 Rwy'n meddwl. Rhaid i anglesu yhad o'n ddemol yw'r bellach? Rwy'n mewn i weld i litres o'n ddechrau i chi. Rwy'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i'ch dod o'r syniad o'r hyn yn ym них. Rydych chi'n siarad y ffo'r hyn y bannid o'r hyn. Gweithio y gallwn gwybys hwn i ni dda, sydd y symbol offeron. Rwy'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl ei wneud ymddangodd eich cwrs. Rwy'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i chi'n wneud cyfrwyng maes ei fod yn rhan. Mae wych yn dda. My media work today is delightful image by the times with me as a Viking. I wear that at the weekends at hat, mostly for weekend wear. But I've been lucky enough to have both an academic and a media career over the last few years. I've made some wonderful programmes with the BBC on stained glass windows, on Viking Sagas, and I've just completed one on The Hundred Years' War, which should be going out in the next month or so.Ep dropped the first day in my capacity is the cost director for the undergraduate certificate in history of art. I'm incredibly proud of the cost and has been directing it for the last couple of years now, and it really is a wonderful costs in terms of the scope of what you can study. History of art is taught in many different departments across the country. But not all of them go into the medieval period and not all of them have the same approach that we do Mae'r perthynau sy'n gweithio'r awtodd ar y cyfyrdd yma o'i bod yn ymunoedd ar y parloedd hyn. Mae'n deallu ar y party yma. Mae gennym y tŷetau ar y cyfyrdd, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio ar ddigonol. Mae'r ddisgweld yn llunio'r ddweud. Rydyn ni chi'n fawr i chi'n golygu'r ysgolion ar y cyfyrdd yma o'r ysgolion. Fe'n ddigonol eich ddweud o'r cyfyrdd yma, a'i ddweud o'r ysgolion ar y cyfyrdd. ac mae'r e-mail ar y cwm yn ymddangos. Rwy'n e-mail rwy'n meddwl i'w meddwl i'r cwm yw'r pwysig, o'r gymdeithas i'r cwm yn gyffredinol i'r cwm. Mae'r cwm yn ei wneud i'r meddwl i'r meddwl i'r cyfrifiadau o'r newydd o'r cyfrifiadau o'r meddwl yma. Ond mae hi i gyrsio'r cwm yn ei gyrsio, a hi i gyrsio'r cyfrifiadau o'r mynd. Mae'n oed i gyrsio'r cwm, yn 45 minu yn ymgyrch yn ysgrifennu. This was my research topic, it's what I did my thesis on, and I'm fortunate enough that the certificate allows me to teach some of this as well. So it's one of the few art history courses where we go back as early as Anglo-Saxon and early medieval stuff. The big question hanging over this period is, is it art? I've got a wonderful example of what it assumes to be art, a beautiful three-dimensional classical statue. And then an example of the sort of thing I study, this is the full approach. And it's a difficult one because what we're dealing with, with the majority of Anglo-Saxon art, are smaller, portable objects. They usually come more under the heading of crafts than art. So things like leatherworking, boneworking, textiles, metalworking. But I think it is incredibly valuable looking at Anglo-Saxon artefacts as artworks because they are the creative output of these people. This is what they invest their time, their energy, their interest in aesthetics and beauty in creating. So I'm going to show you a few of my favourites today. But I wanted to really explain why I fell in love with what's otherwise quite an obscure art historical period. And it came to me through the literature. I studied literature for my undergraduate degree, and I had to do Old English. And I had this wonderful moment with three weeks before the start of term, where I'd been sent to something from my tutor to say, right, you must translate these poems in Old English before you arrive. And I thought, oh great, ye olde pubby, it'll be fine. I'll just knock these off and it'll all make sense. And I opened the guide to Old English up and had a small heart attack. And I encountered what was, to all intents and purposes, a completely different language. But a very, very beautiful one. And that time of immersing myself completely into the language really paid dividends. I fell in love with the literature. And there's a lot in Old English poetry that resonates for me, particularly the sound of it. So I was going to read you a little bit just because it is a beautiful sounding literary language as well. Ael is aeth o flitcha, aothan ritcha, on rendeth, worda ysgeaf. Word under heffanum, herbeth feolainna, herbeth freondlaina, herbeth monlaina, herbeth mylaina. Ael is aothan ysgeaf, gyd-al-wath-seoth. So the sentiment is pretty timeless. But I think the way it's expressed is so beautiful. And it flags up what really attracted me to the Anglo-Saxon period. Both these similarities with our own outlooks, these... Oh, I've lost the slide. That's helpful, isn't it? These shared human concerns, these things that have concerned humanity through time. But also the uniqueness of it, the things that make it so different, the sound of the language, the way that poetry is formed, the way it rolls on alliteration and rhythm rather than on rhyme. These things all really appealed to me and they got under my skin. But it wasn't until I encountered the material culture that I realised these things I was attracted to in the literature carried over into the daily lives