Sue Takes on the Sutton Hoo Helmet | Curator's Corner S6 E5 #CuratorsCorner #SuttonSue #TheDig

i'm dr sue brunning i'm the curator of the european early medieval insular collection at the british museum and this is my corner [Music] welcome to a very special edition of curator's corner myself and my colleagues behind the camera who stayed after hours at the museum in order to hold an audience with one of the most famous archaeological discoveries ever made and it is of course the amazing sutton hoo helmet the helmet takes its name from the site in suffolk eastern england where it was discovered in 1939 as part of an amazing ship burial 27-meter long ship that was buried beneath the huge earth mound and this burial took place in the early seventh century so we're talking about the anglo-saxon period in england and the helmet was one of an array of grave goods that was laid out inside that ship things like gold and garnet metal work illustrious feasting equipment drinking horns silver from the eastern mediterranean and of course an array of glittering war gear of which the helmet was the key piece there are only about four complete metal helmets that survive from this period otherwise we only really have fragments of others and this one is the most elaborate but i think another reason why it is the favorite object from the ship burial is simply because it has this amazing human face and i think that for a period of time you know 1500 years ago and for people that can seem quite remote from us this helmet this human face gives us a kind of a relatable way into that period and so what i thought we would do with the helmet today is we would try to get inside the helmet try to look out through the helmet's eyes at that world around the people that were wearing and using and encountering this helmet and i think that would be a really fun thing for us to do together tonight because i think that even though this helmet has this rather inscrutable expression it really has an awful lot to tell us the first thing i thought i'd do is actually explain to you a little bit about what you're actually seeing here because it's not potentially as simple as you might expect so what we have here is a reconstruction of the helmet that was made in the early 1970s by a conservator here at the british museum called nigel williams and it was actually something that took a year of his life and the reason that it was so difficult is because the helmet was discovered in hundreds of fragments and that's because the burial chamber at saturn who collapsed at some point and shattered the helmet into all of these fragments and kind of created the world's most difficult jigsaw puzzle and the way that he pieced this together was by matching curvature of those fragments and the thickness of them and finding joins here and there whenever he could to create the kind of piecemeal approach to the helmet and actually pinning those pieces onto a plasticine head and the amazing thing to think about is that he didn't actually really know what the end product should really look like very much because you know it's a it's something that is as rare as i mentioned earlier and so by all of that piecemeal work he actually managed to create the helmet eventually and piece it all back together into this amazing thing that you can see in front of you now and what we have here is a blend of original and of modern pieces so these lumpy parts that you can see all around here and the facial fittings everything that you can see down here those are the original parts of the helmet and the smooth parts that are interspersed here those are the modern reconstructed parts and that's made from a very heavy-duty jute textile that's covered with plaster and the whole thing has been painted this brown colour so that it matches the corroded colour of the iron pieces now you might be wondering why would we use such a fragile material in order to create this reconstruction and the reason is to make it reversible so if we decided in the future based on new research that the reconstruction was no longer as accurate as we would like it to be we can actually take the whole helmet apart without damaging those fragments and start again and in actual fact that has been done one time before so this is the second reconstruction of the helmet the first one was undertaken in the 1940s by a conservator called herbert marion but unfortunately that reconstruction was thought to be inaccurate and so the whole thing ended up going back to the drawing board now we can take a slightly closer look at the helmet itself so this is the domed skull cap of the helmet and we think this may have been made in a single piece because the conservatives were not able to find the tell-tale joins that suggested that the helmet may have been made in segments like other helmets of this type at the back behind me we have the sloping neck guard that protected the back of the neck on each side we have the cheek pieces which protected the cheeks and they're on hinges so they were able to move around over the top of the helmet we have this amazing iron crest which is actually in the form of a two-headed snake there's one head at the back here staring at me and then another head at the front here now the form of this helmet is really interesting because its closest parallels do not actually come from england they come from a part of eastern sweden known as upland which is kind of up to the north east of stockholm there's a place there uh two places called vendel and valciota where other boat barrels have been found bit similar to what we find at sutton hoo and inside those burials we also find other equipment that looks a bit like some of the finds at sutton who so appears to be some kind of connection between this part of eastern england where sutton who is and this part of eastern sweden but the reason that the helmets are quite interesting is because their form their shape actually looks as if it's based upon late roman types of helmet and one of the theories about that is that northern european mercenaries who were fighting in the late roman army brought back this equipment or the idea of this equipment to their homes when they returned after fighting and then locally made versions were made there's also a roman flavor to some of the imagery that we find on the helmet now obviously as you can see it's very fragmentary but originally we have to imagine that the entire surface of the original helmet was covered in rectangular and square and sort of oblong plaques that were all completely covered with repuce or pressed imagery covered the entire helmet was absolutely dense with this imagery some of the images showed human beings and other images showed animals we have a wonderful replica actually in the gallery at the museum that you can come and see a little bit about what it would have actually looked like in its heyday but i still think it's pretty magnificent but one of the scenes on the helmet this one that has a roman flavor shows a mounted warrior trampling over his enemy crushed beneath his horse's hooves and the enemy is just dealing a bit of a parting shot by sticking his sword into the horse's breast and at the back of the horse sort of perched on its rump there's a mysterious third small figure human figure that's grasping onto the horseman's spear and appears to be controlling it in some way now this imagery of the horseman trampling his foe seems to have roman roots we find it in roman art but this northern european version that we find at sutton who and in those areas of sweden which i mentioned seem to have added a couple of details so that detail of the enemy doing the parting shot sticking the sword into the horse and that curious third figure perched at the back of the horse and guiding the sphere the meaning of it is not exactly clear but it appears that those those changes may have been made to make that particular scene more relevant to the northern european uh non-roman people that were consuming it and it's very interesting because it makes a kind of unambiguous imagery of victory into something a little bit more ambiguous both of those warriors the rider and the person that's being trampled appear to be experiencing both victory and defeat at the same time another image on the helmet is a little bit more curious it shows two human beings standing side by side carrying a sword and a pair of spears and the most fabulous headgear it's kind of like this this horned piece of headdress or something like that and each horn ends in two fierce birds of prey heads now we don't really know what these people are representing but we do know that they turn up in the art not just at sutton who but in other parts of northern and northwestern europe as well some people interpret it as some kind of ritual performance the men are not kind of facing each other as if they're warring with each other they're standing side by side and their legs are kicking out so they appear to be moving some people have seen this perhaps as some kind of ritual dance that's connected with traditional that is pre-christian beliefs and cultural practice we really don't know for certain i'm afraid it's one of those enduring mysteries but i think that what we can see with this imagery based on what we've looked at just now is that we can see the imagery is showing us these connections between the past and the present between different regions and cultures different times the helmet is not just home to a lot of strange human beings it's also a veritable menagerie of creatures there are so many animals that are