The Times from Shreveport, Louisiana • Page 83

Revitalize your Love of Life Willi 'A 5DiermicfBatItf I'JYCIIE TRAVEL AGENCY "Your Travel Agent" Ticlc.tt Raiwationi Information AIR LAND SEA WORLDWIDE Lobby of The Fountain 184 FAIRFIELD AT OLIVE PHONE 423-7153 Whooo Died tflfc at-; Sutton Hoo? 1 Hoi Springs National Park, Arkansas Call, wire, or wrile Edgar May, Manager (AC 501 NA 3-7771 for personal resorvntloiu. 1 DINERS FUGAZY TRAVEL hiwuswep wo "TAKE A AIR LAND SEA RESERVATIONS AUTO RENTALS TRAVEL INSURANCE TRAVEL FINANCING WORLD-WIDE SERVICE NO EXTRA COST MAJOR CREDIT CAROS HONOREO 422-0704 TRIP FROM THE TRAVEL PEOPLE!" BUSINESS OR By Henry Mitchell L.A. Times-Washington Post suspected there were as many glimmerings in England as in France. Sutton Hoo also sheds some light on the author of "Beowulf," as much as he sheds light on this Saxon find. When that writer spoke of gold and great feasts and so on, it was generally assumed these were fantasies, perhaps disordered, of the first and therefore least experienced poet of the English language.

But the golden horns of Sutton Hoo, the thousands of garnets, the flamboyant skill of PLEASURE NUMBER ONE MID SOUTH TOWERS SELBER'S PIERREMONT MALL IB" Long before the grave was opened and the king's gold treasure made her eyes blink, the owner of Sutton Hoo had suspected there was something unusual about the 16 mounds on her property. So had plenty of other people, including a would-be grave robber a few centuries ago. But until Mrs. E. M.

Pretty set her hand to it, nobody succeeded in finding the treasure or greater than the gold the most exciting archeological find in English history. Since the mound over the treasure was as conspicuous as the Anglo-Saxons of 625 A.D. could make it (it was 100 feet long and nine feet high), no archeologist had to follow a rabbit down a hole to come upon the find. It just took a few days of digging. The digging is chronicled with simplicity and grace by Bernice Grohskopf in a recently published book, "The Treasure of Sutton Hoo." (Atheneum Sutton Hoo is a pleasant freehold half a mile from the North Sea on the Suffolk coast, where the River Deban flows home.

1 Anglo-Saxon King An Anglo-Saxon king (scholars are still arguing which one) was buried there in a ship the ship was lowered, like an 89-foot coffin, into a sandy grave and the king's body placed in it, along with more than a million dollars' worth of gold jewelry. Or so it is thought. Except that no trace of the king's body has been found; and more than one explanation is offered for that. Returning to Mrs. Pretty and the actual discovery, she arranged, after a talk with the nearby Ipswich Museum, for a Mr.

Basil Brown to take a room at Sutton Hoo in 1938. He was given a free hand with the spade. Two of Mrs. Pretty's gardeners, Mr. Jacobs and Mr.

Spooner, were to forget their delphiniums, primulas and other felicities of the Suffolk garden awhile and lend Mr. Brown a hand. On May 8, 1939 (the hour is not known), Mrs. Pretty walked out and pointed to the largest mound and said, ''What about this one?" TERMITES! ROACHES! Are the termites earing your house down? Have the roaches and other insects taken over? If so, it's time to call Martin Pest Control 631-7147 Free Inspection Terms to Fit Your Budget "Not the Biggest, But the Best" a coffin, was designed for 38 oarsmen and a steersman. To modern eyes, used to today's ugly boats if one may say so without too much flak from boaters it is very beautiful with its beaked prow and stern.

