Alright, just one thing. More a general comment on how these burials are still sometimes discussed than on the movie, per se. The sort of burial these mounds were part of a major change in funerary rites all across Western Europe at the turn of the 6th Century which signalled a/

a still fiercely debated major social realignment and is fiercely debated, many people for a good long time have highlighted we really don’t need to think about this in terms of syncretism or a last gasp of paganism in the face of the onward march of conversion or whatever.

(A lot of archaeologists will now be saying 'yeah James, no shit, thanks' right now, but you still see this said a lot including from people who work broadly on the early Middle Ages but maybe aren't quite so familiar with this bit)

Furnished burial with grave-goods =/= paganism. I’ll let the Sutton Hoo experts stick to commenting on the fun things about the dig itself and the artefacts etc.

Interpreting funerary remains through trying to identify whether they straightforwardly signalled particular markers of personhood. I.e. a 1:1 relationship between symbol and 'pagan'; 'ethnic category'; 'gender' whatever, is a misreading of the complexity through which funerary/

rites constructed & signalled relationships with cosmology (in the more general sense of place in space and time and the general order of things), how and why this was mediated for the participants in the ceremony, and the difficulty of untangling those processes of mediation for

the modern scholars who interpret all the wonderful finds and their positioning after these fabulous excavators pull them all out of the ground for us.

But I think that's far more fun and exciting than going 'look, a pagan king!' (wonderful as Sutton Hoo is).

Best part, aside from being more correct, is that this is a method of interpretation that can be applied to a far wider range of burials than the most exciting, elaborate, and richly furnished.

Pretty much everything I know about this I first learned from @Real_HistoryGuy. For an example of that approach, albeit applied to a slightly earlier time, this is worth a read. https://brill.com/view/book/9789047444299/Bej.9789004179998.i-422_013.xml

The relevance of this to Sutton Hoo specifically is something I picked up teaching the latter on a course of his which took students through all of these social changes across Europe. Coming soon in the form of a rather enormous book to all good book stores near you, I believe?

Anyway, I wrote all of this very hurriedly in response to thinking about the film, as well as a few recent publications/comments, so if the writing is a bit all over the place, that's why.