The Battle of Maldon

by J.R.R. Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas

Genres: Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Synopsis

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poetic dramas, that explores timely themes such as the nature of heroism and chivalry during war, featuring previously unpublished and never-before-seen texts and drafts.

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

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

J.R.R. Tolkien considered The Battle of Maldon “the last surviving fragment of ancient English heroic minstrelsy.” It would inspire him to compose, during the 1930s, his own dramatic verse-dialogue, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, which imagines the aftermath of the great battle when two of Beorhtnoth’s retainers come to retrieve their duke’s body.

Leading Tolkien scholar, Peter Grybauskas, presents for the very first time J.R.R. Tolkien’s own prose translation of The Battle of Maldon together with the definitive treatment of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and its accompanying essays; also included and never before published is Tolkien’s bravura lecture, “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” a wide-ranging essay on the nature of poetic tradition. Illuminated with insightful notes and commentary, he has produced a definitive critical edition of these works, and argues compellingly 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.

 

Release date: June 6, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 208

Sample

FOREWORD

‘Coming home dead without a head (as Beorhtnoth did) is not very delightful’. So Tolkien quipped to his publishers Allen & Unwin in 1961, quite aptly capturing the gist of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth (hereafter referred to as The Homecoming), while voicing his frustration about a glib description of the poem as a treatment of ‘another famous homecoming’, one of several misrepresentations of his work by the first Swedish translator of The Lord of the Rings.

Mis-readings like the one alluded to above are not uncommon where The Homecoming is concerned; the text has for many years maintained something of a reputation as an obscurity in the Tolkien canon. We might say that the precedent was set from the start. Its first publication came in a 1953 volume of the academic journal Essays and Studies – despite the fact that The Homecoming is, at its titular heart, a play in alliterative verse. Its awkward fit in the journal was certainly not lost on Tolkien, who issues a kind of sheepish apology in the opening lines of ‘Ofermod’, the critical essay that follows his verse drama. While this scholarly endnote, which probably earned The Homecoming its place in the journal, has gained considerable traction (first among scholars of The Battle of Maldon, and later those interested in Tolkien’s own tales) the rest of the text has been, when not terribly misunderstood, largely neglected. To cite one egregious example: the stock blurb on some online booksellers for Tree and Leaf, the latest collection to include a reprint of The Homecoming, even today erroneously claims that readers will be ‘treated to the translation of Tolkien’s account of the Battle of Maldon, known as The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’.

This new edition of The Homecoming, on the verge of the 70th anniversary of its first publication, aims to clear up such confusion and to let shine its unique poetic and scholarly qualities: as the rare completed specimen of Tolkien’s mastery of alliterative verse in modern English, and the site of some of the author’s most illuminating reflections on heroism, war, and poetic tradition.

To better achieve this goal, I am pleased to present here alongside The Homecoming two closely-related but previously unpublished works: Tolkien’s prose translation of The Battle of Maldon, the anonymous poem which inspired the events of his verse drama, with select notes and commentary; and ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’, a wide-ranging essay on the nature of poetic and artistic tradition and Maldon’s place within the early English canon. For readers wishing to delve further, appendices provide additional excerpts from Tolkien’s scholarly engagements with Maldon, an early version of The Homecoming in rhyming dialogue with an overview of The Homecoming’s creative development, and (in my own hand) a short reflection on the ways in which the text might be said to converse with the stories of Tolkien’s legendarium. I hope that readers old and new wll find something of interest here.

 

INTRODUCTION

POTTING THE HOMECOMING OF BEORHTNOTH

The Homecoming defies easy categorization. It can be read as scholarship, alliterative verse drama, or historical fiction; it has been described as coda, epilogue, sequel, and prequel to The Battle of Maldon – all of which is pretty much true. Some readers may prefer to eschew or at least put off introductory discussion and come at the text fresh; but for those who require a short primer, I offer a bare summary of The Homecoming’s contents in the following three paragraphs.

The text comprises three parts. At its centre is a dramatic dialogue in alliterative verse (The Homecoming proper) that recounts the fictional journey of two of the Ealdorman (or Duke) Beorhtnoth’s servants, Torhthelm (Totta) and Tídwald (Tída), sent by the Abbot of Ely to recover their lord’s body on the night after a battle between English and viking forces near Maldon in 991, which is commemorated in The Battle of Maldon, an extant fragment of Old English verse. Totta ‘is a youth, son of a minstrel; his head is full of old lays’ about the legends of the North; Tída, on the other hand, is an old ‘farmer who had seen much fighting’, though neither of the two fought in the previous day’s battle.

