Veronica, Wendy, Pippin, Catherine, Catriona, Susie, Andrea, Jane, Mary, Elizabeth, Georgina, Miranda, Prudence, Ileana, Elsebeth
Recently I have read, and been fascinated by, P.V. Glob's The Bog People, published in Denmark in 1965 (titled Mosefolket). It was translated by Rupert Bruce-Mitford and published in the UK in 1969. It is a very good-natured book about those people whose bodies have remained in remarkable condition for centuries, due to the extraordinary preservative qualities of peat bogs.
It quotes a phrase from Gilgamesh more than once – 'the dead and the sleeping, how they resemble one another' – and it is particularly eerie when that quote alone is used as the caption for one of the many black-and-white photographs, one of the 'Tollund Man'. He died two thousand years ago, and he does indeed look contentedly asleep. His skin and hair and bones and clothing are for the most part so well-preserved that, they said, the police could have identified him by fingerprint, were he in their database.
It's a lovely book, I recommend it; the detail and the telling is wonderful – as is Glob's respect, even admiration, for those ancient people whose bodies he has worked with. The treatment of their customs, however brutal or violent they may have been, is accompanied by a sense that this twentieth-century man of science, and his colleagues, are still, in their attitude to the supernatural, not so different from their Early Iron Age objects of study. Once or twice he manages to recount an anecdote about ghosts or gods in a way which seems detached (rather than skeptical), but adds a gentle shrug at the end, as if to say 'there is no reason not to hold this true'. It's definitely the case that many of the black-and-white images reproduced in the book are haunted, or are of haunted things.
'The Tollund man sacrificed to the fertility goddess, Mother Earth,
who has preserved him down to our day' (Glob's caption to this image)
The dedication to the book is a curious square of small-caps text; fifteen first names, arranged in three columns – and there follows a kind of preface, entitled 'An answer to a letter', which tells the story of the book's inception. 'An answer to a letter' might just as well be the subtitle of the book itself:
Dear Dr. Glob,
We were very interested in the Tolland man. We learned about him in History...
– the letter was from a class of girls in a convent school in Suffolk. The girls received some further material in the post and wrote to him again, in response. Two years later, Dr. Glob ends the preface of his book with a covering letter to his correspondents – finally a sudden steep curve of references to time, his time, their time, and to time passing, before the most relevant and sizeable timespan of all:
Dear young girls,
Home again ... I find your enthusiastic letters on my desk ... I have written the 'long letter' in the following pages for you, for my daughter Elsebeth, who is your age, and for all who, like you, wish to know more about antiquity than they can gather from the short accounts and learned treatises that exist on the subject. But I have all too little time, so that it has taken me a long while to finish my letter. However, here it is. You have all grown older and so perhaps are now all the better able to understand what I have written about these bog people of 2,000 years ago.
Yours sincerely,
P.V. Glob
13 August 1964
So it could be said to occupy a very specific category of children's literature: not just a book for children, not just a book for (even addressed to) specific, named children – but a book which forms part of a real correspondence with those children. However, The Bog People not being published in England until seven years after the girls wrote the first letter, they may well have been women by then; and he recognizes in that paragraph that he may at least be writing a 'young adult' book.
I wondered yesterday about those women – whether they had ever met up, or whether any of them had continued the correspondence privately. It might have made an interesting hour of radio to bring them together, I thought.
In none of the write-ups (that I could find) of Anne Youngson's 2018 novel Meet Me At The Museum is it mentioned that the starting-off point is fact, not fiction. The novel is written as a correspondence:
When Tina Hopgood writes a letter of regret to a man she has never met, she doesn't expect a reply. When Anders Larsen, a lonely museum curator, answers it, neither does he.
Tina Hopgood is supposed to be one of the women who wrote as a schoolgirl to Professor Glob, trying many years later to get in touch with him. He died in 1985, so she receives a letter from 'The Curator', and the novel (I haven't read it) proceeds from there.