of these people. They had a propensity for riddling, a desire to create kennings, words that are two different words brought together to make another word. So this is playing on meanings, these multiple meanings. And this was reflected in their artworks too, I started to discover. So here's just a few examples of art from the period. You've got the Book of Kells, amazing example of this incredible art of illumination and these spirals and swirls and also these interlacing beasts around here. Then you've got the Singlesham Buckle, which I'll talk about more in some detail. Me holding it, that's my hand. Amazing. The Alfred Jewel, which many of you as Oxford residents will be familiar with, up at the Ashmalion, a singularly magnificent treasure. Something else I'm going to talk about, the Sutton Who shoulder clasp. But what I realised was that with a lot of hard work and a lot of effort, there was a huge amount of rewards to be had from thinking your way back into this period through the texts, not just the poetry but through the prose, through the theological material that was coming out, the historical texts. But also understanding the language, how they spoke, how they wrote and the fact that this was a time where languages existed alongside each other, so Latin and Old English. It's not been easy over the last how many years to get closer and closer to this material. You have to have done Old English, the history of the English language, paleography, all these different skills and yet it is all about thinking your way back into that moment. What moment are we talking about? Well, we can think about it as the Dark Ages, that wonderful misnomer that I've used in the title, called the Dark Ages because to all intents and purposes there is certainly a dropping away of written evidence and written material with the decline of the Roman Empire. We could date it to around 420 when the Roman troops were withdrawn from Britain. But what happens on the back of the removal of the Roman governance is that different barbaric tribes, called barbarians by the Romans of course, but different barbaric tribes shift and move across Europe and fill in the territories that have been left weak and vulnerable by the withdrawal of the Romans. And the bit that I was concerned with is this bit here. So Roman Britain is left prey to Angles, Saxons and Jutes, these Germanic people who travel across the water and settle, quite notably settle in the British Ars. And it is a period of dramatic change. So Britain goes from being governed by Rome and having a Roman army present and people living in villas and congregating around cities to this wholesale change. There's a change in language so the vernacular becomes Old English. There's a change in the names of places. And there's also a big change in terms of spiritual outlook. While the Roman Empire had its state religion but at this stage it's very much a Christian, it's a state-sponted Christianity, that is replaced by this Germanic paganism, a wealth of gods including Thor and Freia and Odin. So there is a really dramatic change that happens around 450 onwards. And another change happens in this period that I'm interested in, which is the reintroduction of Christianity about a century and a half later. So I find this a fascinating period because it really is a point where the pendulum is swinging between these two extremes. On the one hand, Germanic paganism, tribal military leadership, the idea of living in wooden dwellings halls and not living in cities but living in villages and tribal collectives, but also this idea that they don't work in stone and they don't write things down. They're a proto-literate society. They're not writing in the same way as the Roman Empire did. And yet with Christianity coming, that magical date of 597, St Augustine's Mission, you have a reintroduction of all those things. The Roman Church brought stone with it, stone churches, stone crosses. They brought the Latin language with them and they brought this dependence on the written word. Christianity is a religion of the book. At its heart is a book, the Bible. And so in order for Christianity to enter this world, all these things entered in almost as alien imports. So it's a period of transition. It's a period of a lot of change, cultural, social, economic, but also spiritual and intellectual. So these are the two big, big landmarks. And the time that I'm concerned with in this lecture is just after this event, just after this moment here, when St Augustine sent by Pope Gregory the Great to come and bring Christianity to the heathens to convert them and save their souls. This sets in motion a tide of change and transition. So from about the years 600 to about 750, 800, you see this magnificent coming together of two very disparate people, two very disparate ways of life. And what comes out of it is some of the most magnificent works of art, I think that this country has produced. Things like the Lindisfarne Gospels, which are recognised internationally as some of the finest manuscript illuminations in the world. So that's where I've set us up chronologically. And in order to really understand what we're coming from and to around this period, it helps to start with possibly that most famous