The Guilden Morden boar is a sixth- or seventh-century Anglo-Saxon copper alloy

figure of a boar that may have once served as the crest of a helmet. It was found
around 1864 or 1865 in a grave in Guilden Morden, a village in the eastern English
county of Cambridgeshire. There the boar attended a skeleton with other objects,
including a small earthenware bead with an incised pattern,[1] although the boar is
all that now remains.[2] Herbert George Fordham, whose father originally discovered
the boar, donated it to the British Museum in 1904; in 2017 it was on view in room
41.[1][3]

The boar is simply designed, distinguished primarily by a prominent mane; eyes,

eyebrows, nostrils and tusks are only faintly present.[2] A pin and socket design
formed by the front and hind legs suggests that the boar was mounted on another
object, such as a helmet.[1][4] Such is the case on one of the contemporary
Torslunda plates (de) found in Sweden, where boar-crested helmets are depicted
similarly.[5]

Boar-crested helmets are a staple of Anglo-Saxon imagery, evidence of a Germanic

tradition in which the boar invoked the protection of deities.[6] The Guilden
Morden boar is one of threetogether with the helmets from Benty Grange and
Wollastonknown to have survived to the present,[7] and it has been exhibited both
domestically and internationally.[3] The Guiden Morden boar recalls a time when
such decoration may have been common;[7] in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, where
boar-adorned helmets are mentioned five times,[8][9] Hrothgar speaks of when "our
boar-crests had to take a battering in the line of action."[10]