She was lying on her back. Her clothes - a leather cape and three woollen garments - had not been worn but laid over her, and she had been pinned into the peat beneath hurdles of branches and wooden poles. The bog had done what bogs do: acid and airlessness had held the whole skin envelope intact, the internal organs with it, the joints still articulated under skin tanned deep bronze by the peat. Her hair ran to more than fifty centimetres. Her teeth were complete. The men who lifted her out in 1835 were looking at a face, not a skeleton, and the shock of that is the reason the story went where it did next.

Denmark in the 1830s wanted a Viking queen very badly, and here appeared a woman preserved well enough to be one. The saga account of Gunnhild's death in a bog fitted the circumstances closely enough to convince the court, and the king ordered a sarcophagus worthy of royal remains. It is easy to be superior about this from a distance of two centuries. In 1835 nobody had a method for dating a body in the ground; there was no stratigraphic sequence in common use, no radiocarbon, nothing but texts and inference. A saga was the best evidence anyone had.

J. J. A. Worsaae, a pioneer of archaeological stratigraphy, disputed the identification in 1842 and argued from the deposit itself that she belonged to the Iron Age. He was, in the short term, outgunned. Steen Steensen Blicher had already published a novella in 1836, Gravhojen, parodying a mistaken archaeological find, and yet by 1841 he had written Dronning Gunhild, a lament for the dead queen in the bog - the poets could shift a national story faster than a young stratigrapher could. What turned the public was comedy. In 1846 the playwright Jens Christian Hostrup staged En Spurv i Tranedans, in which Gunnhild's ghost hands a scheming tailor a ring that blinds everyone around him to what he is doing. The satire landed, and it amounted to the first widespread public endorsement of Worsaae's position. Formal proof waited until 1977, when radiocarbon dating placed her death in the 5th century BC, around 490.

Physicians in 1835 put her age at about fifty and noted that she showed none of the degenerative wear, arthritis in particular, usually found in remains that old. By 1979, when doctors at Arhus Hospital re-examined her, she had dried and shrunk to 133 centimetres; working from the original descriptions they estimated her living height at about 150. A CT scan of the cranium revised her age down to roughly forty. A re-examination in 2000 by Lone Hvass, Miranda Aldhouse-Green and the forensic science department at Arhus found unhusked millet and blackberries in her stomach, and a faint groove around her neck. She had also taken a lancing wound to the knee joint, possibly from one of the poles that held her down. Cremation was the ordinary rite of her time and place; she did not receive it. The careful placement, the garments laid over rather than on her, the marks on the neck - taken together the evidence points to a woman who was killed deliberately, and who was meant to stay in that bog.

She lies today in a glass-covered sarcophagus in the Cultural Museum in central Vejle, a short drive from the ground she came out of. Denmark and the wider Jutland peat country have yielded more than five hundred ancient bodies by conservative counts, the oldest reaching back to around 8000 BC and most belonging to the centuries between 500 BC and AD 400 - Tollund Man, Grauballe Man, Elling Woman, the Borremose bodies. Only a handful have been studied as closely as she has. Her particular distinction is not preservation. It is that a whole country looked at her, decided who she was, built her a royal coffin, and had to be argued out of it one poem, one play and one radiocarbon result at a time.