of Anglo-Saxon burials, Sutton Who Ship Burial. And I say this to my students regularly. It is like the Tutankhamun tomb of this country. It is that magnificent, in my opinion, the finds of that spectacular and worthy of study. And we are utterly fortunate that it's made it through the sands of time to us. I, again, came to it indirectly via the literature, but there's a passage in Beowulf that describes something similar and it struck a lot of people as unusual that there's this long passage about a man being sent out on his death in a ship. Because, well, there was some evidence to say that there was a variety of burials and this was one of the things that happened certainly in Scandinavia. There wasn't anything on the scale of Sutton Who to support this literary evidence. That wasn't until, on the eve of war, the burial mound one in Sutton Who began to be excavated by a local archaeologist called Basil Brown and it was on the insistence of the land owner, a woman called Mrs Pretty, who had all sorts of rumours connected with the lands, that there were ghosts out there, that it was this very sort of active spiritual place and she had people come in and do some divining with divining rods and they were all drawn to mound one. They were all saying this is where it's happening. You must get this excavated. She lived with these mounds, these huge burial mounds in her garden for a long time but on her insistence they started to excavate it and what they found was, as they began, Basil Brown was sweeping away the soil and he kept finding these rivets and they were all in rows. So, being a sensible man, he thought, well, these are obviously connected, they're leading to somewhere, we'll be systematic about it. So he swept back more and more and more and he realised he was probably looking at the outline of a ship because the wood had disintegrated but the rivets were left in situ. So he excavated more and more and suddenly the scale became apparent that this wasn't just some little fishing boat, this was an enormous seafaring vessel and this is a slide to show the scale of it but the most magnificent thing was in the heart of this ship which had been dragged up the bank and buried, that's no small feat. In the heart of this ship was a chamber, a burial chamber and inside the burial chamber was this array of magnificent finds. Now, it's amazing that these things survived. Basil Brown, when he began excavating, actually started in Mandwan and went down that he came across a robber's trench that had been infilled and he said, oh, there's no point going any further, they've had whatever's in here has come out. Robbers have got what was there, abandoned it, let's go on but it was only coming into the side that he realised the robber's trench had got within a few inches of the roof of the chamber and then stopped. So thank God they turned back and this was what was inside. Again, because of the nature of the soil, the body wasn't there but there's strong evidence on the placement of the items to suggest there was a buried body there but it's a magnificent glimpse into everything Beowulf talks about. The life of the hall, the wealth and the luxury of an Anglo-Saxon hall. So you've got things like cauldrons to prepare the food. You've got these feasting horns. These are made out of the horns of Erocs, a type of cattle related to the zebe that's now extinct and we've got the fittings for it and we can reconstruct them to give the sense of scale of these things and then these goblets underneath. So almost like the hall in miniature, the Lord and his lady with the retainers within and you get this sense of feasting in the hall. Also things like this collection of silverware. There are vessels here that have come from Byzantium. This dish in and it's the Amstasia's dish. It's the largest surviving single dish from Byzantium at this point and yet it's buried in East India at this time of such great change in transition. So the burial has preserved all sorts of things. Then you've got the weapons, the helmet, the shield, sword, spears, but other indicators of the life of the hall like the lyre. And enigmatic things like this whetstone. It's actually a stone that could be used to sharpen swords but it's not been used for that. It seems to be ceremonial, almost like the scepter, the urban scepter that we've come to associate with Kings and Queens Dow. And then the personal pieces of jewellery. The gold buckle, the purse belt, the fittings for the sword and then the shoulder clasps. So a huge array of items, each of which gives us a different insight into the culture that was responsible for the burial of this individual. The famous Sutton Hill helmet. It appears on many history textbooks and with good reason. Again, it seems to have been something that was ceremonial rather than useful. And it's a very vivid way of looking into this period and was looking into the face of someone from this period. Probably more, more like a crown, again, as part of a regalia, rather than as a useful helmet in battle. But very evocative. And the way that this dragon here with its teeth bared and its garnet eyes stretches across the nose with its wings out over the eyebrows. We can't help but make connections with Beryl from the