That's how I came across the Man of Tollund. Vandercam discovered him thirty years ago in Silkeborg Museum in Denmark and has been haunted ever since by this man born nearly two thousand years ago who now, via Vandercam's work, has become an obsession of mine too.
Tollund is built up round the body and face of this man who was hanged, them dumped in a peat bog, the honoured victim of some ritual sacrifice. I was fascinated by the vagaries of this man's fate : having been compelled to roam the world beyond, he suddenly reappears in the promised light, and his initiatory solitude unlocks fundamental human secrets-secrets whose importance is still fundamental for us today. What I wanted to do was to transpose this man's fate into dance, opting for figurative abstraction rather than a picturesque and anecdotal approach. Michèle Noiret
The characters
Tollund is the slave of Odin or Woden, the cruel Germanic god who has insisted on Tollund's life being sacrificed so that he can assert his own power -or, we might perhaps say, so that he can confirm his own existence.
Tollund accepts his sacrificial role so that he can take on some of the god's characteristics -in death his face wears a mask of calm serenity. So what is this inner certainty? What is it rooted in?
Tollund moves forward in time as if to deny that there is any sort of gulf between life and death.
Does his serenity stem from his awareness that Odin can exist only through his, Tollund's sacrifice, and that one day he will re-emerge into the light of a new life, whereas Odin will have become a shadow that haunts the world of men no more? Does Tollund express the conviction that the life of men will outlast the life of the gods they 've invented?
I see his serenity as a shout of hope from beyond the grave, like a life impulse that is rooted in death.
Odin, a god riding his steed across the heavens, is an incredibly equivocal entity, a character who cannot be pinned down an described in any clear-cut way- he is, and at the same time he isn't, everything he is made of. This elusing being is a past master at metamorphosis, changing his colour, his shape, his appearance.
He is both poet and soothsayer, possessing the power to decide wether mortals shall live or die. As a poet, he is skilled with words, with speech that has the power to invent and confer immortality. This contradictory and polymorphous creature is mortal and weak - and thus eminently human. Indeed he is only too human, embodying the whole gamut of beings -from the basest to the most sublime.
From time immemorial men and women have always been the same - a mixture of beauty and barbarity, of love and cruelty, and so I see Odin as being a contemporary of ours; Beyond his death we can indentify with him and his alter ego, the Man of Tollund, our fellow creature.