The Helmet Restored
The Sutton Hoo helmet was found shattered into more than 100 pieces - damage caused when the timber roof of the burial chamber collapsed. The pieces were mostly rusty iron, though there were also fragments of tinned bronze decorative panels, and a crest inlaid with silver wire. Putting the helmet together was like solving a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with the added difficulty that many of the pieces were missing.
The helmet was first restored in 1947-8, by Herbert Maryon, a British Museum conservator. It took him six months of full-time continuous work to finish the task. His version had a long face mask, small cheekflaps and a narrow neck guard. You can see Herbert Maryon's restoration of the helmet here
Replica of finds from the Sutton Hoo Saxon burial site - a richly decorated Anglo-Saxon helmet of war
©NTPL/Andreas von Einsiedel
©NTPL/Andreas von Einsiedel
In the 1960s, Rupert Bruce-Mitford, the British Museum's keeper of medieval antiquities, pointed out flaws in Maryon's reconstruction, which left parts of the face and neck unprotected. So in 1968, the helmet was taken to pieces and reassembled. The conservator spent a year carefully studing the fragments, taking into account not just their shape but also thickness and texture.
This second restoration followed strict principles - only using joins which were demonstrable, and leaving out altogether fragments whose position was uncertain. The conservator arranged the pieces by pinning them to a plaster head covered with modelling clay, which you can see here
Once the metal pieces were glued to each other, the missing areas were filled with jute textile, stiffened with adhesive and covered with plaster. This was painted brown to match the rusty iron. The new reconstruction, with long cheek flaps, a wide neck guard and a smaller face mask, can be seen here
Replica
Unlike the brown reconstruction, the original helmet, covered with tinned bronze, would have had a silvery appearance. We can get our best idea of how it would have looked from a steel replica made for the British Museum by the armourers at the Tower of London.
Although the decorative panels on the original helmet survived only as
tiny fragments, the
fact that individual scenes were repeated allowed the replica makers
to work out what they looked like. On the sides there are warriors on horseback trampling on fallen enemies, a scene which is Roman in origin, and which was often carved on Roman soldiers' tombstones.
The panels on the front show men wearing horned helmets who dance with spears. Identical dancing men have been found on helmets
from Swedish ship graves of the same period. Like the custom of ship burial itself, this suggests that there were close connections between the royal families of East Anglia and Sweden.
