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The Braak Bog Figures are two wooden figures discovered in a peat bog in Braak, Schleswig-Holstein, Northern Germany. Carved from forked branches, the figures are human-like and are 275 cm. (male) and 230 cm (female) in height. Discovered in 1947, the figures have sockets for arms (the appendages are missing) and pebbles may have been used for their eyes. The sexual organs of the figures are emphasized. The breasts of the female figure are individually set and the male's figure's genital had been "struck off". Scholars have debated what the objects represent, when the figures were produced, and what people created the objects.

The figures are one of several anthropomorphic figures in a "variety of forms" unearthed from the Neolithic and into the Middle Ages. The majority of these figures date to the Iron Age and the Roman period. Of these figures, Malcolm Todd refers to the Braak Bog Figures as the "most imposing" of the figures discovered.

Fokke Sierksma (1960) comments that as the figures were found together in a peat bog, near a pile of stones containing fragments of pottery and evidence of fire, "together with the considerable dimension of the figures, and the combination of a male and a female figure, make it virtually certain that they represent deities of Northern Germanic tribes. These located the residence of their gods in peat bogs, and regarded the sacred union of a fertility god and a fertility goddess as prerequisite for the continued propagation of life in all its forms".

Writing in 1975, Hilda Ellis Davidson comments that these figures may represent a "Lord and Lady" of the Vanir, a group of Norse gods, and that "another memory of may survive in the tradition of the creation of Ask and Embla, the man and woman who founded the human race, created by the gods from trees on the seashore". In 1988, examining the find in the context of a similar figures in the region reaching back to the Neolithic, Davidson comments that then-recent pollen analysis "suggests a much later date in the Viking Age, and they might have been erected by Slavs living in the area".

Malcolm Todd (2009) comments the Braak Bog Figures and other similar bog figures have a "significance difficult to determine but should be related to the supra-mundane and perhaps specifically to the presiding deities of fertility and war".

See also

• Bog body, human bodies placed in peat bogs
• Hörgr, attested in Old Norse sources as a pile of burning stones in North Germanic religious practice

Notes

1. ^ Sierksma (1960:168).
2. Davidson (1988:17).
3. ^ Todd (2009:108).
4. See Davidson (1988:15-19) & Todd (2009:108).
5. Davidson (1975:88—89).
6. Davidson (1988:17-19).

References

• Davidson, H. R. Ellis (1975). Scandinavian Mythology. Paul Hamlyn. ISBN 0-600-03637-5
• Davidson, Hilda Roderick Ellis (1988). Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe: Early Scandinavian and Celtic Religions. Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719025792
• Sierksma, Fokke (G. E. van Baaren-Pape Trans.) (1960). The Gods as We Shape Them. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Todd, Malcolm (2009). The Early Germans. 2nd edn. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781405137560

• 1947 archaeological discoveries
• Archaeology of Germany
• Iron Age art