1.1 Contexts of early medieval language and literature as heritage

Early medieval heritage is created across formal and informal spaces, including school and university classrooms, mass media, and museum and heritage sites. I understand these spaces, and their media and practices, to be constitutive of each other as a meshwork of ‘Anglo-Saxon heritage’ in the English imagination. Gabriel Moshenska (2017) has identified the need for a broad-ranging discipline—with theoretical and practical focus—around ‘public understanding of the past’, advocating for studies which interrogate where the past ‘meets the world’, in ‘public history, classical receptions, elements of digital humanities, museum studies and others’ (Moshenska: 12). I wish to emphasise the importance of literature and language as two of these ‘other’ forms of engagement, which are resourced across a variety of heritage spaces.

The early medieval—as the ‘Anglo-Saxon’—has powerful and ambivalent cultural significance in England. The 19th-century origins of Anglo-Saxonist myths and antiquarian-to-scholarly practices were formulated within and in support of ethno-nationalist and colonialist projects, with the early medieval period idealised as a ‘Golden Age’ of ‘faith, order, joy, munificence, and creativity’, and a time which satisfied a ‘desire to give man a sense of social and political belonging’ within strict, yet harmonious (because perceived natural) hierarchies of race, gender, and class (Chandler, 1970: 1; Utz, 2016; Rambaran-Olm and Wade, 2022). These myths persist, with the early medieval enmeshed with constructions of white, masculine identities, from the local and national, across British, European, ‘Western’, and global Anglophone cultures (D’Arcens and Jones, 2013; Davies, 2018; Rambaran-Olm and Wade, 2022).

Anglo-Saxonist heritage projects often seek positive social effects—for instance, funding being made available for community and arts projects, boosting local pride, rejuvenating infrastructure and the public realm, or encouraging creativity and economic growth. However, without specific attention to anti-racism, equality, and justice, such projects may slide into complicity with exclusionary imaginaries of the past and present. Beth Whalley has demonstrated how heritage organisations, local government, and artists in Essex have instrumentalised the Old English poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’ to facilitate cultural activity in the area, albeit that an all-too-frequent effect of its deployment is that stories of ethno-religious conflict and violence are prioritised over others (Whalley, 2023). In another example, 2018 commemorative programming in Gloucester for Æthelflæd, the 10th-century lady of the Mercians, saw much needed investment in the public realm and creative activity to boost the local area’s cultural industries and capacities (Gloucester Council, 2017). However, the choice of a young, white, blonde woman to perform Æthelflæd during a re-enactment funeral procession reveals how, in the public imaginary, the link between Anglo-Saxon and white English identity—in this case an idealised, able-bodied, slim, young, fair-haired femininity—is naturalised (BBC News, 2018; Williams, 2018b). I would suggest that—intentionally or otherwise—the casting enacts specific political ideals which may read as misogynist and ageist (Æthelflæd died in her late 40s), and racialising, indeed, racist (Fell et al., 1984: 81). Scott Thompson Smith’s study, which examines medieval to modern textual and visual representations of Æthelflæd (including a sculpture commissioned by Gloucester Council), demonstrates how Æthelflæd has been a ‘flexible site for expressing and contesting different constructions of gender, identity, and history’ over time, with the new sculpture especially emphasising Æthelflæd’s ‘warlike’ qualities above other versions of femininity and leadership (Thompson Smith, 2022: 102–104, 108). Old English literature is implicated in this construction. During the Æthelflæd memorial service at St Editha’s, Tamworth, which I attended, Old English was read aloud at the service which included a procession of reenactors in early medieval dress alongside present members of the uniformed services, clergy, civic dignitaries, and Prince Edward (identified by the local tourist board as ‘a descendant of Æthelflæd’) all in ceremonial attire, including livery collars and chains of office: more vernacular medievalisms (Visit Tamworth, 2018). Early medieval language and literature was thus incorporated as a tool for creating a hegemonic vision of English militarism, governance, and faith over time, even if the programming more generally benefitted certain parts of the community.

