Barbarians- Secrets of the Dark Ages

by Richard Rudgley

  yet showed some likeness to

  horse and man, hound and bird,

  and women's beauty too. You will, if you know

  how to, tell the truth about

  the way in which this creature moves.

  The answer to this particularly abstruse riddle is a ship. The four feet represent the four oars, the eight feet belong to those of the four rowers on board, the two wings are sails and the six heads belong to the four oarsmen and the figureheads at either end of the ship (the twelve eyes – eight human and four on the figureheads). This love of circumlocution, analogy and double meanings was not just limited to their riddles and rhymes. This feature is also found elsewhere in their culture. Brooches, as we have seen in the sites of Lakenheath and West Heslerton, are one of the material indicators of the presence (or at least influence) of continental ideas. A study by David Leigh of a particular type of this kind of artefact, the square-headed brooches made in Kent during the fifth and sixth centuries, has shown that visual tricks were a common feature of the designs. What appears to be an animal from one point of view, if turned ninety degrees, suddenly appears as human faces. This seems to have been much more than just a clever illusion. Something deeper is also communicated by this recurrent theme in Anglo-Saxon art. As the riddle is a serious play on words, so the brooches are a play on images; the eye and the tongue can both deceive and be deceived.

  The fact that such ambiguous images are found on expensive items of jewellery shows that many of them clearly belonged to the upper echelons of society, and were designed to last. Ambiguity was a recurrent theme of such art and is therefore unlikely to simply be a trivial and meaningless device. The use of images which, when seen from one angle, appear to be animals and, when seen from a different perspective, appear to be human may well be an expression of the theme of human-animal transformation that is fundamental to the theory and practice of shamanism. Although shamanism is normally associated with Siberian and Native American peoples, it was also widely practised in prehistoric and pagan Europe. One of the skills attributed to shamans is their ability to understand the animal world and, on occasion, be able to change themselves into a bird or other type of animal.

  The shamanic god par excellence among the northern deities was called Woden in England (Wodan or Wotan in mainland Europe, equating to the Viking Age Odin). The myths and stories concerning him give him a number of shamanic attributes. We have little direct information about the Woden of the pagan Anglo-Saxons but it is likely that many of the attributes of Odin were shared by his west Germanic counterpart. The Prose Edda (one of the primary sources of Norse mythology) tells us that Odin was a shape shifter. He is said to be able to transform into a dragon, a bird, a beast or a fish at will. His 'vehicle' by means of which he travels to the other world is his eight-legged horse named Sleipnir. This supernatural steed is the equivalent of the shaman's mount that takes him down to the underworld or up to heaven. Oddly enough, among the Buryat, a people who live to the north of Mongolia, female shamans were said to ride eight-legged horses.

  It has been suggested that the steed's four pairs of legs might simply represent the fast speed at which it travels, but the most convincing explanation is that put forward by Hilda Ellis Davidson, one of the leading scholars of the northern European myths. She notes another instance of a reference to an eight-legged horse as far from northern Europe as the Buryat example given above. Among one of the numerous tribal peoples of the Indian sub-continent, the Gonds, the bier of a dead man, carried by four men, is explicitly compared to an eight-legged horse. The carrying of the deceased on a bier in the northern world could have led to the descriptions of Sleipnir, particularly as it is said to carry its rider to the land of the dead. The creature can now be seen to have developed out of the very tradition of ambiguity that has already been identified: four men carrying a bier seems to be the answer to the riddle that is Sleipnir.

  We can see this delight in ambiguity not just in the riddles and jewellery designs of the Anglo-Saxons but on a far more basic level, in their sense of humour. Here is another riddle from the same collection:

  Strangely hangs by man's thigh

  below his lap. In front is hole.

  Is stiff and hard, stands in good stead

  when the man his own skirt

  over knee hoists, wants that known hole

  with his dangler's head to greet,

  fill it as he filled it long and oft before.

