Word.ws English Dictionary

Tollund Man

Tollund Man proper noun: a bog body found preserved in peat on the Jutland peninsula, Denmark, in 1950; the naturally mummified body of a man believed to have lived in the 5th century BCE during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the pre-Roman Iron Age.

tollund man: a bog body found preserved in peat on the Jutland peninsula, Denmark, in 1950; the naturally...
Image: Grönneger 1, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Proper noun

Tollund Man

  1. A bog body found preserved in peat on the Jutland peninsula, Denmark, in 1950; the naturally mummified body of a man believed to have lived in the 5th century BCE during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the pre-Roman Iron Age.
    • Tollund Man was found eight or nine feet beneath the surface of a Danish bog by two men cutting peat in 1950.1996, Christine Quigley, The Corpse: a history, McFarland & Company, page 237
    • The composition of the meal was a clear indication of the dating of Tollund Man, as the ration of naked and hulled barley closely corresponds to the ratio known to be used around the time of the birth of Christ; linseed and spelt, also found among the stomach contents, do not enter the Danish flora...1998, Christian Fischer, “Bog bodies of Denmark and northwestern Europe”, in Aidan Cockburn, Eve Cockburn, Theodore A. Reyman, editors, Mummies, Disease and Ancient Cultures, 2nd edition, Cambridge...

Origin of Tollund Man

Named after a nearby Danish village, where its discoverers lived.

Questions about Tollund Man

What does Tollund Man mean?
Tollund Man means a bog body found preserved in peat on the Jutland peninsula, Denmark, in 1950; the naturally mummified body of a man believed to have lived in the 5th century BCE during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the pre-Roman Iron Age.
What part of speech is Tollund Man?
Tollund Man is a proper noun.

Words near Tollund Man in the dictionary

  1. tollroad
  2. tollroads
  3. tolls
  4. tolltaker
  5. tolltakers
  6. Tollund Man
  7. tollway
  8. tollwaylike
  9. tollways
  10. tollwoman
  11. tollwomen

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Tollund Man (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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