Preliminary thoughts on the Staffordshire Hoard

*disclaimer* If for some reason Google decides to pick up on this post for the phrase "Staffordshire Hoard" and people end up here looking for actual information, I'd like to just say that I am a lowly MA student studying Old English and my thoughts should not be taken all that seriously. *disclaimer*

While slogging through the texts of the Junius manuscript with the CMS Old English reading group today, I got that familiar wish that there was more information on the Anglo-Saxon period. Specifically, we were discussing who the potential audience of Genesis B might have been and whether they would have been scandalized by the way that Satan talks in it. When it comes down to it, there really is not that much information on the period, or at least not as much as we would like. Most of the remaining Old English poetry is contained in a mere four manuscripts, and even historical records are often vague or extremely narrow in their focus. As a result, scholars of the literature from this period sometimes have to do research in archeological finds to figure out what texts are talking about. For instance, the discovery of the ship burial at Sutton Hoo did a lot to change the way people interpreted sections of Beowulf. Things like the burial practices of pagan vs. Christian communities of Anglo-Saxons sometimes figure prominently in arguments regarding the authorship of Beowulf, whether it is one poem or a few mashed together by a monk (or two), pagan and Christian elements in the story, etc. etc. Physical evidence can be really important.

Once the group meeting was finished, I went to the library and saw Anna's post about the Staffordshire Hoard on my Facebook wall. This is a MASSIVELY important find that will probably impact every area of Anglo-Saxon studies. There is not a lot currently known, seeing as how the stuff has only been out of the ground for a couple months, but over the next couple years this discovery may fill in large gaps that we have regarding the history and societies within Anglo-Saxon England. There are a few things that I have noticed in the information that I have read, and these are the things I am currently pondering:

1. The hoard is apparently not connected to a burial. Ok...so why on earth was the stuff buried?

2. Some of the items in the hoard are explicitly Christian in nature, yet were found in an area that was known to be pagan. Does this indicate that the treasure was taken as loot by a pagan army which had conquered a Christian army?

3. The excavation is not complete and there is apparently more that has been seen via x-ray. I will be spending a good deal of time hoping and praying that somehow there are books buried somewhere in the vicinity. Yeah, its a super longshot and the hoard was almost certainly buried before books were being widely copied in England, but one can always hope. I would rather find another Beowulf-style epic poem than 20 hoards of this nature. I might just be biased towards the written word, but the discovery of a couple more books of Old English poetry and prose would have an unimaginable effect on our understanding of the literature of the period. I can understand more and more why Tolkien decided to write the poetry that he did...