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?

Day 5 in England: The Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum

Overall, my teenager was fairly patient with being hauled along on Mom's England Trip of a Lifetime, but this kid who used to be my best traveler now insists that she hates all travel with the fire of a thousand suns... and she hates visiting museums with the fire of almost a thousand suns.

Funnily enough, the kid who used to be the worst traveler... just, OMG the WORST TRAVELER!... is now the best traveler ever, and by that I mean that she loves all the same travel things that I do: museums, tours of old shit, a few more museums, grubbing in the mud to find literal trash, eating local junk food, and for a nightcap, we'll hit up one more museum then go to bed early so that on the next day we can be at our first museum right when it opens.

So although I was sad to leave my teenager home on this day of museums, she was ecstatic to have the choice to opt out and spend the whole day just rattling around the AirBnb by herself.

And my college student and I, Matt in tow, were ecstatic to catch the bus around the corner and take it all the way to the front door of the Natural History Museum.

We were there right when it opened!

I was the most excited to see the Fossil Marine Reptiles Hall, which is where Mary Anning lives, but in the interest of crowd control, we first hit up the gallery I was second most excited to see:

DINOSAURS!!!

This was not my favorite dinosaur exhibit--for some reason, many of the fossils were mounted overhead, in dim light--

--and I had a lot of trouble simply making them out, much less peering closely and nearsightedly at all their tiny details, as I prefer. 

Still, there were some wonderful treasures! Here is part of the first (known) T-Rex fossil ever discovered:

We also saw the first known Iguanodon fossils ever discovered, two teeth found by Mary Ann Mantell. Later, a quarry owner discovered part of an Iguanodon skeleton inside a limestone slab that had been blasted apart. These Iguanodon teeth are another example of men intercepting women's finds and claiming them as their own, as it's Mary Ann's husband, Gideon, who gets most of the credit for the Iguanodon. To be fair, he was the one who researched it and described it, but he's also the one who had the education and the freedom of movement to do so.

I'm interested in the history of paleontology, and I like to look at exhibits that are still set up to look like they might have in the 1800s and early 1900s. It was really fun, then, that both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum had exhibits like this!

I like to look at the labels on older fossils to see if anyone interesting collected them. A couple of these fossils are labeled as coming from the Mantell collection, as in Gideon Mantell, and a couple more are labeled as having been collected by W.E. Cutler. There's not a ton of information about him, but a couple of cool points: he died of malaria in 1925 while on a dinosaur dig in Africa, and he has a mystery! In 1920, Cutler uncovered a partial Chasmosaurus skeleton and put it in storage to await a buyer. In 1921, he was hired to dig in Africa, where he died. He left no records saying what he did with his Chasmosaurus or where it is. There *is* a Chasmosaurus fossil in the Natural History Museum that resembles the field photographs of Cutler's fossil, but it doesn't have any associated records. 

I would happily spend the rest of my life in some museum's endless archives, puttering away and solving little mysteries like this one.

There were several good specimens from the collection of Georges Cuvier, who I used to be into until I learned about his WHOLE THING with "scientific" racism. He "dissected" the enslaved human trafficking victim Sarah Baartman after her death, not to figure out why she died but to get some primary source support for his racist beliefs, part of which included the idea that Adam and Eve were white. He was super gross, and I'm not happy to have to add him to my list of Misogynistic Men of Science. 

After the dinosaurs, since we were in the area and all, we looked at every mammal, every invertebrate, and every fish, reptile, and amphibian:

Then... Mary Anning!!!

Mary Anning's first articulated plesiosaur fossil!!!

I do not understand the Natural History Museum's obsession with displaying artifacts up high, but a large number of my precious plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were mounted easily 15 feet up. I can't read the labels from that high! I can't closely inspect every bone!

Seriously, look at this nonsense!

Still, even though you have to crane your neck, there were so many beautiful fossils. Look at Mary Anning's marvelous ichthyosaurs!

I love how they're still in their original mounts, in their cases that call them Sea-Dragons!

Only the bottom fossil has a known provenance from Mary Anning, but she probably found the other two, as well. 

Two interesting things about the below inscription: 1) he uses the phrased "purchased from Mary Anning," which is a great way to not admit that she also discovered and prepared the fossil, and 2) he says that she found another part of this fossil later and sent it to him, which shows how well she remembered all of her discoveries, enough to connect one piece to another years apart, and that she was too generous for her own good. She ought to have charged him through the fucking nose for that piece.

This is Mary Anning's biggest ichthyosaur. Matt couldn't even get the whole thing in the same frame as me!

It's so big that it has other fossils ON it!

We could have easily stayed at the Natural History Museum until it closed, and we did swing by most of the other galleries, but on this day I also really wanted to check out the Victoria and Albert Museum, conveniently located just across the street. There was nothing in particular that I'd been excited about seeing there, but of course I DID find marvelous things!

See the pipe found on the Thames foreshore?!? SQUEE!!!

Thanks to all the Medieval art I studied in my misguided twenties, I got very distracted by all the lovely rood screens--

Awww, look at that beautiful sculpture of a bunch of men torturing a lone woman!