Such instrumentalisation of the Anglo-Saxon past echoes 18th-century historians’ attempts to ‘bring their particular localities into the national community by identifying their county’s or town’s origin and articulating its contribution to England’s history, development, and contemporary glory’ (Frazier, 2020: 88). Indeed, archaeologists, historians, literary historians, and art historians have all shown how mass media, museum, and heritage presentations of the early medieval, including public sculpture, archaeological sites, and tourism materials, often perpetuate—unintentionally or otherwise—conceptions of the narrow ‘roots’ of ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’ (Yorke, 1999; McCombe, 2011a; Last, 2019; Williams, 2019; Karkov, 2020; Bonacchi, 2022; Jolly, 2022; Williams, 2022). In fiction and non-fiction mass market books, documentary and drama television and film, news coverage of archaeological finds, re-enactment events, and museums, the created ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world is often narrow at best, actively exclusionary at worst.

The contested early medieval sits within a political context of heritage practices and the formal teaching of historical topics coming under increasing scrutiny, and budget cuts affecting arts and humanities cultural and educational institutions alike in the last decade (Olusoga, 2021). The case study explored in Parts Two and Three of this article took place before so-called ‘anti-woke’ agitation reached its peak in the 2020s, which saw some MPs blame heritage practices which unsettle status quo (sexist, racist, and nationalist) narratives for inciting a ‘culture war’, and repeated unsuccessful attempts by a group of National Trust members to ‘restore’ the Trust’s ‘traditional’ values (Duffy, 2021; Hall, 2021). These developments only make the arguments in this article more urgent.

Despite public interest, early medieval topics are marginalised in formal education. Reforms in 2007–8 and 2012–14 mean that the early medieval—as ‘Anglo-Saxon’—histories, material, and textual culture feature in the English National Curriculum only in primary Key Stage 2 (KS2), and in 2011 Marzinzik noted the outdated focus on elite culture and Britons vs Saxons, or Saxons vs Vikings military action (Marzinzik, 2011; UK Government, 2013). Although ‘Anglo-Saxon art and culture’ is listed on Curriculum guidance, under-resourced primary school teachers who do not necessarily have specific training in History, Archaeology, or Literature, may inadvertently reproduce out of date, yet easily available, materials (MacDonald and Burtness, 2000). Secondary school pupils may encounter the Old English poem known as Beowulf; however, it is not a compulsory text, and students are rarely given access to Old English language (Mogford et. al, 2020; Mogford, personal communication, 2023). While, as Marzinzik identifies, pockets of good work may be found—the British Library ran training for teachers during their 2018–2019 ‘Anglo-Saxons: Art, Word, War’ exhibition, and historians of later medieval England have engaged closely with educators to develop curriculum resources, for instance for ‘Our Migration Story’ (2016)—there remains a need for high-quality, frequently updated early medieval studies training and resources for teachers, especially with regard to literature and language (School Travel Organiser, 2018).¹

To add to the problems of how early medieval stories are most often told (and perhaps as a symptom of narratives which focus on white, elite cultures), there have long existed uneven heritage participation rates along classed and raced identities, even though many institutions offer free access and invest in inclusivity programmes (Hall, 1999; Crang and Tolia-Kelly, 2010). In the UK, 75.4% of white people and 42.3% of Black people visited a heritage site in 2019 (UK Government, 2019). However, while this discrepancy is significant, participatory divides that correspond to structural inequalities are in fact less marked in heritage than other cultural activities, making heritage a vital medium of public history (Audience Agency, 2018).² Despite and because of the sector’s problems, heritage practitioners have a vital role to play in creating a more complex, inclusive early medieval world.

In contrast to how the early medieval is often implicated in narrow or exclusionary imaginaries, it would be remiss not to celebrate the expansive work which is happening. Feminist, queer, and experimental writers, creators, and communities have long resourced early medieval language, literature, histories, myths, and material culture in ways which explicitly or effectively interrogate or trouble patriarchal, national, and exclusionary narratives of past and present. This work does not invent a medieval which did not exist: rather it demonstrates how the medieval is more strange, diverse, and heterogenous than traditional narratives would suggest (see Lees, 2016; 2017; Davies, 2018; Kears, 2018; Lees and Overing, 2018; 2019; Ferhatović, 2019; Whalley, 2019; 2023; Brooks, forthcoming).³ Through play and revoicing, heritage-makers may provide models of how to write the early medieval chapter of ‘our island story’ (Hall, 1999), and how to productively engage with the difficulty, joy, difference, strangeness, and pleasures of the distant past, giving me reason to hope that the early medieval may signify more authentically expansively today. It is this hope which fuelled my investigation into language and literature at Sutton Hoo.

