There was a gold buckle engraved with intricate snakes and animals – a piece so extraordinary that the British Museum’s keeper of medieval antiquities almost collapsed when he saw it; decorated shutters and belt buckles; a wonderful, ornate helmet with a full face mask – the ghostly face of some ancient hero who has looked through the ages.
What the discovery meant
Brown’s find literally led to the history books being rewritten. The ship and its contents were, as it turns out, from the Dark Ages, and the discovery illuminated those four centuries between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Vikings, about which so little was known. The English Saxons who ruled over the various kingdoms of England during this time were regarded as a crude and backward people – almost primitive – but here beautifully made goods were made. It was a society that valued skill, art and craftsmanship, and that traded with Europe and beyond.
And these remnants of a sophisticated, lost civilization appeared just when our own was threatened with extinction by the Nazis. The chief archaeologist gave a speech to visitors at the site and had to shout to be heard above the roar of a Spitfire.
When author and journalist John Preston, whose book on the infamous British politician Jeremy Thorpe, A Very English Scandal, was recently turned into a hit TV series, discovered that Piggott, his aunt, was involved in the excavation. he researched the story and immediately realized what rich seam it provided for a novelist. The Poem was published in 2007 for praise. Robert Harris calls it ‘a true literary treasure’, and Ian McEwan declared it ‘very fine, captivating, superbly original’.
Producer Ellie Wood, who has previously worked on a number of TV adaptations, including Decline and Fall, Bleak House and The Line of Beauty, says she wanted to make a film version as soon as she read the manuscript of the novel in 2006 before it. . has even been published.