button and dragons in there and the idea of dragon mythology from this period. You've got another dragon on the front of the shield as well. This one's got its sideways and it's got its teeth bared and its wings pushed in along its side. Alongside this hook-beat bird of prey, this eagle that would fly over the battlefield and pick over the bodies of the dead in victory. There's this powerful bird that was so present in battle. Here is a reconstruction of the drinking horns and these are some of those magnificent silver vessels I was talking about. But interestingly, the Sutton-Hinship Beryl is dated to around 620. And if you keep it in mind that Augustin and his missionaries were only arriving a decade or two before, there is something in this Beryl that suggests this transition and this change is happening. And that's these two objects here. These are baptismal spoons and etched on the side, on the arms of the spoons, in Greek of the word saulos and paulos, sol and paul. So there seems to be the suggestion of the conversion of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus that these are baptismal spoons given perhaps to this individual because he's converted to Christianity. It's a very complicated set of artefacts in here. So much of it screams Germanic, pagan, tribal, military. But then you've got these hints at connections with Mediterranean Europe, connections with Christianity. So it's sat poised on this moment of change in history. And it's a document of this transition. But for me it is so staggering from an art historical perspective. The objects could tell us an awful lot about the history, the economics, the contact that was taking place with the continent. But when you go in close and interact with some of these things on an art historical level, they open up even more insight, I think. This is one of my favourite objects, the Saturn Hughes shoulder class. But I had the privilege of being able to handle it back in the days where it was allowed out. And I nearly dropped it because I got so excited. Which is probably why no one's allowed to hold them anymore. But it is a staggeringly beautiful object. And being in the presence of it really awed me because it is so finely made. The person who commissioned this was someone with an awful lot of power and wealth at his disposal because it is made by the finest artists of the period. And no matter what has come up before or since, this is still some of the finest artwork of its period. For me it becomes interesting when you start to think of how these things are made. If I go back one, you can see, can I? You can see that the thing itself is about that big. It still works. You can take the pin out and the two parts slide apart so you'd have them on a shoulder class attached to a cape and if you pulled the pins out, the cape would be released. And it's in perfect working order despite being buried in soil for over a thousand odd years. But the thing that staggers me are these panels of closene here. So if we zoom in and have a look at them, some of these are sort of a centimetre unless these closens. But if I explain to you how they're made, it really is staggering to think that they're intact, completely intact. The gems remain in their closens. These things look as beautiful as the day they were made. The way they're made is that these gold fittings are created, each of which holds an individual gem. But to show off their virtuosity, I think, in terms of making these things, the artists at work on the Sutton Who treasures didn't choose a simple shape like a square or a diamond. They chose these stepped closens. Each of these steps is a couple of millimetres wide at most. So absolutely tiny detail to cut into. And that's fine if you're bending wire. That's doable. You can have closene fittings on rings now that you have to hold the gem in place. But what's staggering is they then had to cut garnets to fit into that space exactly. Garnets are a tricky material to work. It comes in layers like this. And you slice into it and then polish it so you get a gem that is thin enough to be transparent. And it chips easily. It's not the easiest thing to work. And yet each of these garnet gems has been cut into the shape exactly of the closene fitting so that it is held in place by nothing else. There's no glue. There's no adhesive. It is held in place by tension of each of the pieces pressing against one another inside these fittings. That's astounding in itself. But in the pursuit of aesthetic beauty, Diangelo Saxons took it a stage further. They're interested in chyroscuro, the play of light and dark, and this idea that you enjoy the play of light, the light on a weapon as you go into battle, the way that it catches it in candlelight and in different lit into environments. And yet, if you look at this shoulder clasp, it's quite a flattened object. There isn't an awful lot of opportunity to play on the potential of the gold and the garnet. So what they've done is inside each of these closene fittings, they've handed down a piece of gold so that it is some of them paper, absolutely, paper-thin gold. Then they've stamped it with a checkerboard effect. This is a stamp that gives the indication of it. And you can see, I think, looking at the