  Despite the deliberate attempt by the riddler to mislead by means of the heavy sexual connotations, the answer is actually a key. Ben Levick, one of the mainstays of the Angelcynn (the Anglo-Saxon re-enactment society), told me that he believes the Anglo-Saxons are the source for the sexual doubles entendres that have survived in such elements of popular English culture as the 'saucy' seaside postcards and the bawdy Carry On films of the twentieth century. It is something that resonates through the whole culture from top to bottom, and from the ridiculous to the sublime. It has many applications, from vulgar humour to communicating the esoteric language of the gods.

  Beowulf: a Hero Immortalised

  Another of the core members of Angelcynn is Ben's father, whose Anglo-Saxon name is Dodda. He explained to me, by way of an anecdote, how he felt his society brought back to life the traditions of the past one night at West Stow:

  There was an evening we had a couple of years ago when we were in the hall building. We simply got together a crowd of people who were to do with West Stow. We had a young lady as a member of the group whose main subject at university had been Old English, and we had a meal. We were sitting around drinking by firelight and she was telling the story of Beowulf in Old English. My son, who is her partner, was actually giving the modern English translations and there was one point when suddenly it sort of ceased for a moment and I think that everybody when we spoke afterwards was aware that the original inhabitants could almost have been there.

  It was just one of those moments. I don't think it could have happened if the building wasn't on the site of one of the original buildings. And you get moments like that and they are absolutely wonderful.

  Beowulf is the most famous of all works written in the language of the Anglo-Saxons, Old English. Its unique status has made it an enduring monument in the landscape of English literature. The poem, 3,182 lines long, has become an institution. Its very stature has made it less approachable, yet it still has a resonance and a power to move that has not diminished through time. J. R. R. Tolkien, best known for The Hobbit and the epic The Lord of the Rings, was also Professor of English at the University of Oxford. In the 1930s he wrote a study of Beowulf that criticised the dry approaches to the poem that had surrounded it with a stale and academic air. He helped to resurrect it as a work of art and imagination – he breathed life back into it. The poet Seamus Heaney, himself a recent translator of the saga, has said that while its narrative belongs to an age long past, 'As a work of art it lives in its own continuous present, equal to our own knowledge of reality.'

  Only a single manuscript copy of the work is known and is now ensconced among the treasures of the British Library. The date of its composition is still hotly debated, but lies somewhere between the middle of the seventh and the end of the tenth century. Most commentators would place it in either the seventh or eight century. Where it was composed is as contentious a question as when. The kingdom of Mercia during the reign of King Offa (757-96) has been suggested, on the basis that there is a section of the poem that sings his praises. Others have suggested that it was much more likely to belong to the world of seventh-century East Anglia as there are echoes of the world of Beowulf in the archaeological discoveries from the site of Sutton Hoo, the subject of the next two chapters of this book. Its author is unknown. Over a millennium or more the English language has changed dramatically and the reader of modern English cannot simply pick it up and read it. There have been a number of translators who have taken on the onerous task; Seamus Heaney has compared it to 'trying t
o bring down a megalith with a toy hammer'.

  The poem tells the heroic story of Beowulf, leader of the Geats (a people of southern Sweden), and his deadly encounters with three supernatural foes. He travels over the sea to the land of the Danes to confront the first two, the monster Grendel and his mother. He defeats them both and returns home to be made king and reigns for half a century. His last foe, a treasure-guarding dragon that has been plaguing his own country, he kills only at the cost of his own life. The poem begins and ends with a funeral, first that of Shield Sheafson, a great warrior king of the Danes, whose body is carried by his warriors on to a ship in the harbour. He is laid out on the deck, which is then piled high with treasures from far and wide. The ship is then set adrift on the icy seas and seen no more. The funeral recounted at the end of the poem is that of Beowulf himself.

  The dying king instructs his warriors to build a mound on the headland of a coast. This will serve as a permanent reminder of Beowulf to both his subjects and all who sail by in their ships. His body is burnt on a pyre and his ashes then transported to the heart of the mound. In death he is surrounded by helmets, shields, armour and other trappings of war along with gold, jewels and other treasure. Twelve mounted warriors ride around the mound, singing dirges in honour of their lost king.

