The Dig: Sutton Hoo flick is a gem of a find
The charm of the The Dig, just out on Netflix, is as insidious and penetrating as the Suffolk mists and fogs of Simon Stone’s sublime cinematography. It is the more or less true story of the unearthing of a Saxon funerary ship from about the 7th Century CE, with a surprisingly complete inventory of grave goods from across Europe and into Asia.
The ship was excavated at Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge in the summers of 1938 and 1939. As war came that last September the burial area was covered with bracken leaves, the treasures destined for the British Museum were buried in deep deposits on the disused stretch of the London Underground between Aldwych and Holborn.
But the hundreds of artefacts, ornaments, utensils, helmet, sword, standard, whetstone sceptre, bowls, clasps, buckles were not shown in their own display until 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain. By then it was pretty evident that the Sutton Hoo ship was the greatest find of artefacts and treasures of early medieval Europe. As a single grave find it ranks with Tutankhamen, discovered by Howard Carter in 1922, and the uncovering of the tomb of Philip II of Macedon – father of Alexander the Great – at Vergina by Manolis Andronikos in 1977.
By 1951, the person who first inspired and then paid for those first two crucial summers of the dig, Edith Pretty, owner of Sutton Hoo, had been dead nine years.
The film is the story of Edith and her chance hiring of a self-taught excavator and archaeologist, Basil Brown, who had been recommended on account of his occasional work for the Ipswich Museum. Brown, who could recognize and locate any sample of Suffolk soil is played brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes. By wonderful doggedness, and a sly turn of phrase (he wrote an excellent archaeological guide, which has come back into print) Fiennes as Brown steals the show.
Carey Mulligan plays Edith with subtle charm and dry wit. It is a brilliantly intelligent performance because Mulligan seems to sense that Brown is driving the drama. She also had to face the challenge of playing a woman twenty years older than herself. Pretty was 55 when she and Brown started to dig. She was a widow with an eight-year-old son, Robert, a latecomer born to her when she was 47.
The mutual respect and chasm of class difference add to the air of gentle melancholy. They know that war is not far off, with the overflights of fighters from the nearby RAF base. One crashes just beyond the estate – an incident based on fact. There is occasional comic relief, particularly in the appearance of the Cambridge academic Charles Phillips, who demands to take over the whole show, once Brown and the estate staff had done the breakthrough spadework. Phillips gets put in charge and wants to haul the treasure off goodness knows where – all in the name of academe, of course. All this is more or less true to life. Phillips is portrayed by a pouting, shouting Ken Stott – and oh boy does Ken have fun.
In its quiet strength it has echoes of a Chekhov masterpiece. It is a story of great hopes, and great sadness. Pretty herself had hoped to go to a London university but was forbidden by her parents – and she had maintained an interest in ancient coinage and archaeology since childhood. She had nursed in the First World War, working in casualty hospitals in France in the last and bloodiest campaign in the summer of 1918. Brown had taught himself archaeology, excavating techniques, and classical languages. He kept superb field dairies, maps and catalogues of methods and matter of the discoveries. Only just recently has the name of Basil Brown been placed alongside that of Edith Pretty as patrons in the great display of the Sutton Hoo treasure at the British Museum.
The brilliant touch of the film – and this is as much Ibsen as Chekhov – is that the audience catch hardly a glimpse of the main object of the story – the treasure itself.
The Sutton Hoo find is a chamber of delights – and of mystery. The whole collection is of extraordinary sophistication, as well as beauty. The buckles and clasps, purse covers, pommels and helmet furnishings are as fine, or finer than almost anything from Viking Scandinavia – and they are at least a century older. They are clearly Anglo-Saxon, showing the Angles and Saxons of Britain were refined and sophisticated in taste and craftsmanship.
But who was buried at Sutton Hoo? Is anyone buried here, or is it a cenotaph, a great memorial to a warrior tribe, but with no actual cadaver in the tomb? The mounds round and about the ship burial have been turned over, dug and robbed for centuries, and so give little clue. There is a possibility it may be the last resting place of Raedwald, the King of the Angles of the lands of Eastern Britain from the Humber through present day Lincolnshire and East Anglia. He is mentioned by Bede in his History of Britain – but of mortal remains, let alone a possible DNA yield, there is almost no trace.