From an interview with the author on the Los Angeles Public Library website:
LAPD: Is there a book that changed your life?
AY: I would have to say The Bog People by Professor Glob, the book that led to Meet Me at The Museum. It was only by delving into the detail around the Tollund Man that I was able to see my way to creating the story, which has given me a chance to have another profession, as a novelist, instead of sinking into idle old age.
(Youngson took a creative writing course, and wrote this book, which was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Medal.)
It is interesting, because the character of Tina Hopgood mentions in her first letter 'thirteen of my classmates': so she is clearly supposed to be one of the original fourteen girls. Of course none were in reality called Tina and her name may even – I think, looking at the dedication page – have been deliberately chosen by Youngson so as not to resemble any of them. So it's as if, in the world of the novel, one of those original schoolgirls – we can't know which – is not there. But Tina is, making up the fourteen.
This is not a criticism; as I say, I haven't read the book. I am just enjoying over-reading one very tiny aspect. It's a sequence I find quietly eerie: fourteen girls, intrigued by a photograph of a two-thousand-year old body, spark up a correspondence with a Danish professor; the correspondence gives rise eventually to a strange, beautiful book – I'm calling it a children's book – which, many years later, is the inspiration for a work of adult fiction. And in that fiction, likely quite by accident – one of those original girls must be assumed missing, replaced by a fiction. I'm reminded of the girl in The Witches by Roahl Dahl who is trapped in an oil painting, grows old there – and one day is simply gone.
In 2004, Christine A. Finn – a journalist, author, and research associate at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford University – set up a multi-media installation in the crypt of St. Pancras church. She
invited some of the girls and Sister Simon, their former teacher, to revisit [their] experience.
[Christine A. Finn, 'Bog Bodies and Bog Lands', in Images, Representations and Heritage: Moving beyond Modern Approaches to Archaeology, pp. 315-332]
The work featured some of the original photographs used in the book, as well as poetry by Seamus Heaney, whose Bog Poems (1975) was also directly inspired by Glob's 'long letter'. Finn's installation was
… [a] short film piece ... [with] digitally captured photos taken by [Lennart] Larsen, scanned from Glob's book ... set against music which mimicked the human breath. To this mix came the genuine responses of the former schoolgirls and their teacher, who were seeing the images for the first time in half a century. In this case they remembered their first glimpses, and recalled that earlier inspection of the Tolland Man's bristled chin, the peaceful look of his visage.
This 'peaceful look' seems to be behind everything: we can see it on the cover of the book, and it recalls Glob's claim regarding the Tolland Man on page 27 of the book: 'Majesty and gentleness still stamp his features as they did when he was alive'. It is in this paragraph that he again quotes Gilgamesh: 'the dead and the sleeping, how they resemble one another.' As Glob says, though, 'The air of gentle tranquillity about the man was shattered...' when they discovered the noose around his neck. Finn's essay seems to discuss the occasionally dissonant utility of such images of the dead: she refers to specifically to another photograph of a bog body in Glob's book, the Graumalle man, whose 2000-year old facial expression, if it is anything, is surely one of agony.
Next in her account of the event, Finn answers another question:
... there was another story in tandem. The women revealed that they did not know a book had resulted 10 years after they had written to Glob nor that the work was dedicated to them and to Elisabet.
It feels in the spirit of Glob's insistent mentions of time passing, in his covering letter to the slightly-older girls, to query the figure here of '10 years' – although perhaps it is not very fruitful. He wrote the book in two years, and it appeared in English translation in 1969. I wonder why he didn't send copies to the school. I would love to hear how the women felt about it.
And, in fact, Finn mentions too that the reunion of these women did after all make it onto the radio. Her installation, and the women's reactions to it, were featured in 'The Glob Girls', broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in 2005. But I enjoyed the book, a lot; and I enjoyed finding out about these things, and wonder if there might be even more to the story.