  Whether a real Beowulf ever lived we do not know, but he has been immortalised in this poem. And for those who read the poem out loud at West Stow it provides a link with a rich and powerful tradition that evokes the spirits of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors.

  West Stow gave us some idea of what life for the average Anglo-Saxon villager might have been like. The most famous of all the Anglo-Saxon sites is not far from the peace and quiet of that ancient village. It tells us about the other end of the social scale: it was a final resting place fit for a king – the Sutton Hoo burial ground. The world that Beowulf conjures back to life is evoked once more by the archaeological treasures unearthed from this site.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE BURIALS OF SUTTON HOO

  The message of the cemetery, like that of Beowulf, is heroic and international; in praise of enterprise, achievement and fame, of a life that is memorable even if short, rather than one that is long and virtuous or boring.

  Martin Carver, Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings?

  What were once places of great significance in the past are often now just quiet backwaters far from the centres of contemporary power and influence. Today's Sutton Hoo lies in the peace of the Suffolk countryside outside the small town of Woodbridge. The Sutton Hoo of the seventh century was a place of regal power and a prominent feature of the political landscape. Then, the river Deben that flows past the ridge upon which the burial mounds were built was the route to the estuary that led to the North Sea. From there, ships travelled across to the river Rhine and into the heartlands of Europe. In Anglo-Saxon times, the rivers and the seas, far from being a barrier, were the arteries of communication and trade.

  The Secrets of the Mounds

  To the visitor, Sutton Hoo has none of the immediate impact of either the earlier Stonehenge or the later castles built by the Normans. Here there was no statement written in enduring stone, yet it marks one of the turning points in the history of Britain. A cluster of grassy mounds is all that is visible today, but what has been unearthed from inside them has shone an unexpected and dazzling light on the Dark Ages. Three major archaeological campaigns took place: the first in the 1930s; the second the British Museum dig in the 1960s; and the excavations that took place in the 1980s. The combined discoveries have resulted in a vast amount of hitherto unknown aspects of Anglo-Saxon life.

  There was an unsuccessful attempt to rob the mounds in the sixteenth century. Queen Elizabeth I herself, desperate for loot to melt down for bullion, reportedly gave Dr John Dee (an antiquarian and her personal astrologer) permission to dig in East Anglia. Whether he was actually involved in the failed attempt is not known. The story of the rediscovery of this long-lost part of our heritage begins in 1926 when a Colonel Pretty bought an Edwardian mansion and the land around it that included a strange series of mounds. His wife Edith gave birth to a son in 1930 but, sadly, the colonel died when the boy was just four years old. The grief-stricken widow sought solace in the company of a medium. Her interest in spiritualism seems to have had a bearing on her decision to initiate the excavation of the mounds. There were strange stories of ghostly sightings at Sutton Hoo – reports of spectral visions of a man on horseback, and claims of phantasmal figures wandering the mounds at night. Furthermore, Mrs Pretty's nephew, a keen dowser, believed (rightly as it turned out) that gold was present at the site.

  Whatever influence the supernatural aura of Sutton Hoo had on Mrs Pretty's decision to dig there, it would be a mistake to see her as simply a mystically inclined individual. She also had her feet firmly on the ground and had witnessed her own father excavating elsewhere near her childhood home. She went to the local museum at Ipswich and was put in touch with an enthusiastic archaeologist named Basil Brown, who was later to be connected with the initial work at the village of West Stow. One of Brown's contemporaries was to characterise him rather rudely as a ferret-like man in a trilby hat, but one of Sutton Hoo's later excavators, Martin Carver, was to describe his work at the site as an 'excavation of genius'.