slide, this checkerboard effect going on behind it. So if I tell you that each of those checkerboards that you can see is probably about half a millimetre across, you can think this is impressive stuff. They're making these imprints that are so microscopic. If I then tell you that inside each of those checkerboard squares is another checkerboard, then you get the sense of the magnificence of this thing. These are difficult to see with the naked eye. If you add to that the fact that they're working in poorly lit conditions, they don't have electricity, they don't have artificial light, this is incredible to me that these things were created. And all for this sense of the pursuit of beauty, the pursuit of the effect, as the light hits the garnet, it sheets through and then it radiates back off the gold checkerboard effect, filtering out and creating a sparkle. That's why they've done it. And yet it just astounds me that they were capable of doing that all that time ago. So they're absolutely beautiful objects in terms of how they're made. I'm very interested in symbols and what symbols mean to different people at different times. These things are also heavily laden with different symbols. So around the edges of the cosiné centrepiece you've got these interlacing serpents. If I go in on a close-up, can you see the eyeball there picked out in blue glass? There's the eyeball and here are the jaws opened up, biting on to its own body as it winds up and behind the other beastie. So here's the other one. There's its eye, there's its jaw biting, and it winds around the back of the other one. Two of these serpent-like beasts biting themselves. I suppose it's something we know even from childhood that Anglo-Saxon art has lots of interlaces in it, but it's this interlacing beast, these biting beasts that recur again and again and become a sort of a traditional aspect of the art. But there must be something behind these images and if we think that the serpent Jormunganda in Paganthology, the world serpent, surrounds the world and bites its own tail, and as long as Jormunganda holds its tail the world remains intact, but when that's released chaos ensues. So there is something about biting beasts that are biting serpents that may be carrying through from the mythology to the art, but nonetheless it creates this visual riddle, something to play with, something for the eye to tease out and enjoy. And so wherever you encounter these Anglo-Saxon artefacts there's an awful lot of pleasure to be had in tracing how they work and where one overlaps with the other. But the second new shoulder clasps are amazing for me because of these creatures up at the top. They're worn on the shoulders. They're worn most probably by a man, a high status man as part of a military attire. And the bores are functioning here in quite a symbolic way, but where are they? We have to find them and the eye has to tease them out. So if I show you that this is the eyeball, this outward shape here, and this is the snout complete with a little black tusk, so the snout is pressing down there, there's the tusk and this is the shape of the head. That's the bores' head. Then if you follow its prickly spine it goes over the thing and what you've got on the outside of the shoulder clasp is the curly tail. There you go. And it's little trotter here. And then you follow it back and its front limb hangs down like this, picked out, the shoulder blade is picked out in this wonderful blue enamel. And its pair is over here. The eye has the snout complete with tusk. The spine going down to the curly tail. So they fold over one another. And it is a visual riddle again. It's something you have to tease out. For me it conjures up this idea of the Anglo-Saxon world as one where this is normal. People play verbal and visual riddles constantly. It's part of their imaginative world. And yet the bores here are probably functioning as symbols as well. They're only the shoulder clasp, they're in a prominent place. And it's easy to think of them as reflecting something about the wearer, the owner. And bores in mythology, in Germanic mythology were connected with the god of fertility. And in this case there's this sense in which maybe they reflect male virility, the power and the virility of the person who's wearing them. So there's many things to unpick from a historical perspective in these objects. They are very worthy of study by archaeologists, historians, people who are interested in what they tell us about the events that take you place at the time. But they are also artistically worthy of study. They are artistically beautiful. They're technically very accomplished. And they're abounding in symbols that can be looked at and that can be held up against the time to give us a sense of their meaning. So they're absolutely incredible. They're my favourite things. Gosh, I've had enough on time. I've got so many lovely things to show you. I'm nervous I'm going to run out of time. We're poised at a moment of transition. So Sutley here is a couple of decades into this Christianisation process that begins with Saint Augustine. These objects all date from around that time too. So this is another princely find. This is another in Taplow. Another high status burial. Unfortunately