1.2 Sutton Hoo as case study

Sutton Hoo—figured by archaeologist Martin Carver as ‘page one of English history’—occupies a privileged place within the public construction of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (Carver, 1989). ‘Sutton Hoo’ is a shorthand which may signify concurrently a combination of places, artefacts, burial, and excavation events. The place is in Suffolk, part of a larger area called East Anglia (following medieval nomenclature), on a bluff above the River Deben where early medieval people buried their dead through the 6th to 9th centuries (Bruce-Mitford, 1975; Carver, 2017). Following the 1939 excavation of the 7th-century ship-burial now known as Mound 1 and the subsequent ‘treasure trove’ trial, the landowner and dig instigator Edith Pretty donated all the Mound 1 finds to the nation, and the collection has been on display at another place, the British Museum, in various formats since 1940 (Carver, 2017). The last 80 years have seen further excavations at Sutton Hoo, and the estate was acquired by the National Trust in 1998, opening to visitors in 2002 (Fern, 2015; Carver, 2017).

Sutton Hoo public archaeology overwhelmingly focusses on Mound 1, and the reconstructed Mound 1 helmet is an icon for the ‘Anglo-Saxon world’ in media even where Sutton Hoo is not the main focus: adorning popular history books, Old English poetry translations, early medieval news articles, and websites (McCombe, 2011b; Echard, 2010; Williams, 2018; Walsh and Williams, 2019). Howard Williams proposes that this attention to Mound 1 has been enabled by the naming of the finds as ‘treasure’ in scholarship, museums, and popular books (2022). ‘Treasure’ is not a neutral term simply for sparking the imagination, it has sustained the focus on elite society, and Williams also notes the frequent collocation of nationalistic-complicit language in these Sutton Hoo presentations.

It was not my innovation to bring early medieval language and literature to Sutton Hoo, rather—as I will discuss in Part Two—my intervention was to expand temporarily the range of texts and their presentation medium, and to measure participant responses to the new and existing literature and language at the Suffolk site. Before putting together ‘Trade and Travel’, I began by reviewing the state of literature at the National Trust visitor centre, as well as past and present uses of literature with Sutton Hoo at the British Museum and in mass media. Since 1939, Sutton Hoo has been an important public locus through which people encounter early medieval literature and language, especially the Old English poem known as Beowulf. From archaeological and literary-historical perspectives, the early-7th-century East Anglian burial and the poem about Scandinavian warriors uniquely preserved in a 10th-century manuscript witness of uncertain provenance may have little to do with one another, yet, through repetition, their bond has become naturalised (Frank, 1992; Fisher, 2008). Quotations from and references to Old English feature in newspaper coverage of the Mound 1 excavations, Old English poems are quoted in the original language and modern English in Sutton Hoo television documentaries, and extracts of Beowulf adorn the British Museum Sutton Hoo display (McCombe, 2011b; Allfrey, 2021; 2022).

Performances of poetry—especially Beowulf—have taken place at the Sutton Hoo site both before and since the National Trust took ownership, and poetry featured in the visitor centre and in signage across the Sutton Hoo landscape between 2002–2019 (Anon., 1988; Care Evans, 2002; Anon., 2003; McAndrew, 2003; McCombe, 2011b; Kriebel, 2017; Allfrey, 2022; The Suffolk Coast, 2022). Table 1 shows the texts and themes in the permanent display during that time, with Beowulf featuring most heavily. I have argued elsewhere that the relatively narrow selection of texts on show, and the themes of war, elite culture, and ship-faring represented in quotations contribute to the ongoing formation of Sutton Hoo as a place of paganism, masculinity, and royalty (Allfrey, 2022). Although reflecting on the post-2019 displays is beyond the scope of the present article, it is worth noting Williams’ argument (2022) that the Visitor Centre display, following a National Trust and Heritage Lottery Funded refurbishment, retains a focus on Beowulf and a narrow range of themes, obscuring the diversity of burial practices across the cemeteries at Sutton Hoo, eliding the stories of non-elite early East Anglians (although the exhibition film stages a conversation between fictional peasant-women), and creating a somewhat homogenous ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world.

