A Shut Have a look at Beowulf-Period Helmets & Swords, Courtesy of the British Museum

Even when a stu­dent assigned Beowulf is, at first, dis­mayed by its lan­guage, that very same stu­dent could be cap­ti­vat­ed by its set­ting. Whereas that fable­i­cal however some­how each glo­ri­ous­ly and dankly actual­is­tic realm of kings and drag­ons, mead halls and bathroom mon­sters could really feel famil­iar to fan­ta­sy enthu­si­asts, it’s additionally unusual on a deep­er lev­el; this sto­ry, any mod­ern learn­er will really feel, is in no sense a prod­uct of our personal time. In an effort to con­crete­ly envi­sion each the motion of that epic and the cul­ture that gave rise to it, it helps to examination­ine arti­info from across the identical place and time in his­to­ry. To search out such issues, we’d like look no fur­ther than Sut­ton Hoo.

Beowulf is ready within the fifth and sixth cen­turies; Sut­ton Hoo is an archae­o­log­i­cal website whose con­tents date from the sixth to sev­enth cen­turies. Locat­ed “within the east­ern a part of Eng­land, in a coun­ty known as Suf­people, which at the moment was a part of the East Anglian king­dom in Anglo-Sax­on Eng­land,” it con­sists of “a grave made within the mid­dle of a 27-meter-long ship that was buried beneath a gigan­tic earth mound, and inside a bur­ial cham­ber that was positioned within the mid­dle of the ship have been laid out some amaz­ing trea­sures drawn from everywhere in the recognized world at the moment.” So says Sue Brun­ning, cura­tor of the Euro­pean ear­ly medieval col­lec­tions on the British Muse­um, in a single Cura­tor’s Cor­ner movies that professional­vide close-up views and expla­na­tions of a cou­ple of par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant Sut­ton Hoo arti­info.

This hel­met and sword (with oth­er Anglo-Sax­on swords additionally introduced out for com­par­i­son) are asso­ci­at­ed with King Ræd­wald of East Anglia. Beowulf, you’ll remem­ber, opens with the funer­al of the Dan­ish king Scyld Scef­ing, and takes place total­ly in Scan­di­navia. However the sim­i­lar­i­ty between the elab­o­fee orna­males­ta­tion on the Sut­ton Hoo arti­info and that on com­pa­ra­ble objects unearthed in east­ern Swe­den sug­gests a con­nec­tion between these areas in that period, and Beowulf itself could have been com­posed in East Anglia. It takes some imag­i­na­tion to pic­ture this sev­en­teen-cen­tu­ry-old hel­met and sword intact and of their prime, however how­ev­er they seemed, one positive­ly would­n’t have turned down the additional con­fi­dence they’d have professional­vid­ed in a present­down with Gren­del.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Vin­tage Quick Movie in regards to the Samu­rai Sword, Nar­rat­ed by George Takei (1969)

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er a 2,000-Yr-Outdated Roman Glass Bowl in Per­fect Con­di­tion

An Artist Vis­its Stone­henge in 1573 and Paints a Appeal­ing Water­col­or Paint­ing of the Historic Ruins

Bronze Age Britons Turned Bones of Useless Rel­a­tives into Musi­cal Instru­ments & Orna­ments

Hear Beowulf and Gawain and the Inexperienced Knight Learn in Their Orig­i­nal Outdated and Mid­dle Eng­lish by an MIT Medieval­ist

The British Muse­um Places 1.9 Mil­lion Works of Artwork On-line

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­e book.