page_title: Rupert Bruce-Mitford
section_title: Sutton Hoo
hierarchical_section_title: Rupert Bruce-Mitford / At the British Museum / Sutton Hoo
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of the Sutton Hoo helmet from the front in 2015 Français&#160;: Le casque de Sutton Hoo, vu de face. Photo de 2015. accession number 1939,1010.93 / British Museum&#58; online database&#58; entry 86159
context_page_description: Rupert Leo Scott Bruce-Mitford, FBA, FSA was a British archaeologist and scholar, best known for his multi-volume publication on the Sutton Hoo ship burial. He was a noted academic as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University from 1978 to 1979, in addition to appointments at All Souls College, Oxford, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
  Bruce-Mitford worked for the British Museum in the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities from 1938 and, following the bequest of the Sutton Hoo Treasure to the nation, was charged with leading the project to study and publish the finds. This he did through four decades at the museum. He also became president of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Apart from military service in World War II he worked at the British Museum continuously until 1977, including two keeperships, and finally as a research keeper. Bruce-Mitford also held the titles secretary, and later vice-president, of the Society of Antiquaries, and president of the Society for Medieval Archaeology. He was responsible for translating Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob's book The Bog People into English.
context_section_description: Excavated in 1939, the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo ship-burial was to become "the defining moment of Rupert's life, his greatest challenge, the source of almost insuperable difficulties, and his greatest achievement." By 1954 he was already recognised as the "spiritus rector of present day Sutton Hoo research", a title that would only become more deserved with time.
  Soon after returning to the British Museum Bruce-Mitford began publishing the Sutton Hoo finds, which had waited out the war in the London Underground before being returned to the museum in 1944 and 1945. In 1944 Herbert Maryon, a Technical Attaché recruited for the task, set to work restoring them, and when Bruce-Mitford returned two years later, he quickly began work. As he later wrote, "[t]here followed great days for Sutton Hoo when new, often dramatic, discoveries were being made in the workshops all the time. Built from fragments, astonishing artefacts – helmet, shield, drinking horns, and so on – were recreated." The first edition of The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial: A Provisional Guide was published in January 1947, the same year that Bruce-Mitford was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. The work quickly "turned out to be one of the Museum’s most successful publications ever"; by the time the second edition, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial: A Handbook, was published in 1968, the first had gone through ten impressions.
  Dozens of articles, chapters, and books on Sutton Hoo would follow. In 1947 he visited Sweden for six weeks at the invitation of the archaeologist Sune Lindqvist, in what Bruce-Mitford would later describe as "one of the most rewarding experiences of my life." There he studied the similar finds from Vendel and Valsgärde, learning Swedish along the way. In 1960 Bruce-Mitford was put in charge of a definitive Sutton Hoo publication, but before it was completed, from 1965 to 1970 he led another round of excavations at Sutton Hoo to acquire "more information about the mound, the ship and the circumstances of the burial". The first volume of The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial was finally published in 1975, and hailed as "one of the great books of the century" by A. J. Taylor, then president of the Society of Antiquaries. The second volume followed in 1978, and the third volume—published in two parts—came in 1983.
caption: The Sutton Hoo helmet is one of the most iconic finds from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial.
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