I Read The Sutton Hoo Story and Pretended it Was About Beowulf

My favorite artifact is Beowulf's helmet!

 My latest Goodreads review is just me fangirling over Sutton Hoo!

The Sutton Hoo Story: Encounters with Early England by Martin Carver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you followed a rabbit trail from Beowulf or wanted a deep dive after visiting Room 41 in the British Museum, this book is where you want to go next. It's the least dry in-depth book on an archaeological site that you're going to get (yes, it's still a little dry, but you should read the book about Spiro Mounds that I'm currently trying to slog through--it's printed in typewriter font, for pete's sake!), and also the most comprehensive you'll get in under 250 pages, with a history of both the site and its excavations, and discussion of the finds in which they're put in historical and cultural context.

I loved this book so much that I carried it around my house and forced family members to listen to me read random passages out loud to them.

The Anastasius platter, engraved with the name of Roman Emperor Anastasius.

The book’s order is a little confusing at first, although I understand why Carver organized it the way he did. You obviously want to hear the fun story of Sutton Hoo’s “discovery” in 1939 first, and then you might as well continue its history from there so you can cover the other excavations, but when you get to the most recent excavation, to understand the archaeologists’ findings you have to pop back into Anglo-Saxon times and start the history all over again.

Even though I came to the book mostly to learn more about the grave goods, themselves (Beowulf and Room 41 were my gateway archaeological drugs!), I actually found it just as interesting to read about the politics of an archaeological excavation, and fascinating to read about the thoughtful reasoning involved in planning Carver's excavation of the 1980s-1990s. Basically, the idea was to come up with a research question, figure out the absolute minimum amount the site needed to be excavated to answer that question, then excavate only that amount, leaving the rest of the site undisturbed to wait for a future time with better technology and another interesting research question. Seen in this way, the 1939 Basil Brown excavation’s research question was probably something like, “What treasures are inside Mound 2?” I like Martin Carver’s research question of “How did England begin, and what did that society look like?” much better!

You can also see the really great shield in the background. I didn't take a ton of personal photos of the Sutton Hoo artifacts, because you can download high-res images free for personal use from the British Museum's online collection database.

Because I'd expected to slog through a dull tome (looking at you, Spiro Mounds book!), I was even more delighted to find Carver's book full of vivid little details and discoveries that bring the Sutton Hoo site to life. One of my favorite parts of the book is the tiny detail that when the archaeologists studied the site in the 1980s, the mounds were permeated with rabbit warrens--just chock-full of warrens! This led them to speculate that at some prior point, rabbits were probably put there on purpose because the mounds made a favorable habitat, and then the residents could essentially farm them.

You know what that is just exactly like?!? That terrifying chapter of Watership Down when Hazel and Fiver go to live on what is essentially a rabbit commune. There’s tons of food and no predators, and all the rabbits are LOVING it, but all the time Fiver is all, “DAAAAAANGER! I sense danger here!”. And they act like they don’t believe him, but at the same time the rabbits from this warren *are* hella weird, and come to find out a local farmer is feeding them and protecting them and also eating them whenever he’s hungry. JUST LIKE SUTTON HOO!!!

I appreciated having lots of illustrations in the book, although I did often go off-road and look up more info about things that Carver mentioned. He's got a few photos of specific grave goods, for instance, but it's so easy to just pop over to the British Museum's online collection site and pull up a really detailed image of each thing that tbh an in-book photo isn't really necessary. The most helpful and unique illustrations were site maps, line drawings of possible burial scenes (OMG the burial scene of people carrying the coffin of a young man to his open grave, with his perfectly alive bridled horse standing innocently next to a second open grave), and renderings of the excavation. That rendering of all the horrific ways that execution victims were found in their graves, their heads in completely random spots, their legs jacked up all weird, is the stuff of nightmares.

My personal fascination with Sutton Hoo, in particular its grave goods, is because of Beowulf. I'd read before about the tons of connections between Sutton Hoo and Beowulf, and I was thrilled to read Carver also illustrating them in his discussion of the overall historical and cultural context of Sutton Hoo: the time period the poem is set in matches the Sutton Hoo mound burials pretty well, and many of the grave goods found match things mentioned in Beowulf, from the dead king Scyld Scefing’s ship filled with treasure to the fancy horse harnesses to the weaponry. And based on chemical analysis of the soil underneath the spot where the occupant of the ship burial was laid, as well as other clues, the occupant’s age, sex, and clothing seem to match up pretty well with an old Beowulf, dead from the wounds he received while battling a dragon. Another Sutton Hoo mound burial is for a wealthy, high-status woman, Beowulf’s queen if you turn your head just right and squint. Many of the grave goods from the site have wolf imagery, recalling Beowulf’s name (“bee wolf” or “bee hunter,” both a kenning for “bear”). The ship even included a giant cauldron on a giant chain, a chain long enough to hang it from the roof beam of a great mead hall like Heorot…

In my personal Beowulf fandom, then, my headcanon is that THIS is Beowulf’s burial. The book even includes an artist’s representation of the occupant of the ship burial before death, dressed in the clothing he was buried in and carrying the armor he was buried with. That old guy in his red tunic, holding the famous Sutton Hoo helmet in one hand and the famous Sutton Hoo shield in the other?

Y’all, That. Is. BEOWULF!!!

Now future Sutton Hoo archaeologists just need to find his mead hall…

View all my reviews.

Okay, now a little blog-only bonus content

Zoom Interview: This book is plenty to give you a good understanding of Sutton Hoo’s history and archaeology, but you know I love myself a deep dive, so over the weekend I basically roamed around the house until I convinced Matt that he both wanted to play his video game AND watch this Zoom interview with Martin Carver with me on my laptop:

He gave that about half an hour, and then I roamed around some more until I convinced my college student that she wanted to read the book she was already reading AND also finish the interview with me. 

Fun fact based on this Zoom interview: Martin Carver and I have the exact same fold-out illustrated Bayeux Tapestry print! His is mounted on his wall, but I keep mine on my bookshelves so I can unfold it on the floor and peer nearsightedly at all the details.

Martin Carver's Excavation Overview: If you’re as interested in deep dives as I am, Martin Carver also wrote a breakdown of each time that Sutton Hoo has been excavated (including treasure-hunting from the 1600s), and what each excavation did well, did poorly, and discovered. It's a couple hundred pages shorter than The Sutton Hoo Story, so it's a good quick summary with some fun details included.

The Million Pound Grave: Carver referenced this 1965 BBC documentary numerous times, and I used all my Google karma trying to locate it, but all I could find was this widely distributed clip that has done nothing but whet my interest:

Phillips Tell-All Memoir: In Carver's book, he also references a memoir by Phillips, the eventual head archaeologist of the 1939 excavation. He said that Phillips had withheld publication until his own death, but that it was available in some online archaeological database. I went there to find it, and OOOOH is it gossipy!!! In it, you can learn which museum curator Phillips thinks is incompetent, as well as which artist is an alcoholic. He low-key accuses Mrs. Pretty’s sister-in-law of trying to get her to keep the treasure so she can have the jewelry, and he definitely thinks that Mrs. Pretty’s spiritualist is telling her what to do on a general basis. He tells a few more vivid and adorable anecdotes, and his memoir isn’t long, so I think it’s a must-read companion piece.

Virtual Tour: There's a Google Street-View tour of the Sutton Hoo exhibit, but you can't zoom in well enough to read the labels so it's only okay.

More To Read: Let's keep these deep dive vibes going, shall we?