that one had been plundered quite a bit. So there's only a few items remaining to give us a sense of the beauty of it. But it would have been on a similar scale to Sutton here in terms of the collection of finds. Amazing use of gold and garnet on this one too. And here you can see the eyeball for the serpent that winds its way all the way around this interior. And this is on a bulkbuckle. And on the Sutton Who bulkbuckle too, there are serpents. And so there's again this connection with these repeating motifs, the serpents, the boars, the birds of prey. This one is a bit of an anomaly. This is the Finglsham buckle. And again I was extremely lucky to be able to hold it given that it's in the private collection of Lord Northbourne and really able to be encountered. But it's quite small scale. It's guilt. And in the middle we have something quite unusual for Anglo-Saxon art. A figure, a human figure. Well we tend to get a beast and birds. But in this case there's this human figure. He's got this tear drop shaped head which seems to be a way of representing Odin, or things connected with the god Odin. And these hook beat birds coming out of his head or helmet on the top. And he's holding spears. These are all things that are associated with Odin. One of the ways of violating a pagan temple was to throw a spear into it. And there's this connection here with sacred spears. The two birds that could perhaps be his ravens, hewn and mywn, that were his symbols of thought and memory. So we perhaps have an image of the god Odin. But it's showing me that these pieces of jewellery were little canvases for artistic expression. They were the opportunity for Anglo-Saxon peoples to express things that were important to them and visually interesting to them. So these buckles have these sorts of motifs, snakes, garnets, something extreme that the fingers and buckle might have a figure. But something changes around the coming of Christianity. We've got a new motif introduced. And the motif comes from this long tradition of Christian art in late antiquity that's connected with this word here, ichtheus. If you take the first letters from the word ichtheus, it makes the sentence Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. But ichtheus in Greek means fish. So the fish that we associate with Christianity, this symbol of the fish, comes from this sort of an anagram that's complicated, literary, playing on words. And yet what we end up with is something that we all recognise today as a symbol of Christianity, the fish. And that's got echoes in the gospels of the dividing of the bread and the fish as well. So the fish is a very potent and powerful symbol. But it's almost entirely absent from Anglo-Saxon art up until the year 600. Then a couple of strange little objects start to appear. So this one, the echoes buckle, very traditional on its front. You've got a double-headed serpent. We find those a lot on helmets going over the prow of the helmet. And then these knotted serpents either side. But on the back of the buckle, so facing inwards for the wearer, this funny little plaque has been attached. And it's a fish. So what's going on here? Is this talismanic? Is the owner putting a symbol of the fish on the inside to confer some sort of protection? That seems to change again when we come to this object, the Cremdal buckle. Because here, suddenly, it's all been amalgamated. We've still got knotted serpents going up the sides. We've still got gold and garnet. But here, in absolutely pride of place, this fish on the front. So we're looking at transitional art. We're looking at the introduction of new ideas and also new symbols, new meanings. And these objects chart that transition in some ways. I get very excited by this. It's like looking at a moment in history that you could read about in a history book and someone tells you this is very important, something really important happens. But when you see it visually like this, this is happening. It's real and it's filtering down through members of the population into their imaginative worlds. This happens with another important symbol, the cross. So prior to the year 600, this is dated to around 600, in my doggy, it's the earliest in the sequence. You've got things like this, pendants. But here, you've got it arranged on a triple, on a triplicate. The number three was very sacred in Germanic paganism. And this idea of three ravens or three birds of prey in a spiral is very apt. It connects a lot of things that were coming out of the mythology. But look what happens to it on the arrival of Christianity. We've got things like this, the X-worth cross, where the same technology and techniques are being used. It's still gold and garnet. They're made in the same workshops by the same craftsmen that are working on things like this. And yet now they're employing this new symbol to a new end to advertise the Christian sympathies of the wearer. And this one is interesting too. This is the Walton cross. And at its centre, something else that was unfamiliar to the young Glace Saxons, coinage. There's a coin that's been set in here. And there's been some interesting work done on this. It's a coin from the reign of Heraclicius. And it shows the cross on Calvary. Can you see a stepped