2.1 Programme planning and design

‘Trade and Travel’ was a temporary display and events programme which I planned and delivered in collaboration with the National Trust in summer 2017. My overarching aim for the project was to examine, first, what early medieval literature and language can do at a heritage site and, second, what participants in turn do with such materials. I have volunteered and worked in museum education since 2014, which has included conducting participant surveys, and contributing to several university-arts collaborative public engagement projects, the learnings from which informed my approach to the ‘Trade and Travel’ programming and research methods (Videen, 2014; Allfrey et al., 2015; Videen, 2016). I consider working with visitors—as participants and collaborators—to be a form of relational arts practice, and subscribe to the idea that ‘conversations are the process and the outcome of museum learning’ (Leinhardt et al., 2003: xi). I mean learning here in the broadest sense of thinking about texts, environments, and objects triggered by an encounter, including reflection on the self and other, on fact and emotion (Ritchart, 2007). Chiara Bonacchi, referencing Bitgood, terms this activity ‘engagement’, however I prefer ‘learning’ as a verb connoting an experience which may inform future thought (Bitgood, 2010; Bonacchi, 2017: 61). I further prepared for the project with training offered by King’s College London’s Centre for Doctoral Studies in qualitative research methods for humanities. Although my limited sample size means that larger conclusions may not be drawn, I offer an example of how literature scholars may conduct such research. I outline my experience here not to say that a researcher needs similar experience before running a programme such as this, rather, to demonstrate how my own approach was shaped by my previous theoretical and practical experience.

My work at Sutton Hoo was made possible thanks to the National Trust team’s openness to experiment and their creation of a loose brief, at the time facilitated by the site being in an exploratory phase of the Heritage Lottery-funded project to ‘Release the Sutton Hoo Story’ (Heritage Fund, 2015). ‘Trade and Travel’ was one of several options suggested by the team, who were keen to expand interpretation strategies around the site to reveal wider cross-cultural networks in the early medieval period. I was also asked to find ways of facilitating and measuring spiritual engagement alongside intellectual and social engagement: three types of engagement previously measured by the team which had shown to be uneven.

Summer 2017 was a pertinent moment to be thinking about early medieval trade and travel, which also influenced my choice of the topic. Post-Brexit vote discourse and anti-immigration sentiment dominated the mainstream press (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021). References to the early medieval past were interwoven in right-wing popular responses to both topics (Bonacchi, 2022). Concurrently within academia, across popular and scholarly blogs, conferences, and social media, conversations about the nationalist, racist history of early medieval studies as a discipline proliferated in tandem with increased global visibility of exclusionary Anglo-Saxonisms (Kim, 2017; Livingstone, 2017; Miyashiro, 2017; Clarke et al., 2020).

I combined the National Trust brief with my own research interests and commitment to an inclusive, expansive medieval studies when designing the content of the displays and activities, and in my approach to evaluation. I proposed a temporary display and a selection of activities across three weeks in August and September 2017. The activities included a ‘Word Hoard’, a ‘Sound Walk’, origami boat-making and drawing to represent the boats that carried afterlife treasures, a children’s activity trail, a board game, and talks from colleagues and volunteers. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on the temporary display, the Sound Walk, and Word Hoard.

The temporary display took the form of eight panels hung around the half-length replica of the Mound 1 ship, Sæ Wylfing, which was docked in the Sutton Hoo courtyard for the summer (Figure 1). I combined Old English, Latin, manuscript images, and interpretive texts, and questions to prompt reflection and wondering. Texts included biblical and classical stories, treatise, and encyclopaedic entries. Table 1 above outlines the texts and themes present on the site in permanent displays, alongside the ‘Trade and Travel’ display, Word Hoard, and Sound Walk (the editions consulted for the programming: Kemble, 1844; Liebermann, 1903; Krapp and Dobbie, 1936; Winterbottom, 1978; Colgrave and Mynors, 1993; Crossley-Holland, 2008; Fulk, 2010; Bjork, 2014; Godden, 2016; Exeter Cathedral Library, n.d.). I was alert to potentially homogenising the early medieval world by bringing together disparate material and textual cultures from a wide geographical and temporal span. However, as literature was already present at Sutton Hoo, I reasoned that bringing in more could only expand the narratives, and I indicated the provenance of quotations in the display. This did result in pushing the display panels into higher-than-recommended word counts according to then-National Trust standards—although best practice in the interpretation of text is split on how much visitors read (McManus, 1989; Perry, 2012).

