Benty Grange helmet

The Benty Grange helmet is a boar-crested Anglo-Saxon helmet excavated by Thomas Bateman on 3 May 1848 from a tumulus at the Benty Grange Farm in the civil parish of Monyash in the English county of Derbyshire. The remains were purchased by Sheffield's Weston Park Museum in 1893 as part of Bateman's collection, and are now displayed there along with a reconstruction.

This helmet is boar-crested, evoking descriptions of similar helmets in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. The surviving iron bands would have supported plates of horn (decayed in antiquity) held in place with small silver rivets. The nasal (nose guard) of the helmet is decorated with a silver cross.

Discovery
The helmet was discovered on 3 May 1848 during an excavation by Thomas Bateman on the Benty Grange farm in Derbyshire, in what is now the Peak District National Park. The subject of the excavation, a barrow, was "perhaps not more than two feet at the highest point," but "spread over a pretty large area," and "surrounded by a small fosse or trench."

At its centre lay a body, flat against the original surface of the soil, of which little remained; what was thought to be the one remnant, strands of hair, is now thought to be from a cloak of "fur, cowhide or similar material". In the area of the "hair" was found "a curious assemblage of ornaments," which were difficult to successfully remove from the hardened earth. This included a cup of leather or wood, approximately in diameter at the mouth. Its rim was edged with silver, while its surface was "decorated by four wheel-shaped ornaments and two crosses of thin silver, affixed by pins of the same metal, clenched inside." Also found were "two circular enamels upon copper 1 3/4 diameter, in narrow silver frames, and a third, which was so far decomposed as to be irrecoverable", as well as "a knot of very fine wire," and some "thin bone variously ornamented with lozenges &c." attached to silk, but which soon decayed when exposed to air.

Crest
This helm is crested with an iron boar with bronze eyes inset with garnet, this sits upon an elliptical copper-alloy plate. The hips of the boar are made with pear-shaped plates of gilded silver. The 1986 reconstruction, based on conservation work carried out at the British Museum, has boar bristles running along the back.

In Norse mythology, the boar talisman was associated with Freyja's role as battle goddess.

Typology
The Benty Grange helmet is one of the "crested helmets" known in Northern Europe in the sixth through eleventh centuries AD.

Boar-crests in Beowulf


The Benty Grange helmet recalls the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, in which boar-adorned helmets are mentioned five times. Three passages appear to describe examples that, like the Benty Grange helmet, are topped with a freestanding boar. After Æschere is killed by Grendel's mother, King Hrothgar's lamentation speaks of such helmets.

The devastation wrought by Grendel's mother itself invokes a boar-crested helmet, for "[h]er onslaught was less only by as much as an amazon warrior's strength is less than an armed man's when the hefted sword, its hammered edge and gleaming blade slathered in blood, razed the sturdy boar-ridge off a helmet" (Wæs se gryre læssa efne swa micle, swa bið mægþa cræft, wiggryre wifes be wæpnedmen, þonne heoru bunden, hamere geþruen, sweord swate fah swin ofer helme ecgum dyhtig andweard scireð.). These two passages likely refer to boar-crests like those found on the Benty Grange and Wollaston helmets, and the detached Guilden Morden boar.