The head, though, is entirely his. It is the reason Seamus Heaney — who read P. V. Glob's study of the Danish bog finds and wrote a sequence of poems out of it — put "The Tollund Man" into his 1972 collection *Wintering Out*, setting an Iron Age killing beside the sectarian dead of the Troubles. Margaret Drabble used him as a satirical mirror for Thatcher's Britain in *A Natural Curiosity*. The Mountain Goats and The Darkness have both written songs about him. A great deal has been projected onto a face that has been asleep since before Rome had an empire.