  The work began in 1938, on the biggest mound of all – known as Mound 1. Preliminary digging also took place on Mounds 2 and 3. The following year further excavations at Mound 1 took place, and around noon on 11 May one of Brown's assistants dug up a small piece of iron. It turned out to be a rivet from a ship. More rivets were unearthed and Brown was quick to understand what they had found. He realised that the rivets were all that had survived of a ship, which, being made of wood, had long since decayed. The position of the rivets in the mound marked their original position and so the whole shape of the vessel had been preserved. They had truly found a ghost ship that had left its shadow in the sandy soil. This was no modest boat like the one that the Fallward chieftain had been buried in – it was about 27 metres (90 feet) long.

  News of the discovery did not take long to spread, and the archaeological establishment descended on Sutton Hoo. The gold that Mrs Pretty's nephew had predicted to be at the site soon came to the light of day. A curator from the British Museum was met at the local railway station by one of the expanded team of archaeologists, who showed him a buckle, one of a number of pieces of jewellery that had emerged. It belonged to a type well known to both the curator and the excavators – it was clearly Anglo-Saxon and had been made in the seventh century.

  Then a shield, a large silver dish, a bronze bowl of east Mediterranean origin, more silver bowls, gold and garnet shoulder-clasps, a sword and a mysterious sceptre – the cultural treasures of the Anglo-Saxons came thick and fast out of the mound. In what must have been one of the most hectic periods of excavation in the history of British archaeology, over 263 artefacts made from numerous materials were found over a period of seventeen days.

  The mound had revealed many of its secrets. A large ship had been buried in its midst and in the ship itself a trove of Anglo-Saxon riches of unparalleled beauty and craftsmanship. In later times the Vikings buried the great and the good in ships and covered them with mounds. Mound 1, belonging to an earlier period, seemed to foreshadow this tradition but there was something missing: a body. Initially, this led some observers to believe that there had never been one and that the site, rather than marking a burial, was actually a memorial to a person who had died elsewhere. Perhaps it commemorated someone who had been lost at sea.

  The senior archaeologists who had been excavating Sutton Hoo in 1939 thought otherwise. Sandy soils having a high acidic content (like that at Sutton Hoo) often tend to destroy all traces of skeletons, and so the absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. The British Museum gave the onerous responsibility for publishing the reports concerning Sutton Hoo to Rupert Bruce-Mitford; these would eventually run to nearly two and a half thousand p
ages. Bruce-Mitford left no stone unturned in his efforts to track down any possible traces of a body in the mound. He even went to the Pathology Museum of Guy's Hospital in order to look at the evidence of a victim of the notorious killer John George Haigh. By putting her in a bath full of acid, Haigh had attempted to destroy all traces of his victim, a Mrs Durand-Deacon, and only her heels survived. Bruce-Mitford concluded that something similar, but less sinister, had happened to a body in the mound. The interminably slow effects of the acidic soil had completely disposed of all traces of the body except a slight but recognisable difference in the level of phosphates in one area, which would have been where a body would have once lain.

  Naming the King

  It is now universally accepted that this was indeed a burial and obviously that of a highly important person – a great ship, full of treasure and fit for a king. The next question was inevitably to try to identify who it was who had been buried. Hector Munro Chadwick had an incomparable knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon period, and when he visited Sutton Hoo on 18 August 1939 he immediately gave his verdict: this was the final resting-place of King Raedwald, who had ruled East Anglia from about 599 until he died in or around the year 625.

  Bede tells us that he was a powerful ruler who once controlled the whole region south of the river Humber. He was a king at a crucial time in history. England was on the cusp of conversion to Christianity. Some of his contemporaries had already gone over to the new religion, while others held tenaciously to their pagan traditions. These dual forces of tradition and innovation pulled Raedwald first one way, then the other. While he was visiting the court of Aethelbert of Kent, which had already succumbed to the Christian faith, he was persuaded of the virtues of the new religion. His 'conversion' was to be short-lived, though. On his return home, both his wife and his advisers dissuaded him from his new-found faith. He wanted to have the best of both worlds, and set up twin altars in his place of worship: one to the old gods and one to the Christian God. This compromise must have proved to be untenable – his pagan followers would have disapproved and the Christians certainly would not have accepted that their God would share power with what they saw as evil spirits and effigies of idolatry.