The Sutton Hoo helmet is a decorated Anglo-Saxon helmet found during a 1939 excavation of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial. It was thought to be buried around the years and is widely associated with an Anglo-Saxon leader, King Rædwald of East Anglia; its elaborate decoration may have given it a secondary function akin to a crown. The helmet was both a functional piece of armour and a decorative piece of metalwork. An iconic object from an archaeological find hailed as the "British Tutankhamen", it has become a symbol of the Early Middle Ages, "of Archaeology in general", and of England.
The visage contains eyebrows, a nose, and moustache, creating the image of a man joined by a dragon's head to become a soaring dragon with outstretched wings. It was excavated as hundreds of rusted fragments; first displayed following an initial reconstruction in 1945–46, it took its present form after a second reconstruction in 1970–71.
The helmet and the other artefacts from the site were determined to be the property of Edith Pretty, owner of the land on which they were found. She donated them to the British Museum, where the helmet is on permanent display in Room 41.
Background
The helmet was buried among other regalia and instruments of power as part of a furnished ship-burial, probably dating from the early seventh century. The ship had been hauled from the nearby river up the hill and lowered into a prepared trench. Inside this, the helmet was wrapped in cloths and placed to the left of the head of the body. An oval mound was constructed around the ship. Long afterwards, the chamber roof collapsed violently under the weight of the mound, compressing the ship's contents into a seam of earth.
It is thought that the helmet was shattered either by the collapse of the burial chamber or by the force of another object falling on it. That the helmet had shattered meant it was possible to reconstruct it. Had the helmet been crushed before the iron had fully oxidised, leaving it still pliant, the helmet would have been squashed, leaving it in a distorted shape similar to the Vendel and Valsgärde helmets.
Owner Attempts to identify the person buried in the ship-burial have persisted since virtually the moment the grave was unearthed. The preferred candidate, with some exceptions when the burial was thought to have taken place later, has been Rædwald; his kingdom, East Anglia, is believed to have had its seat at Rendlesham, upriver from Sutton Hoo. The case for Rædwald, by no means conclusive, rests on the dating of the burial, the abundance of wealth and items identified as regalia, and, befitting a king who kept two altars, the presence of both Christian and pagan influences.
Rædwald
What scant information is known about King Rædwald of East Anglia, according to the Anglo-Saxon historian Simon Keynes, could fit "on the back of the proverbial postage stamp". Almost all that is recorded comes from the eighth-century Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum by the Benedictine monk Bede, leaving knowledge of Rædwald's life, already poorly recorded, at the mercy of such things as differing interpretations of Ecclesiastical Latin syntax. Bede writes that Rædwald was the son of Tytila and grandson of Wuffa, from whom the East Anglian Wuffingas dynasty derived its name. In their respective works Flores Historiarum and Chronica Majora, the thirteenth-century historians Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris appear to place Tytila's death, and Rædwald's presumed concurrent succession to the throne, in 599. Yet as reasonable as this date sounds, these historians' demonstrated difficulty with even ninth-century dates leaves ample room for doubt.
In any event, Rædwald would have ascended to power by at least 616, around when Bede records him as raising an army on behalf of Edwin of Northumbria and defeating Æthelfrith in a battle on the east bank of the River Idle. According to Bede, Rædwald had almost accepted a bribe from Æthelfrith to turn Edwin over, before Rædwald's wife persuaded him to value friendship and honour over treasure. After the ensuing battle, during which Bede says Rædwald's son Rægenhere was slain, Rædwald's power was probably significant enough to merit his inclusion in a list of seven kings said by Bede to have established rule over all of England south of the River Humber, termed an imperium; the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle expanded Bede's list to eight and applied the term bretwalda or brytenwalda, literally "ruler of Britain" or "ruler of the Britains".
Bede records Rædwald converting to Christianity while on a trip to Kent, only to be dissuaded by his wife upon his return; afterwards he kept a temple with two altars, one pagan and one Christian. In the likely event that this was during Æthelberht's rule of Kent, it would have been sometime before Æthelberht's death around 618. Rædwald's own death can be conservatively dated between 616 and 633 if using Bede, whose own dates are not unquestioned. Anything more specific relies on questionable post-Conquest sources. Roger of Wendover claims without attribution that Rædwald died in 624. The twelfth-century Liber Eliensis places the death of Rædwald's son Eorpwald, who had by then succeeded his father, in 627, meaning Rædwald would have died before then. If relying solely on Bede, all that can be said is that Rædwald died sometime between his circa 616 defeat of Æthelfrith along the River Idle, and 633, when Edwin, who after Rædwald died converted Eorpwald to Christianity, died.
