The story of this helmet has little to do with power and faith. But I was so glad to see it, because the previous time I had come to the British Museum it wasn’t on display. It acquired iconic status for me because it’s on the cover of my dual-language edition of Beowulf translated by Howell D. Chickering, which I had studied in college (though not Gilgamesh). And a few years ago, as we were driving from Aldeburgh down to Glyndebourne in pursuit of glorious opera, we had driven right past the Sutton Hoo National Trust site and I forced my friend to go in with me and take a look, where the archeologists have reconstructed this burial of an Anglo-Saxon king from East Anglia from the 600s:
The idea of the burial mound was of course familiar from the barrow-wights of The Fellowship of the Ring, and I’m happy to say I later got involved with lots of them out in the world of Wiltshire crop circles. Here I was, standing outside the Sutton Hoo mound (or a reconstructed one, so we could see what it was like):
Getting back to MacGregor, in his typically helpful way he points out that the king buried here was rich indeed, and connected to powerful trade routes, since there were materials in his grave that had come from India or Sri Lanka. (Doesn’t explain what those were.) It’s a ship burial, which was probably a Viking custom...though not as wild as the flaming ship put out to see, à la Tony Curtis in The Vikings: “Prepare a funeral for a Viking!” And because of the way the ship would have been buried on land, an acid bath presumably disintegrated the body that was buried there, along with other organic items. The helmet is in pretty good shape, all things considered; their helmet-ologists at the British Museum have built a reconstruction of what they think it might originally have looked like, and this one is exhibited nearby:
Anyway, the Sutton Hoo burial, unearthed in 1935, was definitely the northern version of King Tut’s tomb. It’s from that site that they learned most of what they know about the people who lived in England between the Romans and the Normans, the people that gave us Beowulf. MacGregor’s special guest here was the Irish poet and Beowulf translator Seamus Heany, who reads a bit of his own translation (I think it’s a passage where Hrothgar gives Beowulf a helmet as thanks for his having killed Grendel). I don’t know Heany’s translation; I’ve always been a bit puzzled that an Irish poet, who presumably draws his poetic ancestry from the Celtic tradition, would have this connection to the Anglo-Saxon, since they were the enemy. Although...the Anglo-Saxons were enemies of the Vikings, which is also a bit puzzling, since they would have spoken similar languages and worshipped similar gods. So I don’t know. Which is more English? Beowulf, a Christian poem about ancient Danes that became popular among the Anglo-Saxons in England; or the Arthur material, French poems about pseudo-historical Celtic/Roman folk that inspired a lot of readers a thousand years after the facts were all forgotten?
:(
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