--and effigies--

--and dragons!

I really loved the large-scale architectural elements in the Victoria and Albert. The museum has saved pieces like staircases, entire balconies, and decorated columns-and you can look at them!

There was also a wonderful display of jewelry, so the college student and I spent a LOT of time inching our way around the jewelry exhibit, peering at every tiny ring and reading its label twice, then peering at it again with renewed interest based on what we'd learned from the label. I'm low-key obsessed with iron jewelry now--it was great to wear during mourning and during wartimes after you'd donated your precious metal jewelry, but it's also super bad-ass and I would wear it all the freaking time if I had it.

Also bad-ass? Queen Victoria's sapphire and diamond coronet!

It was designed by Prince Albert, who apparently had excellent taste and was in charge of making sure all of Victoria's jewelry was beautiful and classy.

I don't wear jewelry, but I could use someone with excellent taste to make sure that all of my cargo pants and T-shirts and sneakers are beautiful and classy!

Here's our trip so far!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

Day 4 in England: Mudlarks and Southwark

The day's agenda:

• 8:30 mudlarking tour with Thames Explorer Trust
• walk across Millennium Bridge
• Borough Market
• Southwark Cathedral
• Tate Modern
• original location of The Globe

Probably the most unhinged thing that I did while planning our trip was make this map. It consists of EVERYTHING that I want to do in England. Like... EVERYTHING. All the forts along Hadrian's Wall. Every castle. Every museum. Isaac Newton's apple tree. All the barrows and standing stones that Google could tell me about (I've since purchased a giant map of the sites of Ancient Britain that will come in handy for my next trip!). All the thrift stores and bakeries and curry stands. 

So when I was planning out our days, if we had a specific place that we were definitely going to be on a specific day, like our tickets to Six or our special tour of Stonehenge, I could then look on my map and easily see all the stuff I wanted to see near that area, or stuff that would be on the way to or from that place. 

That's how our mudlarking excursion on this day would lead right into spending the rest of the day in Southwark: they're neighbors!

Mudlarking is now officially one of the best things that I've done in my LIFE. For a two-week trip, England now holds quite a lot of my most favorite memories!

This two-hour mudlarking tour with Thames Explorer Trust was fortunate in timing, early enough that after it was over we still had nearly the entire day to spend in Southwark; it was less fortunate in regards to the fact that I, personally, got absolutely pig-filthy while larking around in the mud, and had to spend the rest of the day looking at Jackson Pollock paintings and buying fancy doughnuts in pants with muddy knees.

Our tour met at the Millennium Bridge obelisk, where the tour guide took us through the history of England from Neolithic times, showing us mudlarked finds to illustrate her history. We saw Neolithic artifacts, bones, pipes, fossils, and pottery from the Roman, Medieval, Tudor, Elizabethan and more more modern periods, all of which helped us know what to look out for when did our own mudlarking. Bartmann jugs from Germany are tan with a speckled brown glaze, even if you don't get part of a face. Clay pipe stems are older the thicker they are, and they used to be essentially disposable so there are literally millions of them on the banks now. Medieval pottery is also quite thick, and often--but not always--has a green glaze. Roman roof tiles could have evidence of charring from the Great Fire, or, rarely, could have the imprint of an animal's paw. Willowware, my favorite, began in the Victorian period but never stopped being produced so could be quite modern. 

We were in the location of the former Trig Lane, an area that has been in heavy commercial use since at least Roman times. In the 70s an excavation uncovered an entire Medieval quayside that proved its popularity for small boats... which probably explains the thousands of pipe stems on the shore! Tobacco was expensive but clay pipes were cheaply made, so often the pipes were considered single-use, packed with just a bit of tobacco and discarded when done. Pubs would have pipes for patrons to use, and it was considered sanitary to nip the tip of the pipe stem off with every use so that your lips wouldn't touch where someone else's lips had been. 

Here are some of the pipe stems I found:

Look how narrow! A wire was pushed through the hand-rolled clay to create this channel.

The "best" finds are the longest pipe stems, or ideally a complete pipe with an intact bowl. Later pipes had maker's stamps that can be used to date them. The teenagers with their sharp teenager eyes found some pipes with partial bowls, but I was ecstatic with every single utterly basic pipe stem fragment that I found. 

Below, I've got a fragment of a Bartmann jug, a bit of pipe stem, a piece of Willowware, two pieces of Medieval pottery with the green glaze, and a piece whose provenance I can't recall, but I do remember our guide showing me that it's the lip of a vessel, with a gap through the middle where the edge of the clay was folded under:

The college student has some lovely bits of Medieval pottery... and a sheep's tooth!

There were a LOT of animal bones on the foreshore, speaking to the area's history--where better to slaughter animals than a riverbank, where the blood can just wash away? The teenager immediately dove right in and settled into making decorative piles of bones. She thoughtfully even brought the nicest ones to me to admire!

You can sometimes find cut marks in the bones, because of COURSE the best part of a bone is the delicious marrow inside!