Figure 1

The Trade and Travel temporary display. Photograph by Fran Allfrey, CC0.

The Word Hoard is an educational game initiated by Hana Videen (Allfrey et al., 2015; Videen, 2014; 2014-ongoing; 2022). The ‘Trade and Travel’ Word Hoard took the form of a bowl full of folded cards printed with Old English words and runes (Figure 2). Inside each card was a definition on the right (drawn either from the Bosworth Toller dictionary online, the Dictionary of Old English (2007), or from edition notes), and a contextual line of poetry or prose on the left. Visitors could then graffiti words directly onto a paper table covering. My co-facilitators Miranda Rainbow, Rose Griffiths Evans, and Jasmine Higgs collaborated with me to compile the Word Hoard with a mix of everyday, spiritual, and metaphorical words, kennings, and runes.⁴

Figure 2

Example Word Hoard cards. Photograph by Fran Allfrey CC0.

Nikos Bubaris notes that sound contributes to enabling ‘multiple interpretations’, effectively and affectively facilitating ‘visitor–exhibition interaction, providing the visitor with a sense of immediacy and participation’, and the increased ‘potential [for] personalised paths of experiencing the museum’ (2014). I therefore designed a Sound Walk for the programme to experiment with language and literature at Sutton Hoo in a multi-sensory way. I hoped that incorporating both written and spoken words into the ‘Trade and Travel’ programme would help to facilitate emotional and spiritual engagement. For the Sound Walk, visitors borrowed MP3 players loaded with poetry and prose in Old English and its translation into English to listen to as they walked around the burial mounds. Texts were chosen by me, and translated and read by me, Rose Griffiths Evans, Carl Kears, James Paz, Miranda Rainbow, Victoria Walker, and Beth Whalley. Extracts of poetry and prose, short phrases, and individual words were chosen based on their description of travel, or as representations of ‘traded’ knowledge; as with the texts on the display panels, they drew from a variety of early medieval text traditions (see Table 1). I combined the readings with my own field recordings from Sutton Hoo, and recordings of beaches, rivers, and woodland in England by artist-producer Luke E. Walker.⁵

Don Henson proposes that a general view held by public-facing scholars and heritage practitioners is that ‘our investigations of human behaviour can lead us towards a feeling of common humanity with others and a more empathetic understanding of human experience’, or a sense of ‘what makes us human’ (Henson, 2017: 45, 54). I am both attracted to and suspicious of this belief, or the desirability or possibility of these outcomes. Posthumanists have warned us that the category of ‘human’ is not as open and inclusive as idealistic understanding may have it—historically and in the present, many people are denied human status due to race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other characteristics (Braidotti, 2013; Ferrando, 2019). Encounters with the early medieval past may well trigger affective and intellectual reflection on the sameness and difference of human groups and individuals across time. I was keen that a sense of ‘having things in common’ should not be the sole basis for affective, intellectual, and spiritual engagement. As Simon Gaunt argues, ‘shouldn’t it in fact be difficult and challenging to access a different culture, and isn’t being confronted with the alterity of a strange language part of this process?’ (2012: 254–5). To think optimistically (albeit with no doubt of the enormity of the task at hand) with Sylvia Wynter, we might think instead of the human not as homo sapiens but as homo narrans, which Gumbs translates emphatically as ‘not the ones who know, but the ones who tell ourselves that we know’ (2020, xi). McKinttrick and Wynter discuss how the concept of homo narrans invites us to reflect on being human ‘as a verb’, always in a process of becoming through storytelling (McKittrick, 2015: 7–8, 25–26). I want to insist that the unfamiliar and familiar—the knowable and strange—may be evoked with medieval literature in the museum to generate new ways of becoming.