Date A precise date for the Sutton Hoo burial is needed for any credible attempt to identify its honoree. Thirty-seven gold Merovingian coins found alongside the other objects offer the most objective means of dating the burial. The coins—in addition to three blanks, and two small ingots—were found in a purse, and are themselves objects of considerable interest. Until 1960, and largely on the basis of numismatic chronologies established during the 19th century, the Sutton Hoo coins were generally dated to 650–660 AD. With this range the burial was variously attributed to such monarchs as Æthelhere, Anna, Æthelwald, Sigeberht, and Ecgric, all of whom ruled and died in or around the given period.
The proposed range of years, and accordingly the regnal attributions, was modified by later studies that took the specific gravity of some 700 Merovingian gold coins, which with some predictability were minted with decreasing purity over time, to estimate the date of a coin based on the fineness of its gold. This analysis suggests that the latest coins in the purse were minted between 613 and 635 AD, and most likely closer to the beginning of this range than the end. The range is a tentative terminus post quem for the burial, before which it may not have taken place; sometime later, perhaps after a period of years, the coins were collected and buried. These dates are generally consistent, but not exclusive, with Rædwald.
Regalia The presence of items identified as regalia has been used to support the idea that the burial commemorates a king. Some jewellery likely had significance beyond its richness. The shoulder-clasps suggest a ceremonial outfit. The weight of the great gold buckle is comparable to the price paid in recompense for the death of a nobleman; its wearer thus wore the price of a nobleman's life on his belt, a display of impunity that could be associated with few others besides a king. The helmet displays both wealth and power, with a modification to the sinister eyebrow subtly linking the wearer to the one-eyed Germanic god Odin.
Two other items, a "wand" and a whetstone, exhibit no practical purpose, but may have been perceived as instruments of power. The so-called wand or rod, surviving only as a gold and garnet strip with a ring at the top, associated mountings, and traces of organic matter that may have been wood, ivory, or bone, has no discernible use but as a symbol of office. On the other hand, the whetstone is theoretically functional as a sharpening stone, but exhibits no evidence of such use. Its delicate ornamentation, including a carved head with a modified eye that parallels the possible allusion to Odin on the helmet, suggests that it too was a ceremonial object, and it has been tentatively identified as a sceptre.
Syncretism Further evidence for the burial's association with Rædwald has been adduced from the presence of items with both Christian and pagan significance. The burial is in most respects emphatically pagan; as a ship-burial, it is the manifestation of a pagan practice predating the Gregorian reintroduction of Christianity into Britain, and may have served as an implicit rejection of the encroaching Frankish Christianity. Three groups of items, however, have clear Christian influences: two scabbard bosses, ten silver bowls, and two silver spoons. The bowls and scabbard bosses each display crosses, the former with chasing and the latter with cloisonné. The spoons are even more closely associated with the Catholic Church, inscribed as they are with a cross, and the names ΠΑΥΛΟΣ (Paulos) and ΣΑΥΛΟΣ (Saulos), both names were used by Paul the Apostle. Even if not baptismal spoons, invoking the conversion of Paul—a theory which has been linked to Rædwald's conversion at Kent—they are unmistakably associated with Christianity.
Others Rædwald may be the easiest name to attach to the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, but for all the attempts to do so, these arguments have been made with more vigour than persuasiveness. The desire to link a burial with a known name, and a famous one, outstrips the evidence. The burial is certainly a commemorative display of both wealth and power, but does not necessarily memorialise Rædwald, or a king; theoretically, the ship-burial could have even been a votive offering. The case for Rædwald depends heavily on the dating of the coins, yet the current dating is only precise within two decades, and Merovingian coin chronologies have shifted before.
The case for Rædwald depends on the assumption that modern conceptions of Middle Age wealth and power are accurate. The wealth of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial is astonishing because there are no contemporaneous parallels, but the lack of parallels could be a quirk of survival just as much as it could be an indicator of Rædwald's wealth. Many other Anglo-Saxon barrows have been ploughed over or looted, and so just as little is known about contemporary kingliness, little is known about contemporary kingly graves; if there was any special significance to the items termed regalia, it could have been religious instead of kingly significance, and if anything of kingly graves is known, it is that the graves of even the mere wealthy contained riches that any king would be happy to own. Distinguishing between graves of chieftains, regents, kings, and status-seeking arrivistes is difficult. When Mul of Kent, the brother of King Cædwalla of Wessex, was killed in 687, the price paid in recompense was equivalent to a king's weregild. If the lives of a king and his brother were equal, their graves might be equally hard to tell apart.
Rædwald thus remains a possible but uncertain identification. As the British Museum's former director Sir David M. Wilson wrote, while Rædwald may have been buried at Sutton Hoo, "the little word may should be brought into any identification of Rædwald. After all it may or even might be Sigeberht who died in the early 630s, or it might be his illegitimate brother if he had one (and most people did), or any other great man of East Anglia from 610 to 650."
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