British Library, London
With the Codex Amiatinus, the earliest surviving text of Beowulf and serpents galore, this blockbuster exhibition reveals a Britain not very English at all
The gallery is full of snakes that twist and slither in hypnotising coils of green and gold. It is hard to stop looking. That fascination leads you into a world that gradually ensnares the imagination. To spend time in the British Library’s blockbuster exhibition about the Anglo-Saxon world is to discover a culture of barbaric splendour and fierce vision, where the real and supernatural entwine.
The snakes are cast in gold and painted in books. You see them on a belt buckle from Sutton Hoo and the abstracted illuminations of Northumbrian gospels. The Germanic people who invaded Britain after the Romans left in AD410, pushing the native Celts into what became Wales, brought these swarming serpentine images from deep in the mists of Eurasian prehistory.
Related: Behemoth Bible returns to England for first time in 1,300 years
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War is at the British Library, London, until 19 February.
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