pyramid there and then the cross? But it's been put in upside down. Now, it has been said that this reflects the ignorance of the Anglo-Saxons because they don't know about coins, they don't know about Calvary, they don't know about crosses, they just stuck it in, built this thing up around it. That doesn't rush with me, I'm afraid. Because this is a pendant. And if you think of nurses' watches, they're going to look at it like that. So this, in fact, shows quite a bit of insight on the part of the creator because they set it so that the coin and the cross can be appreciated when it's held by the person who owns it. So these things are all charting this trade, this change. And they flag up so many other changes. The fact that a coin is now being set, it's showing that international trade links are opening, but the Anglo-Saxon people are opening up to the world of the continent, of the Christian continent. One of the pluses of accepting Christianity. If you look at Scandinavia a couple of hundred years later, the motivation it seems for their conversion to Christianity was that trade was getting a bit difficult. Christians would only trade with other Christians. So these Scandinavian pagans would wander into a negotiation and they'd say, oh dear, are you a pagan? I can't trade with you. No, no, no, I'm fine, I'm fine, let's get going. And they had to make the sign of the cross to show that no, actually, they were all right. But if there are many aspects to conversion, it's not just intellectual and spiritual in terms of everybody suddenly changing the way they think about God and creation. There are reasons for it and there are raves and patterns to it. And the Anglo-Saxons show some of these waves and patterns in their artworks. Amazing Survival, the Saint Augustine Gospel Book, probably brought over, if not by Augustine, certainly by one of the missionaries that came following him. So part of that initial Christianisation and still a very important manuscript that's used when the new Archbishop of Canterbury, as we're going to have soon, takes up his position. And so much of it would have seemed alien to the Anglo-Saxons when they arrived in 597. It's a book. If you're coming from a proto-literate society, the book must be the strangest thing. I've tried to imagine it. It's like that Craig Rain poem about an alien coming from Mars. How do you encounter these sorts of objects? If you are not using written words and you are speaking in a vernacular that's not written down, the format of a book must be the strangest thing. It's held as sacred. It's supposed to contain the secrets that will give you eternal life. And in there, you open it up and it's page after page of this indecipherable script held within these covers. It must have just been a very odd object to encounter. Even more so, as the artwork within it was very unfamiliar. We're looking at classic late antique art. You've got a figure in classical guise and dress seated on a stella. And then these narrative sequences played out cartoon-like in this sort of comic book effect. Very much what we see in late antique sarcophagi. It's the way that a literate society makes use of its art. Christianity is, as I say, a religion of the book. If you're trying to tell a story, you create an art that reflects that, which is a narrative art in the sequence of your stories. So there's this narrative playing out. But in many ways, it's the perfect thing to take with you as a missionary. Because Gregory the Great ropes to Augustine and the Missionaries and said that there are ways to bring about this conversion. One of them is not to destroy the temples. Just make them useful for Christian acts. So just take the statues out and sprinkle some holy water and it's all fine. And then the other one was to educate through images. Use images to tell these stories. He was a big advocate of that. So we're looking at a teaching aid. We're looking at something that may have been poured over by the eyes of these very early Anglo-Saxons. It kind of gives me goosebumps to think that this was something that was actually useful in this process. I've got a wonderful riddle here for you to show that the Anglo-Saxons were a very strong literate society in terms of all literacy. There's accounts where a shop, a minstrel, could recite for days on end in the hall, could recite poems that he's memorised, that had gone in there and stayed. And there's something about being literate that actually makes the memory lazy. If you've written something down and you forget about it because it's done, we've got a record of it. Whereas if you don't have written texts you have to have a much stronger energetic brain retaining things. Where does your land end? Up by the oak tree, up to the river. That's it. This is where my plot of land is and don't forget it. So this idea that you don't have text to fall back on actually made for quite an active oral literate society. But one of the things that's interesting about what happens in the ways of conversion is certain aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture are held on to and protected. There's this sense in which the Anglo-Saxons have converted to Christianity. They have opened up their mind to the world of Rome and the