Martin Carver, Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings?<\/em><\/p>\n The travel gods were against us. The trip to Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, usually takes about two hours from London. But on this day in March, our journey took over three hours and involved a ride to the end of the London Underground, a coach, two trains, and a twenty-minute trudge uphill.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n https:\/\/vine.co\/v\/iXPgzJEXAqi<\/p>\n Sutton Hoo is the most important early medieval archaeological site in England, an Anglo-Saxon burial mound which is today complemented by an exhibition hall and tearoom complex owned by the National Trust. The famous ship burial buried underneath the largest of many barrows at the site in the seventh century were discovered by Edith Pretty and Basil Brown in 1939. These treasures have since been on display at the British Museum<\/a>, gifted by Edith to the nation in an act of generosity not matched before or since. But it wasn\u2019t until the new millennium the National Trust opened the Suffolk site officially to the public for the first time.<\/p>\n So. Why had Dr Josh Davies and I coerced a group of third year Beowulf<\/em> students to spend the best part of their Saturday on public transport to go to Sutton Hoo? The thought did cross my mind several times: on the overly-hot coach; on the creaky, power-socket-free slow-train; once more when the hail came down between Melton station and the National Trust site.<\/p>\n https:\/\/vine.co\/v\/iXPHTQTVHHL<\/p>\n Well, the story goes that, in a crowded village hall at Sutton Hoo in August 1939, Beowulf<\/em> (an Old English poem extant only in a tenth-century manuscript that you can see at the British Library), was called upon as evidence at the coroner’s inquest. The inquest had to decide whether or not the treasure had been put into the ground deliberately, never to be recovered. If it had been, then the treasure would belong to the finder. The poem, and particularly its final scenes in which the hero is buried in a barrow surrounded by amazing wealth, seemed to prove that the buried goods at Sutton Hoo were indeed never intended to be reclaimed by their owner, and so they belonged to Edith Pretty. Since then, Beowulf<\/em> and Sutton Hoo have become ‘the odd couple’, as Roberta Frank has dubbed them, related to each through historical and academic circumstance and practice, even if their precise relationship is unknown and unknowable.<\/p>\n https:\/\/vine.co\/v\/iXPpeIuzUle<\/p>\n This semester, conversations in our Beowulf<\/em> class have looped and centered and dodged around questions of authenticity (what do we mean when we talk about the original poem, when we talk about a text supposed to have come from an oral tradition perhaps hundreds of years before it was copied into the tenth-century manuscript in which it survives? what do we make of editorial \u2018corrections\u2019 to the manuscript?); of materiality (what remains? what can the damaged, messy manuscript tell us? how might looking at the objects found at Sutton Hoo help us?); and of how we might know about the past through poetry (was it written down as history, as fantasy, as propaganda?).<\/p>\n We’ve wondered about how we might not be able to talk about the \u2018Anglo-Saxon World’ with any certainty if we use the poem as evidence. But we\u2019ve agreed that we can talk about what the poem<\/em> thinks, what the poem<\/em> wants, and we can explore the physical form(s) the text now takes. We can think through what the poem has to teach us about history, time, memory and identity, and we can examine what its translation and study today might tell us about the Anglo-Saxon world and the modern imagination.<\/p>\n https:\/\/vine.co\/v\/iXPTKZ0L3W0<\/p>\n
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