Guilden Morden boar

Guilden Morden boar
Colour photograph of the Guilden Morden boar
The Guilden Morden boar
Black and White drawing of the Guilden Morden boar
1904 drawing of the boar
MaterialBronze
Size2.5 in × 1 in
(6+14 cm × 2+12 cm)
Createdc. 500–700 AD
Discovered1864 or 1865
Guilden Morden, England
Discovered byHerbert Fordham
Present locationBritish Museum
Registration1904,1010.1

The Guilden Morden boar is a sixth- or seventh-century Anglo-Saxon copper alloy figure of a boar that may have once served as the crest of a helmet. It was found around 1864 or 1865 in a grave in Guilden Morden, a village in the eastern English county of Cambridgeshire. There the boar attended a skeleton with other objects, including a small earthenware bead with an incised pattern,[1] although the boar is all that now remains.[2] Herbert George Fordham, whose father originally discovered the boar, donated it to the British Museum in 1904; as of 2018 it was on view in room 41.[1][3]

The boar is simply designed, distinguished primarily by a prominent mane; eyes, eyebrows, nostrils and tusks are only faintly present.[2] A pin and socket design formed by the front and hind legs suggests that the boar was mounted on another object, such as a helmet.[1][4] Such is the case on one of the contemporary Torslunda plates found in Sweden, where boar-crested helmets are depicted similarly.[5]

Boar-crested helmets are a staple of Anglo-Saxon imagery, evidence of a Germanic tradition in which the boar invoked the protection of deities.[6] The Guilden Morden boar is one of three—together with the helmets from Benty Grange and Wollaston—known to have survived to the present,[7] and it has been exhibited both domestically and internationally.[3] The Guilden Morden boar recalls a time when such decoration may have been common;[7] in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, where boar-adorned helmets are mentioned five times,[8][9] Hrothgar speaks of when "our boar-crests had to take a battering in the line of action."[10]

  1. ^ a b c Fordham 1904, p. 373.
  2. ^ a b Foster 1977a, p. 166.
  3. ^ a b British Museum boar.
  4. ^ Foster 1977a, pp. 166–167.
  5. ^ Fordham 1904, p. 374.
  6. ^ Foster 1977b, pp. 5, 27.
  7. ^ a b Meadows 2010, p. 16.
  8. ^ Beowulf, ll. 303–306, 1110–1112, 1286, 1327–1328, 1448–1454.
  9. ^ Hatto 1957a, pp. 155–156.
  10. ^ Heaney 2000, p. 93.