The English Fen is a real insight into the understanding This world and the other world in the mind of the Anglovolk. It is the Bog and marsh, Water and land interacting three dimensionally, the waters are muddled if it were. In ancient western euro beliefs (Germany to Ireland). The Western European folk would make offerings to these bogs, It would range from weapons to people (See Lady of the lake & The Bog people).

The Image of Warriors of Old offering their swords to the bog screams the Arthurian Legends of the Lady of the Lake, Perhaps they believed that their weapons where loaned to them by the Spirits of the waters and they are repaying a debt? Or “take this sword from which it has spilled blood, and give me bounty”?
It could be a number of things but it gives us a clear glimpse into the mindset and view regarding such marshes.

Throughout Northern and Western Europe Archaeologists have found huge deposits of Weapons ranging from Spears to Swords, The first question of course was this a battle ground but what changes is the fact that it is not a battle ground or a horde of enemy weapons to be salvaged later on as suggested by some but instead it is a clear Religious rite, Here is an offering to the Supernatural forces of the land that our Ancestors were fully aware off even so much so that this continued after the pagan days and the dawn of Christianity.

“Vimose or Allese Mose on Funen in Denmark is
one of the classic weapon deposits partly excavated
by Conrad Engelhardt in the 1860s, but the find history goes back to at least the 16th century, where a
ship’s anchor was located in the bog 3. The National Museum of Denmark received the first objects
from Vimose in 1848 as a result of the increasing
use of peat as fuel, which lead to large-scale peatdigging in the Danish bogs. In the following years
the National Museum gathered almost 1,000 artefacts prior to the first archaeological excavation
in 1859.” – ‘From fertility rituals to weapon sacrifices
The case of the south Scandinavian bog finds’ -Xenia Pauli Jensen

The largest hoard of Bronze Age objects ever found in Britain, at Isleham in Cambridgeshire, included more than 6,500 objects from about 3,000 years ago. The objects included ingots from metalworking, so Archaeologists wondered if it was deposited by a blacksmith who planned to retrieve and recycle the bronze later.

But other objects in the Isleham hoard tell a different story, in particular the tools and weapons found, some of which were deliberately broken before being put inside the large ceramic pot.

Deliberately breaking hoarded objects was not unique to the Isleham hoard, either. Why break your objects before storing them somewhere for safekeeping? It is in my mind that these are clear offerings of highly prized objects.

This is clearly expressed in the English Myths, Such in case of the Lady of Lake and also you can make the argument that maybe this was to subdue certain spirits? In Beowulf the Monstress Grendel lived in a bog did she not?

In 2010, David Yates and Richard Bradley published a study of 30 finds of Bronze Age metalwork in East Anglia’s Fenland area. They found Individual weapons intact in rivers, especially rapiers from the Middle Bronze Age and swords from the Late Bronze Age. However groups of bronze items still mostly weapons, were discovered instead in pools or bogs.

“What is striking is how many different kinds of deposits were associated with water, and just how varied those findspots actually were,” wrote Yates and Bradley. “Even a major find like the Isleham hoard was buried in a ditch terminal beside a former channel and a concentration of burnt flints.”

There has long been a deeply-rooted relationship between water and the underworld: think of Norse warriors being put into longboats and being burnt at sea or in a lake.

Maybe weapons were broken and deposited after a warrior’s death: for example, to allow the “killed” weapons to travel along with the spirits of the dead. Did our ancestors see the water ways being a portal to the Land of the Dead? The liquid that seeps into the Earth? The underworld if it were? Do our spirits seep into the earth with water and thus water evaporates, do we as the dead ascend to the skies? through this motion? Is this what our Ancestors believed or knew?

Ritual and Symbolism is key to the Human Condition as it was a Thousand years go and as it is now.