Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the spring of 1950, two brothers were cutting peat for fuel in a bog called Bjaeldskovdal, on the Jutland peninsula of Denmark, when their spades uncovered a face. It was so fresh, so peaceful, so entirely human that they were certain they had found the victim of a recent murder, and they called the police. They were wrong by roughly two thousand years. The man whose eyes were gently closed and whose lips were faintly pursed, as though he had lain down in the peat only hours before and drifted off to sleep, had in fact died in the pre-Roman Iron Age, some four centuries before the birth of Christ. He is called the Tollund Man, and his serene, uncanny face confronts us across twenty-three centuries with a question the bog has preserved but never answered: who killed him, and why did he seem to go so willingly? A Body Kept by the Marsh The peat bogs of northern Europe are natural preservers of an almost miraculous kind. Their cold, acidic, oxygen-starved water halts the ordinary de...