Voyage To The Other World: The Legacy of Sutton Hoo

Description

The discovery in 1939 of a richly outfitted ship buried at Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge in East Anglia, provided a range of important information to a wide range of disciplines, including archaeology, art history, economic history, folklore, literary studies and numismatics. This volume details the interdisciplinary impact of Sutton Hoo over the past half-century and reconsiders aspects of the culture of Anglo-Saxon England in the broad context of its connections with Scandinavian and Merovingian Europe. From the perspective of European archaeology, Sutton Hoo belongs to a large group of exceptionally rich burials, dating from the Neolithic period until the practice of placing lavish objects in graves ended with the adoption of Christianity, well into the medieval period in northern Europe. As the richest early medieval burial found in Europe, Sutton Hoo provides insights into pagan Anglo-Saxon culture at the moment of transition to Christianity, and a model for understanding the politics and personalities of a world caught on the boundary between competing ideologies and contrasting social systems.