Sutton Hoo

A Swedish shield from Vendel, directly comparable to the Sutton Hoo shield.

The inclusion of drinking-horns, lyre, sword and shield, bronze and glass vessels is not untypical of high-status 6th or early 7th century chamber-graves in England.[134] The selection and arrangement of goods in these graves shows a widespread conformity of household possessions and funeral custom among these wealthy people. The Sutton Hoo ship-burial is a uniquely-elaborated version of the ritual, of exceptional quality, with the addition of the regalia and instruments of power, and with Scandinavian connections more direct than the general overlap between English and north continental art of the period.

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

A possible explanation for these Swedish connections lies in the well-attested northern custom by which the children of leading men were often brought up not at home, but by some distinguished friend or relative.[135] In this way, at a royal level, a future East Anglian potentate fostered in Sweden could have acquired very high quality objects of Swedish type, and have made the necessary contacts with those armourers, before returning to Britain to assume his inheritance.

Sam Newton draws together the Sutton Hoo and Beowulf links with the Raedwald identification, and using genealogical data argues that the Wuffing dynasty derived from the Geatish Wulfing house mentioned in Beowulf and the poem Widsith. Possibly the oral materials from which Beowulf was assembled belonged to East Anglian royal tradition, and they and the ship-burial took shape together as heroic restatements of migration-age origins.[136]

Professor Carver argues that pagan East Anglian rulers responded to the encroachment of Roman Christendom by ever more elaborate cremation rituals to express defiance and independence. The execution victims, if not human sacrifices for the ship-burial, perhaps suffered for dissent from the cult of Christian royalty.[137] The executions may coincide in date with the period of Mercian dominion in East Anglia (c 760–825).[138]