That’s when she saw #SuttonHoo trend on Twitter that Sue Brunning knew this would not be like any other week.
As curator of the British Museum’s medieval collection and guardian of Sutton Hoo’s spectacular treasures, Brunning is used to arousing interest in what are, in fairness, some of the museum’s most beloved exhibits.
But with the release last week of The Dig, a major Netflix film about the dramatic discovery of the Anglo-Saxon grave and artifacts in a Suffolk camp in 1939, interest in Sutton Hoo increased.
Traffic on the museum’s web pages about the treasure tripled, while a video recorded by Brunning about the famous Sutton Hoo helmet, reconstructed from fragments discovered at the grave, has been viewed 650,000 times since mid-January.
A Brunning blog about the discovery hung under the weight of interest, while his email inbox and Twitter feed were inundated with questions. For a while, the film was the number one Netflix Netflix most watched in the UK.
“I knew the film would be popular with fellow archaeologists and people interested in period dramas and that sort of thing,” says Brunning, who advised the actors and filmmakers behind the production, “but it seems to have transcended the usual audience and really touched a nerve with people.
“I mean, I think Sutton Hoo is a trend, of course, but to see that for real [doing so] it has been surreal in many ways ”.
It was a similar story at the Sutton Hoo site, the house and land formerly owned by Edith Pretty, portrayed by Carey Mulligan in the film, who commissioned the self-taught archaeologist Basil Brown, played by Ralph Fiennes, to excavate the great mounds that were in their lands.
Sutton Hoo is now run by the National Trust, and although its new visitor center and Pretty house are closed, its website and social media channels have also been “crazy,” according to Laura Howarth, the archeology and engagement manager for the site .
“We knew that for the local people of Suffolk, Sutton Hoo was a real source of pride, but it would be fair to say that none of us had predicted how much interest would be generated by this story,” says Howarth.
While only local residents doing allowed blocking exercises can visit today, they have noticed more people walking through the countryside, eager to see where Brown in real life worked, eventually with a team of other archaeologists, over 80 years ago.
Both Brunning and Howarth would like to see that interest translate into visitor numbers when their sites reopen, perhaps later this year. But they also hope that the surge of interest will fuel curiosity about the period when the unknown king was buried at Sutton Hoo in the early 7th century.
“If you mention the Tudors, the Victorians, everyone knows roughly what we’re talking about,” says Howarth. “But Anglo-Saxons have always been something that we don’t really know where it fits in the timeline. Are they like Vikings? Who are they?”
For Howard Williams, professor of archeology at the University of Chester, fictional portraits of archeology and brilliant treasures can be extremely significant in sparking real-life interest in the discipline, even if in many cases fictions are totally inaccurate.
Students still arrive on their courses excited about a legendary King Arthur or inspired by reading the Lord of the Rings, he says, “and that’s still a positive thing, because we can use it to creatively take them on a journey to what really we know, which is usually much more interesting and exciting.
“Generations of students love Indiana Jones, [and] I’m not a snob about it. I like it. You can work with that. “
Brunning, who admits that it was the “sword and sandal films” that first inspired his interest in the past, agrees. In her own case, it was a “lightning moment” on her first encounter with the Sutton Hoo treasure on a visit to the university at the museum that turned her into one of the first medievalists, she says.
“I was completely electrified. I couldn’t believe that people were capable of this type of technical art at a time that I always thought was the dark age after the Romans left. And I thought, ‘I need to know more about this.’
“It’s still hard to believe that I really care for her now.”
What did the Anglo-Saxons do for us?
Language
Although modern English has been influenced and largely borrowed from Latin, Old French and many other languages, its base is the dialects spoken by the Germanic peoples who settled in England in the 5th century. Many of the most common words in daily use they come directly from Old English and it is possible to construct simple phrases in Anglo-Saxon English that remain essentially unchanged today.
The English nation
Initially forming a group of separate (and often warrior) kingdoms, it was under the Anglo-Saxons that the idea of England as a nation emerged. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People of the Northumbrian monk Beda was completed in 731, but it was not until the 10th century that kingdoms came together as a recognized English nation.
Christianity
Christianity first came to Britain under the Romans, and the invading Saxon kings and their kingdoms were initially pagan. Under the influence of Roman missionaries and Irish and Scottish monks, however, the Anglo-Saxons gradually converted to Christianity. Little Anglo-Saxon architecture remains, but a number of pre-Conquest churches are still standing, suggesting how they would have worshiped.
Poetry
Anglo-Saxons have left a collection of some of the richest and most evocative poetry of the English language, from Beowulf’s heroic fantasy to mystical religious verses like The Dream of the Rood and historical accounts like the Battle of Maldon, which talks about a defeat Anglo-Saxon in Essex when it invaded the Vikings in 991.