2.2 Data collection

Listening and carefully watching visitors produced the largest quantity of data. I made ethnographic field notes on 231 visitor interactions with myself, facilitators, and with other visitors. My approach to collecting visitor data was fuelled by an understanding of ‘heritage’ articulated by Jessica Moody: that heritage is ‘a discourse about the past which is ever in fluctuation’ (2015: 114–15). Putting this principle into practice means that listening to visitors talk together or with facilitators is as important as giving out information. Gaea Leinhardt and Karen Knutson have shown how observing body language from a distance and measuring the time a visitor spends at an exhibit are not the best methods of gauging engagement: fluent readers absorb large amounts of text quickly; in time that can seem insignificant (2004). Therefore, attending to visitor talk, and engaging with conversations enables researchers to gather evidence of social, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual engagement more effectively.

In my experience, when visitors perceive me as a staff member or a volunteer—rather than a visitor or a researcher—they will disclose opinions, life stories, and share knowledge without much prompting. Of course, interactions with visitors are never neutral, often surprising, and even the silent presence of nearby facilitators may affect visitors’ talk. Perceived race, gender, sexuality, and age, and biases and assumptions made by facilitators and participants will affect each encounter. This can be difficult for first-time facilitators—especially women, genderqueer, and global majority people—so if you plan on co-facilitating it is worth discussing strategies for responding to awkward or uncomfortable topics according to the ethics and values of your project and its research aims.

I briefed the team who co-facilitated ‘Trade and Travel’ with the above approaches and advice. Then-undergraduate students of Old English at King’s College London, Miranda Rainbow (now a PhD candidate at SAS, University of London and the British Museum) and Rose Griffiths Evans (now finishing her MSt at Oxford), and Jasmine Higgs, then an undergraduate student of Old English and Old Norse at the University of Nottingham (and now completing her PhD), joined me for six days each across the programme. It was important to involve additional facilitators as this enabled us to record more encounters and run the activities on a practical basis more smoothly, and offered some skill development for me and for them. We discussed how visitors’ ‘entrance narratives’, social and familial commitments, prior learning, emotions, and even factors such as the weather, would be subject to huge variety (Doering and Pekarik, 1996). I briefed Miranda, Rose, and Jasmine to invite and respond to questions, and to observe visitors’ talk and behaviour while making sure to avoid pressuring visitors toward specific activities or topics. Visitors need to feel at ease before learning can happen, and the wellbeing of participants, and their social, intellectual, and emotional enjoyment was a priority, so I encouraged us to listen actively rather than to lead conversation (Hooper-Greenhill, 2013).

A second data collection method was through the use of anonymous comment cards which I gave to visitors and left on tables across the site. A total of 132 visitors filled in the anonymous comment cards and dropped them into a ballot box which I positioned near the exit. Of these, 125 cards were printed with ‘The Anglo-Saxons were…’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon poetry is…’, with the remainder bearing the prompts ‘Today at Trade and Travel I have thought…’ and ‘Today at Trade and Travel I have felt…’ (I had planned to use both equally, but it became difficult to manage in practice). Although my tendency is to discuss ‘Old English’ rather than ‘Anglo-Saxon’ poetry when referring to texts written in the vernacular, I chose ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to echo its use across the Sutton Hoo site, and precisely because I am interested in the resonances of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ today. However, as I will touch upon in the conclusion, if given the opportunity again I would insist on using ‘early medieval’ instead, as the display incorrectly perpetuated ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as an accurate term. Finally, I conducted 24 semi-structured interviews with visitors, with 25 questions, and five demographic-measurement questions; all questions were optional. I took a grounded theory approach to the data, allowing themes to emerge as analysis progressed rather than pre-defining them (Urquhart, 2021). I coded the data using NVivo software, which allowed me to bring together differently collected data easily, and to continually create and edit codes and categories as they emerged.

Unfortunately, I did not collect gender, race, class, or other demographic information within the comment cards, nor from the visitors that I observed, and in the structured surveys the optional demographic responses did not reveal diversity in participants. I cannot assign race from observation, but my overall impression was that most visitors were from white, English-speaking backgrounds. Given the particular intersections of ethnonationalism and early medieval heritage, I would suggest an important avenue for future research would be in how racial identity affects the ways in which visitors engage with early medieval heritage.