The discoveries and analysis of Sutton Hoo continue. In the mid-sixties I recall being invited to hear an illustrated lecture in the Oxford history faculty by one of the great communicators about the medieval world, Sir Richard Southern. He wanted to talk about the latest theories on Sutton Hoo prompted by the new discoveries by Rupert Bruce-Mitford of the British Museum. The artefacts spoke of a panoramic vision of Europe, where Southern and Bruce-Mitford had seen action in the war.
Southern was beguiled by the sheer quality of the craftsmanship of gold inlay filigree, the knot patterns on the buckles and clasps. They were as Anglo-Saxon as Beowulf – the epic which celebrates the world of this class of warrior. At the time of the lecture the great helmet was being reconstructed, the finest of this era ever found. The whetstone mace had a stag-like ornament above the pommel. This complemented a standard in a cruciform. What was it? Was it a ceremonial cross? speculated Southern, a man of deep faith.This took us to the four silver bowls, with a cruciform flower in the centre, of finest craftsmanship from Anatolia. With them lay the two spoons – from Orthodox Byzantium, inscribed with the name ‘Paulos’.
They are spoons for baptism or conversion and they are certainly Christian. How came they to the funeral ship at Sutton Hoo? Were they just loot, along with the coinage found by them, or were they symbols of the conversion of Raedwald or his kin?
They barely get a look in with the film, and if you look on the web about the Sutton Hoo finds, they barely get a mention. For me, the bowls and the spoons are the big outliers. They show a European world with astonishing connectivity, despite all the physical perils and challenges in a “world grazed thin by death” as St John Chrysostom said a century or so before Raedwald.
The connections of Saxon and Viking England across Europe from the 6th to the 8th century was the subject of the Ford Lectures, “England and the Continent”, given in 1943 by Wilhelmus Levison, a refugee from the Nazis. He was the mentor, and distant relation I believe, of the Oxford historian Karl Leyser, who has influenced my thinking about history, context, strategy and friendship as much as anyone. Karl, too, was an exile from the Nazis, who was first interned and then fought with the Black Watch. His view of the great outreaches of the medieval world complemented that of Levison and Southern. It is the world of the Sutton Hoo ship, and more. “Karl threw great light into some of the darkest and most obscure parts of European history,” Richard Southern said at Karl’s funeral. He was also brilliant on modern warfare and history and Nazi propaganda.
The film, too, shines wonderful light on obscure parts of the Anglo-Saxon world, and 20th century Norfolk social history. “It proves that the Dark Ages weren’t so dark after all,” booms Ken Stott in full over the top mode in the film.
Don’t run away with the idea that the movie is as dry as a Suffolk soil dust history lesson. There is quite a bit of wit and sly fun.
There has been controversy, though, caused by an almost extraneous mild sex scene provided by Lily James, playing a young Cambridge archaeologist, Peggy Piggott. Piggott, later known as Margaret Guido, also had to fight for recognition rather like Edith Pretty, and appears to have been equally single-minded. She worked with her then husband Stuart at Sutton Hoo, but the marriage was in trouble. In the film she has a fictional fling with a cousin of Edith, Rory, just as he is about to join the RAF.
Margaret Guido wrote a slew of studies of the archaeology of Britain, Italy and Sicily, and died in 1994 aged 82. Edith Pretty died at the end of 1942, aged 59. She had donated the Sutton Hoo collection to the British Museum, for which she was offered a CBE – which she promptly but politely declined; the correspondence with Churchill’s No 10 is published.
The treatment of the character of Peggy Piggott/ Margaret Guido has caused a furore and charges of sexism. Lily James says she loves and admires the character. Peggy, it turns out, is the inspiration for the whole project of The Dig, the film, and the novel on which it is based, written by her nephew, the hugely talented John Preston.
This week Preston has two hits on his hands; the movie based on his novel, and his biography of Robert Maxwell, The Fall. Challenged about the depiction of his aunt, Preston has said “she would have been really tickled to be played by Lily James.”
We should all be tickled and thankful to Preston and the Sutton Hoo dramatis personae living and dead for inspiring a gem of a movie – and for an epic tale. They have shown us that history is as much about the present as the past, and opens worlds of boundless imagination and debate.