To show you the treasures that we were walking on, I zoomed in on this photo in Photoshop and circled every artifact I could see. Most are pipe stems, of course, but I also saw part of a pipe bowl, a piece of a Bartmann jug, more Willowware, some pottery I can't identify but that has embellishment... and, of course, consider that I barely know what I'm looking at, so what other treasures did I miss!

This is why the advice given by serious mudlarkers is to settle down and spend time closely examining one small area. I was WAY too excited to do that, and was pretty much in roomba-mode the entire time. 

More finds!

Some Roman and some Willowware, along with a couple of pieces I don't know.

Here's our tour guide helping the college student identify some of her finds:

One time, she picked an object out of my hand and threw it down the shore. "Asbestos," she said.

Another time, she told me that what I had thought was a marble was actually a MUSKET BALL!!! It was too good for me so she kept it, and I didn't realize until hours later that I hadn't even taken a photo of it! So guess who bitched for the ENTIRE rest of the England trip about the time our tour guide stole my musket ball and I didn't even take a photo? 

She also handed out this ID guide for us to use. No musket balls, but it did help quite a bit with the pottery:

We mudlarked our way steadily east--

I love the Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern in the background!

--until we came to our turnaround point, Queenhithe, where you can see this Anglo-Saxon dock at low tide:

You're not allowed to mudlark in that area, so we started mudlarking our way back again:

I did not keep track of time AT ALL, and finally our guide had to tell us that we were the last people left on the shore, and the tide was coming in quickly. Oops!

After climbing back up the Trig Lane Stairs, we took a quick peek at St. Paul's Cathedral--

--then walked across the Millennium Bridge to Southwark:

I was most excited about seeing Southwark Cathedral, but my family of hungry raccoons was most excited about Borough Market!

Here's a couple who went to Borough Market on a day that was a LOT less crowded than the day we went...

I'm super jealous of them, because we barely had space to move of our own volition in Borough Market! In each aisle there was a crowd going one way and a crowd going the opposite way, and you just sort of nudged yourself into one of the crowds and let it carry you along. 

We still ate, though! We bought a loaf of bread--

--pain au chocolat--

--more bread--

--veggie pies--

--and the teenager even found the specific doughnut place that's gone viral on Tiktok:

Sitting on the filthy ground in a parking lot, with our backs to some construction fencing... you know, as you do!

And then FINALLY, when even the most crowd-tolerant of us had grown frustrated and claustrophobic, we went to look at Southwark Cathedral!

Statue of Minerva in the foreground

I didn't go inside even though I'd have liked to have seen John Gower's tomb, but I DID spend quite a lot of time pretending to start my Canterbury pilgrimage from here:

Shall we ride donkeys to Canterbury together? We can entertain ourselves by telling tales!

On a previous trip to England, Matt and I had LOVED the Tate Modern, so we were both excited to see it again. I think we were all really worn out from the mudlarking and the traipsing through Borough Market, though, because none of us were really into it on this trip. We wandered a bit and saw some famous artists--

--but the only thing I was really revved up about seeing was this genuine Gee's Bend quilt!!!

I don't think I've ever seen one in real life before! Aolar Mosely pieced and quilted the above log cabin quilt, and her daughter, Mary Lee Bendolph, pieced and quilted the basket weave quilt, below:

I love how the techniques are similar enough to speak to each other, but the look is so different. 

You can graduate the homeschooler from the homeschool, but you cannot graduate the homeschooler from sitting herself down at the preschool art table every place she sees one:

For a change, we didn't close this museum down--instead, we went to the Marks and Spencer Simply Food for more noms--Cadbury Popping Jellies! Chocolate-covered ginger Borders! Rekorderlig Strawberry-Lime ciders! Haribo Tangtastics!--then sat and people-watched and passed judgment on the traffic while we ate popsicles. I don't know why I kept getting the Twister because I didn't really like it, but it kept looking so delicious on the package!

We were all more than ready to take the bus back home, but fortunately the last stop on my wish list was just down the steps from the bus stop, across the street from a construction site, and on the other side of a locked gate...

It's Shakespeare!

This private courtyard between two apartment buildings is the original site of Shakespeare's Globe. We'd walked past the reconstructed Globe, just a few blocks to the Northwest, a few times that day. I'd looked into getting us tickets for a performance, because Matt and I saw Hamlet there 20+ years ago and it was EPIC, but I didn't think the kids would like the current show and that would spoil the whole concept of Shakespeare for them.

Right now they're doing A Midsummer Night's Dream, which the kids would have freaking LOVED. Grr!!!

Aww, look at us clinging to the bars like old-fashioned zoo monkeys. We wanted IN!!!

This day felt sooo long, and I was frankly also VERY excited about our bus, because it was the same bus that stops right by our AirBnb, which means NO transfers!!! It was a 45-minute trip, sure, but with no transfers we could plop ourselves down on the top level of our double-decker bus and sightsee (or, let's be real here, nap) the whole way back.

Here's our trip so far!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!