The Franks Casket (figs. 2–6) was made in what Alfred believed to be England's lost golden age and in what in more recent times has come to be known as the ‘Golden Age of Northumbria’. It demonstrates the multilingualism and interest in translation that Alfred believed were so definitive of the period, bearing inscriptions in two different languages and two different alphabets, along with carved figural panels that constitute a third system of signification. Whether it is representative of the peaceful and united community in which Alfred imagined learning and translation took place, however, is another matter as there are multiple ways in which the casket and each of its panels have been read and interpreted; however, as the meaning of any text or thing is always plural, a ‘stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers’ rather than a coexistence of different readings, the casket ultimately moves beyond any individual's capacity to read it. The casket is itself also a reader of sorts, reaching back geographically and temporally to carry and narrate stories that were part of or related to the multiple origin legends of the gens Anglorum back to England. It gathers floating pieces of narratives into one place, but it leaves the gaps between those narratives in place. They are transformational but they do not come together as a single narrative. The construction and materiality of the casket structure the way it narrates its stories but do not impose any narrative order on its readers. It is important, however, to understand the casket's composition, imagery, and texts before moving on to its function as a heterotopia and a crypt, and to get a sense of its order before I go on to explore it as a site of disorder, split selves, and disrupted meanings.

The casket is a small (23x19x13cm) box made from the jawbone (or jawbones) of a whale (or whales) in the early eighth century somewhere in Northumbria – the Northumbrian coast, Ripon, Wearmouth-Jarrow, and Whitby, or the area between Whitby and Wearmouth-Jarrow have all been suggested.