kind of depicted all over this helmet there's lots of interlacing creatures on some of the other panels covering the body of the helmet but the thing i really want to talk to you about today is these facial fittings and this great crest that's running over the top of the helmet so this crest is a functional piece it's made of iron it's very solid it would have been able to deflect any blows but it's actually also a great serpent so you'll be able to see at the front here the serpent's head and it has two of these heads there's also one at the back that's staring at me right now it's a little bit disconcerting so we have this strange two-headed creature not really like anything that you find in nature with these staring eyes made from two garnets and then there are also three other creatures on the front of the helmet they take a little bit of puzzling in order to see them if i invite you to look at the human face the more you look at it the more you might begin to see that actually it's not just a human face it's a flying creature so we can see the head of the creature here coming up to meet the crest of that snake coming down then those eyebrows actually become the creature's wings the nose becomes its body and the little curved mustache becomes its tail and what we're left with is this flying creature that's soaring up front of the helmet and each one of its wings is lined with these red garnets so it's almost as if those wings are flaming away there but at the ends of each one of those eyebrows we also have fours heads with these sharp tusks very strange but balls appear to have some kind of special connection with helmets during this period so two of the other helmets that we have that survive from this period are also emblazoned with ball motifs and the famous early medieval poem beowulf also describes helmets that are emblazoned with boars and those helmets are impenetrable because of those boar motifs now if you're able to come around the side of the helmet here and look at the sides of the dragon like creature and the snake that's coming down the center of the crest here you'll actually be able to see that they're not just passively meeting noses and having kind of like a quite nice conversation they've not just been laid there sides of their faces are full of teeth so they're baring their teeth as if they're almost ready to tear each other apart and what we have here are a set of creatures that are predators they're very difficult to deal with you wouldn't really want to cross them they have these very strong aggressive qualities these qualities actually that any leader of this period would have aspired to and by wearing a helmet like this that is covered with this aggressive imagery he's really saying i am like the dragon i am like the snake cross me at your peril so i'd like us to return briefly to the eyebrows of the helmet because they contain another surprise each one of the eyebrows is lined with red garnets and they're a semi-precious gemstone that was very popular in high status metal work of this period now normally each one of these garnets would be backed with a gold foil and the reason for that would be that the light would shine into the garnet it would catch on that gold foil and then it would reflect back out and glow red i think the best example that i've heard is is a bike reflector now you may remember in my previous video about the sutton hoo sword hilt we spoke a little bit about those kinds of effects and the use of those garnets and those gold foils and it's a similar effect that we're finding with the helmet here but there's something strange going on with the eyebrows of this helmet the garnets on the proper right side this eyebrow here those garnets all have those foils behind them but the ones on the left side here they don't have those foils so in practice generally what that would mean is that the right side would have been a bit more glittery a bit more glowy in certain scenarios such as possibly the flickering fire light of the mead hall and this side where the foils are not present would have been left in darkness so in other words the helmet may have appeared as if it was one-eyed would this be something that was just the result of a repair or could it have been something that was a little bit more deliberate well a really interesting paper was written in the last few years by a couple of experts called paul mortimer and neil price and they argued that this was actually deliberate and their point was what we might be looking at here is a reference to the early god wodan who's better known by his scandinavian name of odin now in norse mythology odin quite famously gave up one of his eyes in order to gain wisdom and that one-eyedness then became one of his defining attributes and it's something actually that's lasted down to the present day so that's why in the marvel movies in those thor movies odin actually has an eye patch so what we might be seeing here is an attempt to connect the wearer of the helmet with wooden so possibly to invoke odin's protection to absorb waden's particular strength maybe even at the extreme to even describe or show the the wearer of the helmet is actually like or becoming woden himself these sorts of ideas start to lead us away from the physical aspects of the helmet towards more sensory considerations about what it was actually like to wear this helmet now we estimate that it probably weighed about two and a half kilograms so it was pretty heavy you know it was you know literally heavy where's the crown you know it's something that you had to bear on top of your head you would never forget that you were wearing it but also we can see that the helmet is completely enclosed so we have all of these guards surrounding the head and that actually would have affected and altered all of your senses so your sense of vision your hearing your sense of smell even your voice may have been altered by the very wearing of the helmet i think everything may have been slightly muffled slightly dreamlike almost and that makes me wonder whether it kind of put the wearer into a slightly different mental state whether you felt like you were transformed whether you felt like you were kind of transported into another world or were becoming another being you were not yourself when you were wearing this helmet and i think those kinds of ideas are just really fascinating and if we flip that over we can also think about what it was like to actually encounter this helmet now i don't know about you but i'm fairly intimidated sitting here and looking at this thing you know it's got such a huge presence and particularly if we think about the fact that these metal helmets at the time may have been quite rare so it wouldn't have been every day that you would see somebody wearing something like this we can also imagine this person wearing the coat of mail armor that was also found in the burial carrying that huge shield which itself was covered with lots of metal wielding the huge sword that i spoke about in the previous episode of curator's corner so this person is completely covered in metal wielding metal they would almost have looked like they were no longer a human being that was made of flesh and blood it's like they're made of metal like there's some kind of impenetrable super being and i think that those kinds of ideas also added an extra power to this helmet this has a bearing on what's probably the most common question that i'm asked about the helmet and that is could this thing ever have been worn in battle well you probably won't be surprised to know that we don't actually know the answer but we can weigh up the probabilities so let's do that together one of the theories is that the helmet is far too ornate in order to have ever been used in battle surely this was some kind of parade helmet but really i think that that's our value judgment we might not necessarily be prepared to risk something like this and damaging it in battle that doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't they had different priorities different ideas different concerns different ways of thinking about things and so that might have led them to use this helmet in a different way than we ourselves might be prepared to use it you know this is a time when this kind of display this kind of imagery is actually really important really powerful and not all of those battles are actually fought on the battlefield so sadly that's almost all the time that we have to spend with this wonderful helmet believe it or not this is only the second time that i've ever seen the helmet outside of its display case in more than 10 years working at the british museum so really this is kind of like a once in a decade experience that we've been sharing so thank you for spending this time with me and with this wonderful helmet and i hope that after everything we've looked at in this episode we can start to put the person actually back inside the helmet and maybe we can start to see a pair of eyes staring at us through those black voids in the face mask there and we can start to really see a personality start to emerge on that very inscrutable face if you've enjoyed my corner then please check out the two other curators corners i've done one about anglo-saxon swords and one about the saturn who sword specifically plus lots of other corners that have been created by my colleagues here at the british museum and please subscribe to our youtube channel where you can find all of those things oh and thank you very much for giving a name to my wonderful foam sword so behold flex caliber

