Early Medieval Language and Literature as Heritage: a Sutton Hoo Case Study

Abstract

This article is both a reflection on the cultural, social, and political stakes of how early medieval literature and language functions as heritage in England, and on my practices as a museum educator. Language and literature in heritage contexts may enable rich emotional and intellectual engagement with early medieval stories, landscapes, and objects in ways which may unloose the early medieval from the grip of exclusionary narratives. I discuss how Old English language and literature may be understood within wider contexts of early medieval heritage, often called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in English institutions, by sketching the overlapping public spaces of encounter with the past, and how we may read across them. With its longstanding links with Old English poetry across scholarship and public history, I suggest that Sutton Hoo provides an ideal case study for examining the enmeshment of early medieval literature, language, landscape, and archaeology as heritage categories. I discuss the planning and delivery of ‘Trade and Travel’, a temporary display and learning programme that I organised with the National Trust in 2017, and present findings from qualitative data I collected to suggest how people make sense of place, archaeology, and early medieval language and literature. Understanding language and literature as heritage, I show how visitors discover and create meaning through encounter and conversation. In heritage spaces, literature and language are sensory and emotional artefacts and experiences: observing visitor engagement reveals how both become integral to creative and identity-making work.