In such boats, it is now clear, the Anglos and Saxons sailed the North Sea to come at last to England. "Then they sailed, set their ship out on the waves under the cliffs, ready for what came." And, according to the poet, "rejoicing, they quietly ended their voyage." At Sutton Hoo they found a sword, ornamented with gold and jewels, a family antique, apparently, of Swedish manufacture. "No one who'd worn it into battle, swung it in dangerous places, had ever been deserted." They found also an antique helmet, evidently handed down from the past and quite old, even in 62S A.D.: "His helmet would defend him, that ancient shining treasure, encircled with hardrolled metal, set there by some smith's longdead hand, would block all battle swords and stop all blades from cutting at him." The helmet was not "shining" when they found it at Sutton Hoo, but the author of "Beowulf" knew about that, too: "Gems scattered on the floor, cups and bracelets, rusty old helmets, beautifully made but rotting with no hands to rub and polish them." Christian or Pagan The time of Sutton Hoo was, like today, a transitional time, when nothing much was settled, least of all faith. Some think the prince of Sutton Hoo was buried in church ground, and that the pagan ship burial, perhaps the last in England, was done as a gesture to the large number of pagans in the island. Others question whether it was ever the custom to bury more than a million dollars worth of precious metal and family heirlooms apart from a hero's body or a father's or a son's.

Scholars, who are from time to time confounded by a poet's accuracy (which they grudgingly confess a thousand or two thousand years late, as a rule) are still thinking it over. The damp sand of the Suffolk grave, which preserved the gold and blue enamels set in gold, and the 14-ounce gold buckle and the garnets, thousands of them, cut to fit in gold borders kike campleve enamel, and which spared the silver from the east and from Italy, and Coptic bronze from Africa, did not spare the oak planks of the ship. They rotted entirely, though the sand pressing against them made so precise a mold that a good cast was able to be made. As for the prince's body, of which there is no trace, perhaps it did not resist even as well as oak. In any case, all that's left is the treasure that Mrs.

Pretty gave to the British Museum. the goldsmiths it is now known he reported as much as he invented, and that he had rather a good eye for the princely furniture of the time. The first report of the discovered treasure appeared in July, 1939, in The Times. Never a publication to sound the trumpets hastily, The Times (of London) recorded the discovery in 118 words on the amusement page beneath an article on George Bernard Shaw, the Irishman, who was as usual having another birthday. In normal times, the discovery of Sutton Hoo would have been a sensation throughout the civilized world.

-As well as in England. But the summer of 1939 Within a few weeks the men who dug at Sutton Hoo were in military service. Hardly had the treasure been uncovered when it was buried again, in a disused subway tunnel in London. The English were more interested in trying to survive a German onslaught than in studying the spectacular grave of a Germanic ancestor. After the war, the British 'Museum had more lirgent problems devoting all its resources- to studying the Sutton Hoo'fihds so the work of scholarship, the work of evaluation and cataloging, proceeded slowly and quietly- 'Beowulf Quotations There are quotations from "Beowulf" that fit the Sutton Hoo burial almost uncannily.

The great Anglo-Saxon poem was written within a few decades following 623. The diggers at Sutton Hoo, when they uncovered the treasure, probably could have done no better than follow "Beowulf" when they first saw the gold, emeralds, and jewels: "Jewels and silver buried in the sandy ground, back in the earth again, forever hidden and useless to men." As they lifted out the numerous drinking horns two of them made from the horns of the now-extinct Aurochs, each holding six quarts and not meant to be set down until empty) they recalled, or would have if they remembered "Beowulf" from their school days: "The keeper of the mead came out carrying the carved flasks and poured that bright sweetness." The drinking horns are bound, at Sutton Hoo, with wrought gold. The ship itself, that serves as SUNDAY EVERY DAY AND EVENING Thousands of Mirrors moraasborrj WEEK DAYS LUNCH at 11:30 A.M $1.65 DINNER at 5:30 P.M $1.95 Sunday $1 95 Children under 12 $1.35 Port 0' Call Restaurant at the Quality Motel 1-20 at Monkhouse Drive Exquisite Dining Facilities In a matter of a few weeks it was clear that a ship burial of a Saxon king had been found. It turned out to be the earliest ship burial yet discovered in Europe. It revised a good bit of thinking about the Saxon monarchy nobody had supposed an English chieftain of those days had so much wealth, or that society was well enough organized for an 89-foot ship to be lowered (not slid) into a grave, or that the Saxons had silver from Byzantium and Italy, antique armor from Sweden, gold from France, bronze from Africa.

The French have always hinted that from the fall of Rome (450 A.D.) until the Norman incursion of 1066, all England was dark. It is now Tiik SiiKKvi Poitr Times Sunday, Jan. 17, 1971 11-F.