Channel: The British Museum

Views: 937,147

Rating: 4.9500666 out of 5

Keywords: British Museum, History, Art, Archaeology, The dig, Sutton hoo, Anglo-Saxon

Id: zYk0GH5iFYI

Length: 18min 38sec (1118 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021

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[u/Neutral_Fellow]

Though a great number of exceptional objects were found in the mound at Sutton Hoo, none have captured the public imagination like the Sutton Hoo helmet, here, for the first time in 10 years, we got to get the incredibly delicate helmet out of its display case.

The Sutton Hoo helmet is an ornately decorated Anglo-Saxon helmet found during a 1939 excavation of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial.

It was buried around 625 and is widely believed to have belonged to King Rædwald of East Anglia.

The helmet was both a functional piece of armour that would have offered considerable protection if ever used in warfare, and a decorative, prestigious piece of extravagant metalwork.

It is described as "the most iconic object" from "one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries ever made," and perhaps the most important known Anglo-Saxon artefact.

[u/antiquemule]

Just read a review of the Netflix (fictionalized) film on the discovery of the Sutton Hoo hoard. Sounds worth watching. "The Dig" out on 29th of January.

[u/midaugustsun]

I love Sutton Hoo, I grew up near there so always went to visit as a kid

[u/turkishdisco2]

What a great communicator, and what an amazing job to have! I also love the hashtags on YouTube...someone at the British museum has a sense of humour :)

[u/Berkyjay]

Love Sue Brunning! Wish they gave her one of those BBC history shows.

[u/TickTacWhat]

Brits continue to put out quality historical content. Thank you.

[u/kisscumbag]

I am like a dragon. I am like a snake. Cross me at your peril .

[u/KatKat333]

Wonderful explanation and perspective. Thank you!