IN HER MONUMENTAL 1984 volume, “Beowulf” 's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition, Helen Damico looked at the high-prestige roles of women in a range of motifs in Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature and culture. The publication of this work opened the doors to new areas of scholarly inquiry not only for specialists on Old English texts, but also for archaeologists and art historians working on the material culture of Anglo-Saxon England; Damico's volume has been, to reuse the familiar paraphrase of Claude Lévi-Strauss, “good to think [with]” across the spectrum of Anglo-Saxon studies. This article is offered not only in acknowledgement of the trail blazed by Helen in that volume, but also in gratitude for the support and encouragement that Helen has so generously extended to so many colleagues in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies over the years.

It is an often-published truism that in Anglo-Saxon burials, drinking horns with applied metalwork ornaments are generally found in elite men's graves. I too have made this statement in print on several occasions. Yet there are a very few exceptional examples of such ornamented horns that have been found in women's graves. These graves, and in some cases the cemeteries in which they are found, are anomalous in more than this one way, and are worthy of consideration in terms of what they may reveal about the range of roles women may have played in early Anglo-Saxon society. As such, the examination of these objects in their find contexts seems a fitting subject with which to honour Helen Damico's lifetime of contributions to our understanding of the roles of women in early medieval literature and life.

Although the roles of women as cupbearers in elite Anglo-Saxon society and its early medieval cognates on the Continent have been substantively explored by several writers, and significantly by the honouree of this volume, the subject of the burial of women with drinking horns, outside of Scandinavia, has not been explored. To the best of my knowledge, only two examples from Anglo-Saxon England have been published, Grave 17 at Wakerley, Northamptonshire, and Grave 43 at Fonaby in North Lincolnshire. A third possible example is Grave 124 at Castledyke South in Barton-on-Humber, North Lincolnshire, although identification of the sex and gender of the deceased is problematic there.