world of the continent. And yet there is a sort of archaic tradition where they want to preserve their pre-Christian traditions. That's why Beowulf gets written down. It's written down quite a bit later and probably by Christian monks despite its content. But there is this conservation of ideas that takes place by the Anglo-Saxon Christians. And one of the things they preserve is a big collection of riddles. This one is wonderful I think. I won't read all of it but I'll give you a little bit mild English just because it sounds nice. Where is it? If I've written it down. OK. I won't do much more but you can see there's references throughout her being dipped in water drain out, stretched bare hard blade, the birds when stiff joy dart off into the horn's dark rim. Any ideas what we're talking about? A book. A manuscript. Excellent. This is it. This is vellum. And what this poem amazingly describes is this moment where you don't just get presented with a piece of vellum and start writing your ideas down on it. This was a creature. This was a living breathing creature. And the Anglo-Saxon poems have this great sense of animism about them. The idea that the world is animated with spirit that things tell their own stories. There's a poem I was hoping to have time to cover which I won't, which is The Dream of the Rude which is written on the sides of this magnificent Anglo-Saxon cross, the Rubble Cross, where the cross tells its own crucifixion story. It's the one that dies and bleeds. While Christ is this hero who just jumps on as this magnificent heroic death, this world view where objects can speak for themselves, this personification that takes place in them is absolutely fascinating, but again it helps me realise how these people viewed these objects. The idea that you chart what happens to the vellum, the way it's stripped, the way it's lain in the sun, it's so physical, it's so real and it makes the thing itself all the more precious because of the process it's gone through. Even down to this bit, a skin laced with gold, the bright song of Smith's glissons on me in filigree tones. So this is the covering of the manuscript with gold and jewels. It becomes even more of a treasure and a riddle like this, again it accounts for that event. But then when we look at the results, when we look at something like the Linda's Fun Gospels, that is why I think they are so magnificent. Something has happened in the minds of the newly converted Anglo-Saxon Christians where they've been faced with this new art form, the illuminated manuscript. They've taken their tradition of riddling, interlacing, chiaroscuro, contrast and they've applied all of that. They haven't ignored it. They haven't forgotten it. They haven't put it in the dustbin as something that was from their bad dark past. They've incorporated it into what's new about their outlook and the results are magnificent. So this is a carpet page from the Linda's Fun Gospels. Quite a large thing. And as you look at it, it's a bit like one of those magic eye paintings. You can sort of see the outline of the cross emerging from this horror vacui, this dense collection of interlaces. But as you look longer and harder on it, you can see the wounds of Christ picked out. You can see that there are birds biting themselves. And the birds in the Linda's Fun Gospels, some of them are so well executed they can be identified as particular birds that still live on the island now. So these interlacing birds are all part of the wealth of God's creation that's teeming behind this cross. And it's the first thing you would encounter before you read the Gospels. And I think what it's doing is it's preparing the mind for the sacred text within. It shows how closely they protected this idea of complex riddling imagery that something like this is the spiritual gateway to the sacred text. So if you think an equivalent would be something like an Islamic prayer rug, certainly the rise of Islam is taking place around the same time the Linda's Fun Gospels are being made and there's very possibly contact in ideas. But this idea that you take figures out you take narrative out that's all going along with this idea of concern over representing humankind in art, the iconoclasm concern. So instead in its place what you have are geometric or non-figural images and something like an Islamic prayer rug if you have a decorative pattern and you move further and closer you are meditating yourself into a feeling of spiritual awareness heightened spiritual awareness so these patterns they're not just pretty, they're not just decorative, they're functional, they're part of this opening up the text within and the art reflects that. What I find magnificent about Anglo-Saxon art is it's not text that takes primacy over image it's almost like image it's into text. So with these carpet pages they come here, you meditate, you ruminate and then the pattern flows over and it becomes the first letters of the word liba liba generatio so the book opens up from the image the two go together. I've run out of time I'm afraid I've got some more wonderful things to show you. The faints cast get the rubble crust but I don't have to wait for when you sign up to the certificate. So thank you very much for your time.