It was when she spotted #SuttonHoo trending on Twitter that Sue Brunning knew this was not going to be just like any other week.
As the curator of the early medieval collection at the British Museum, and the guardian of the spectacular Sutton Hoo treasures, Brunning is well used to fielding interest in what are justly some of the museum’s best loved exhibits.
But with the launch last week of The Dig, a major Netflix film about the dramatic discovery of the Anglo-Saxon grave and artefacts in a Suffolk field in 1939, interest in Sutton Hoo has surged.
Traffic to the museum’s web pages about the treasure has tripled, while a video recorded by Brunning about the famous Sutton Hoo helmet, reconstructed from fragments discovered in the grave, has been viewed 650,000 times since mid-January.
A blog by Brunning about the discovery crashed under the weight of interest, while her own email inbox and Twitter feed have been swamped with inquiries. For a while, the film was Netflix’s No 1 most watched in the UK.
“I knew the film would be popular among 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 those usual audiences and really touched a nerve with people.
“I mean, I think Sutton Hoo is worthy of trending of course, but to see it actually [doing so] has been surreal in many ways.”
It has been a similar story at the site of Sutton Hoo itself, the house and grounds formerly owned by Edith Pretty, portrayed by Carey Mulligan in the film, who commissioned self-taught local archaeologist Basil Brown, played by Ralph Fiennes, to excavate the large mounds that stood on her land.
Sutton Hoo is now managed by the National Trust, and while its new visitor centre and the Pretty house are currently closed, their website and social media channels have also been “insane”, according to Laura Howarth, the archaeology and engagement manager at the site.
“We knew that for local Suffolk people, Sutton Hoo was a real source of pride, but it would be fair to say none of us had anticipated how much interest would be generated from this story,” says Howarth.
Though only locals taking their lockdown-permitted exercise can currently visit, they have noticed more people walking the field, eager to see where the real-life Brown worked, eventually with a team of other archaeologists, more than 80 years ago.
Both Brunning and Howarth would like to see this interest translate into visitor numbers when their sites eventually reopen, perhaps later this year. But they are also hopeful the wave of interest will fuel curiosity about the period in which 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 the Anglo-Saxons have always been something that we don’t really know where it fits in the timeline. Are they the same as the Vikings? Who are they?”
For Howard Williams, professor of archaeology at the University of Chester, fictional portrayals of archaeology and shiny treasures can be hugely significant in sparking real-life interest in the discipline, even if in many cases the fictions are wildly inaccurate.
Students still arrive on his courses excited about a legendary King Arthur or inspired by reading the Lord of the Rings, he says, “and this is still positive, because we can use that to creatively take them on a journey to what we actually know, which is often a lot more interesting and exciting.
“Generations of students love Indiana Jones, [and] I’m not snooty about that. I like it. You can work with it.”
Brunning, who admits it was “swords and sandals movies” that first inspired her interest in the past, agrees. In her own case, it was a “lightning bolt moment” on her first encounter with the Sutton Hoo treasure on a university visit to the museum that turned her into an early medievalist, she says.
“I was completely electrified. I could not believe that people were capable of this kind of technical artistry at a time that I’d always thought of as the dark ages after the Romans left. And I just thought: ‘I have to know more about this.’
“It’s still hard to believe that I actually look after it now.”
What did the Anglo-Saxons ever do for us?
Language
While modern English has been influenced by and borrowed widely from Latin, Old French and many other languages, its foundation is the dialects spoken by the Germanic peoples who settled in England from the fifth century onwards. Many of the commonest words in daily use come directly from Old English, and it is possible to construct simple sentences in Anglo-Saxon English which are essentially unchanged today.
The English nation
Initially forming into a group of separate (and often warring) kingdoms, it was under the Anglo-Saxons that the idea of England as a nation emerged. The Northumbrian monk Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People was completed in 731, but it was not until the 10th century that the kingdoms united as a recognisably 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, hinting at how they would have worshipped.
Poetry
The Anglo-Saxons left a collection of some of the richest and most evocative poetry in the English language, from the heroic fantasy of Beowulf to mystical religious verse such as The Dream of the Rood to historical accounts like the Battle of Maldon, which tells of an Anglo-Saxon defeat in Essex by invading Vikings in 991.
