The Battle of Maldon: together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth

First-ever standalone edition of one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most important poetic dramas, exploring timely themes such as the nature of heroism and chivalry during war, and featuring unpublished and never-before-seen texts and drafts.

Historical Context

In 991 AD, Vikings attacked an Anglo-Saxon defence force led by their duke, Beorhtnoth, resulting in brutal fighting along the banks of the river Blackwater, near Maldon in Essex. This attack is widely considered one of the defining conflicts of tenth-century England, immortalised in the poem, The Battle of Maldon.

• Written shortly after the battle, the poem now survives only as a 325-line fragment.
• Its value today is incalculable, not just as a heroic tale, but for vividly expressing the lost language of our ancestors and celebrating ideals of loyalty and friendship.

Tolkien’s Connection

J.R.R. Tolkien considered The Battle of Maldon ‘the last surviving fragment of ancient English heroic minstrelsy’. Inspired by this, he composed his own dramatic verse-dialogue, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, during the 1930s. This work imagines the aftermath of the great battle, when two of Beorhtnoth’s retainers come to retrieve their duke’s body.

Special Features of This Edition

Leading Tolkien scholar Peter Grybauskas presents, for the very first time:

• J.R.R. Tolkien’s own prose translation of The Battle of Maldon
• Definitive treatment of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and its accompanying essays
• Never-before-published lecture, ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’, a wide-ranging essay on the nature of poetic tradition

This edition is illuminated with insightful notes and commentary, producing a definitive critical edition of these works. Grybauskas compellingly argues that, Beowulf excepted, The Battle of Maldon may well have been ‘the Old English poem that most influenced Tolkien’s fiction’, most dramatically within the pages of The Lord of the Rings.