Sue Takes on the Sutton Hoo Helmet | Curator's Corner S6 Ep5 #CuratorsCorner #SuttonSue #TheDig

I'm Dr Sue Brunning. I'm the curator of the European Early Medieval Insular

Collection at the British Museum and this is my Corner!

[Music]

Welcome to a very special edition of Curator's Corner.

Myself and my colleagues behind the camera have stayed after hours at the

Museum in order to hold an audience with one of

the most famous archaeological discoveries ever

made and it is of course the amazing Sutton

Hoo helmet.

The helmet takes its name from the site in Suffolk eastern England where it was

discovered in 1939 as part of an amazing ship burial - 27

meter long ship that was buried beneath the huge earth

mound. And this burial took place in the early 7th century so we're talking about

the Anglo-Saxon period in England. And the helmet was one of an array of

grave goods that was laid out inside that ship;

things like gold and garnet metal work, illustrious

feasting equipment, drinking horns, silver from the eastern Mediterranean

and of course an array of glittering war gear of which the helmet was the

key piece. There are only about four complete metal helmets that survive from

this period otherwise we only really have fragments

of others and this one is the most elaborate.

But I think another reason why it is the favourite object from the ship burial

is simply because it has this amazing human face.

And I think that for a period of time - you know 1500 years ago -

and for people that can seem quite remote from us this helmet, this

human face, gives us a kind of a relatable way into that period.

And so what I thought we would do with the helmet today is we would try to get

inside the helmet. Try to look out through the helmet's eyes at that world

around the people that were wearing and using

and encountering this helmet. And I think that would be a really fun

thing for us to do together tonight. Because I think that

even though this helmet has this rather inscrutable expression it really has an

awful lot to tell us. The first thing I thought I'd do is

actually explain to you a little bit about what you're actually

seeing here because it's not potentially as simple as you might

expect. So what we have here is a reconstruction of the helmet that was

made in the early 1970s by a conservator here at the British Museum called Nigel

Williams. And it was actually something that took

a year of his life and the reason that it was so difficult is because the