On the (re)construction site

It really was a Good Friday for me this week. I had one of those serendipitous museum visits when two different displays join up disparate thoughts in your head. I went to the British Museum to see the exhibition which opens their new World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre, Vikings: Life and Legend, but also had a look around the new 'Sutton Hoo and Europe' gallery.

What largely distinguishes both Anglo-Saxon and Viking material culture is a wealth of fascinating but battered and relatively unattractive objects. Of course, there are notable exceptions, but to my mind the unaided beauty of the Anglo-Saxon shoulder clasps or the extraordinary, woven gold Viking necklace only prove my point by contrast to the other objects around them. Burnt and bent swords, pieces of cauldron decoration, drinking horn mounts, or indeed planks of an enormous ship are undeniably interesting and important, but often don't present that much visual clout.

The question becomes, then, how to reconstruct or redisplay these fragments. Of course, visitors should see the real, wonderful survivals of the Viking or Anglo-Saxon past, but how can they be shown to make their purpose clear and give them some visual interest? I was struck by the different approaches in the BM's two displays, which, broadly present the same kind of story of the Anglo-Saxons or Vikings at the centre of wider European trade and culture. 

In the case of Sutton Hoo, the curators have chosen to display existing parts of objects mounted on a replica base shield, helmet, cauldron or horn. Next to these are also shiny modern reconstructions of how each might have looked to its owner. For Vikings, the approach is somewhat different. Partly, I assume, only the most visually striking object fragments have been chosen, but then these have been mounted on skeleton wire forms that both support them and evoke their now lost parts. 

Oddly, in the case of Vikings's signature object - the longest-known Viking warship, Roskilde 6 - I found this approach seemed to let down both the original object and the extraordinary structure. The final last room of the show is dominated by an enormous skeletal reconstruction of the ship, which both supports the surviving planks of the original and gives you a sense of the size and shape it would have been. While this was undeniably impressive, I found somehow it meant that it belittled the real parts of the ship, making them look surprisingly small and insignificant, while they in turn made the structure look out of place in its shiny, modern completeness. 

So, to reconstruct or not to reconstruct? I found the small ship burial that was next to Roskilde 6 much more evocative, with the simple metal nails displayed on a shaped, stepped indentation in the plinth, covered over by glass. People were peering over it almost reverently. Perhaps both more and less needs to be left to the imagination?