Martin Carver

So this continues my Beowulf journey.* A detail oriented academic read (the second half; the first half reads like a whodunnit) but for me fascinating for its ties to Beowulf. And this connection is addressed by Carver in the Open Forum epilogue of is book where he answers questions posed by lecture attendees and viewers of the BBC2 program that focused on Sutton Hoo. (A wonderful and informative way to wrap things up)

Here he states “A burial is composed of selected objects and it is likely that the objects, taken individually and together, were also full of allusions to rank, power, ancestry, ideology and allegiance to kin at home and overseas. I therefore regard a ship burial as just as much a poem as Beowulf is, just as difficult to interpret but just as capable of giving us insights into the Anglo-Saxon mind. Burials are poems written with material culture; so that the choice of burial rite and choice of what is put into the grave are choices to what was known or feared or loved by the mourners.”

“Neither Sutton Hoo or Beowulf represents a straight account of reality. Both contain allusions to the real world, but we do not know for certain which the were.”

*so the Beowulf course i was in has taken me from Tacitus writing in the 2nd A.D. to Sutton Hoo with Basil’s 1939 dig** and various interpretations of Beowulf (Heaney, Hedley, Tolkien) including modern novels and movies (Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead and The 13th Warrior and The Mere Wife). Now onto Gardner’s Grendel and Ibn Fadlan’s travels.

**Serendipitously, last year before the Beowulf course, I’d watched the movie The Dig with Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan as Basil Brown and Edith Pretty which, based on this reading, fairly accurately captures the events surrounding that dig (well, except the whole love triangle (?) tangent involving Lily James)… (mer)