Sutton Hoo

Vendel era helmet, at the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities.

Beowulf and Vendel

Vendel era helmet, at the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities.It is debated whether the custom of furnished burial was explicitly pagan, or whether it was reaching a natural culmination when Christianity began to make its mark.[130]

Beowulf, the great surviving example of heroic Old English poetry, is set in Denmark and Sweden (mostly Götaland) during the first half of the 6th century. It opens with the funeral of a king in a ship laden with treasure, and has other descriptions of hoards including Beowulf's own mound-burial. Its picture of warrior life in the Hall of the Danish Scylding clan, with formal mead-drinking, minstrel recitation to the lyre and the rewarding of valour with gifts, and the description of a helmet, could all be illustrated from the Sutton Hoo finds. The interpretation of each has a bearing on the other.[131]

Beowulf is a work of heroic lore, not a scholarly history. However, the real eastern Swedish connections of the Sutton Hoo material reinforce this link.[132] The Vendel and Valsgärde graves also include ships (though smaller), similar artefact groups, and many sacrificed animals.[133] Ship-burial at this date is largely confined to east Sweden and East Anglia. The rather earlier mound-burials (without ships) at Old Uppsala, in the same region, have a more direct bearing on the Beowulf story and date-horizon. The Sutton Hoo and the Swedish burials are earlier than the famous Gokstad and Oseberg ship-burials.