The Sutton Hoo Helmet
Early seventh century
A rusted iron helmet with a full face mask stares out from its case, the eyebrows, nose and moustache made in one piece of gilded bronze so that the face looks like a stern man's. Beside it stands a gleaming replica showing how it appeared when new, covered in tinned bronze panels stamped with warriors and interlaced animals. Look closely at the face and you will see that the eyebrows end in boar heads and are inlaid with garnets, and that a dragon runs down the crest of the skull to meet a second dragon formed by the eyebrows and nose.
The helmet was built for a king. It descends from the parade helmets of late Roman cavalry, but the decoration belongs to the Germanic world, with close parallels in the boat graves of Sweden. The stamped panels show a pair of dancing warriors with horned headdresses and a rider trampling a fallen enemy, images that also appear on the helmets of Uppland. Only one eyebrow was inlaid with gold foil behind its garnets, which would have made one eye flash in firelight, perhaps a reference to the one eyed god Woden.
In nineteen thirty nine, weeks before the outbreak of war, the landowner Edith Pretty asked a local archaeologist, Basil Brown, to dig into the mounds on her estate at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Under the largest mound he found the ghost of a twenty seven metre ship and a burial chamber filled with gold, garnets, silver from Byzantium and this helmet, shattered into hundreds of fragments. Mrs Pretty gave everything to the nation. The burial is usually linked to Raedwald, king of the East Angles, who died around six hundred and twenty five. The helmet was reconstructed twice, most recently in nineteen seventy one, and has become the face of Anglo-Saxon England.
Did You Know? The helmet was found in more than five hundred fragments, and the version you see is a reconstruction completed only in nineteen seventy one, thirty years after the discovery.
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