"Glob’s archaeological study plays a key role in the history of bog body reception and in the archaeological imagination that is attached to bog bodies. It is the indisputable ur-text, a site from which fiction writers, poets, and visual artists have culled material for representing and re-configuring the cultural afterlives of bog bodies. Seamus Heaney, for example, used Glob’s book as source and inspiration for his early bog poems. I first read the The Bog People in Danish when I was a teenager and lived outside Copenhagen. Glob’s mixing of scientific-archaeological discourse and mythological-poetical narration made me want to be an archaeologist. I became a literary scholar instead but I owe to Glob (and Heaney) the initial inspiration for writing Bodies in the Bog."

Recommended by Karin Sanders, Professor of Scandinavian and author of Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination.