Marina Warner steps in to back Hoard campaign

12 February 2010

Award winning novelist, mythographer and cultural historian Marina Warner has stepped in to pledge support for the Staffordshire Hoard campaign, The Art Fund today announces.

Speaking to The Art Fund this week, she said: “It’s wonderful that such treasures can still be found, like that, in the fields, and they weren’t even buried that deep. The vision in my mind, when you scrape away the earth and see gold – and this gold has been preserved for so long and it’s so beautifully decorated and inlaid – really reminds me of stories from the Arabian Nights, which are full of people dreaming about treasure and then going to the place they dreamed of and finding it.

 “Our evidence from this period, I would have thought, is so scanty that we need to have these elements to fill it in. And it seems to me at a quick glance that [the Hoard] instantly sets up all kinds of questions about societies [from that time], possibly quite different from what we would have imagined.

 “I hadn’t imagined that they had such complex jewellery work: I knew there was metal work, the making of bowls and incising silver, but I didn’t know that they inlaid garnets… so the complexity of the workmanship alone seems to point to more about that society than we know just offhand.”

Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of myths, symbols, and fairytales. She is Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. Her fictional works include The Lost Father (1987), Indigo (1992) and the Leto Bundle (2001). Marina is also a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.

Marina joins a growing list of celebrity supporters of the Hoard campaign, which now numbers Dame Judi Dench, Frank Skinner, Michael Palin, Dr David Starkey, Dr Tristram Hunt, Noddy Holder and Bill Wyman, among others.

News of Marina’s support comes the day before the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent unveils a breathtaking exhibition of treasures from the Hoard. The show will run from Saturday 13 February to Sunday 7 March. This marks the first time so much of the Hoard will be displayed at once and the display includes 40 treasures that have never been shown before.

The campaign, kick-started by The Art Fund, has until 17 April to raise the £3.3million needed to save the Hoard for the West Midlands.

To make a donation, please visit www.artfund.org/hoard

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