As this odd couple wanders through the muck and gore of the battlefield, searching in the dark for the headless body of Beorhtnoth, their conversation explores the tensions between youth and age, romance and realism, pagan and Christian worldview. After much toil, and a scuffle with desperate scavengers that leaves one more needlessly dead, the two men succeed in loading the duke’s body onto their waggon and then hit the long road to Ely Abbey. Totta, half-asleep in the cart, has a dream vision in which he mutters the most famous lines of the (as yet unwritten) Old English Maldon, suggesting that he may one day go on to compose that poem. His dream is interrupted by a jolt from the bumpy road, and the curtain falls with the monks of Ely chanting the Latin Office for the Dead. Their chant, briefly interrupted by a mysterious voice in the dark, closes out the sombre story of Beorhtnoth’s homecoming.

This dramatic-poetic core is bracketed on the front end by ‘Beorhtnoth’s Death’, a prefatory historical note on the battle and its outcome; and on the back end by ‘Ofermod’, an essay exploring the treatment of heroism in the Old English poem, arguing (with aplomb, and against the grain) that the anonymous poet expresses severe criticism of Beorhtnoth’s gallant blunder in allowing the much greater viking force to cross to the mainland via a strategic causeway and join in a ‘fair’ fight. These two essays were plainly written to provide context for the verse drama and to accommodate the academic audience of Essays and Studies, and they have been retained in subsequent reprints (the present volume included).

The hybrid nature of the text makes for a challenge in placing The Homecoming on the Tolkien bookshelf. Taken as a whole, it may be the finest demonstration of the ways Tolkien’s ‘scholarly studies fertilized his imagination’, producing what Alan Bliss calls his ‘unique blend of philological erudition and poetic imagination’ (‘Canute and Beorhtnoth’ 335; Finn and Hengest preface). The verse drama itself might sit cosily alongside other examples of Tolkien’s experiments in reviving the Old English alliterative metre in modern English. Some of these, like The Fall of Arthur, seem to share The Homecoming’s interest in engaging the primary world traditions and legend cycles that Tolkien loved and studied. But many noteworthy examples also find their way into his legendarium, including his massive early unfinished Lay of the Children of Húrin (in the Lays of Beleriand) as well as shorter verses like ‘The Song of the Mounds of Mundburg’ in The Lord of the Rings. Read as an imaginative coda to the Battle of Maldon – or origin story for the poem that come

morates the battle – it bears likeness to other creative ‘reconstructions’ like his Sellic Spell, the kind of fairy tale source that Tolkien supposes might lie beneath the Beowulf that we know. With greater emphasis on the ‘Ofermod’ essay, the text finds a place beside ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ and other works of literary criticism. And, like seemingly any work of Tolkien’s – scholarly or creative – published before 1954, it will inevitably be judged in part by what small light it sheds on the nature or development of The Lord of the Rings, undoubtedly Tolkien’s masterpiece. In this sense, The Homecoming invites added scrutiny for its publication less than a year prior to The Fellowship of the Ring.

‘Beorhtnoth we bear not Béowulf here’, cautions Tídwald to his young companion in the verse drama, but he may well be speaking to us, too. After all, the later, shorter, mostly historical Battle of Maldon can hardly compare to Beowulf, that lodestone to Tolkien’s imagination, a seemingly inexhaustible source for his scholarly speculation and creative inspiration. But Beowulf excepted, The Battle of Maldon may well have been ‘the Old English poem that most influenced Tolkien’s fiction’ (Holmes in The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia). I take up the subject in the final appendix to this volume.

MANUSCRIPT AND PUBLICATION HISTORY

A substantial collection of undated manuscripts and typescripts pertaining to The Homecoming are held in MS. Tolkien 5 at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Thomas Honegger, in a 2007 article for Tolkien Studies, labels the eleven texts in Bodleian MS. Tolkien 5 chronologically from A – K, and uses the Greek α to denote the early fragment published by Christopher Tolkien in The Treason of Isengard. The drafts trace the work’s transformation – sometimes subtle, sometimes radical – from a short rhyming dialogue (as in version A) to the full-blown alliterative verse drama with accompanying scholarly apparatus in the final typescript Tolkien sent away to the printers (version K). Other, perhaps earlier, fragments are found here and there. Christopher Tolkien describes a rough text scribbled on the back of a version of Tolkien’s poem ‘Errantry’, and notes that a still earlier text may be found with Tolkien’s artwork held in the Bodleian Library, on the verso of a pencil sketch of a countryside landscape (TD 88, fol. 24). The Tolkien-Gordon Archive at Leeds University also maintains an early draft of the dialogue in rhyme, which seems to slot in between the Bodleian versions B and C.

According to Christopher Tolkien, these earliest extant fragments date as far back as the early 1930s, preceding by more than twenty years the eventual publication in 1953. The stages in the text’s lengthy gestation have not been dated with much clarity; Tolkien’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter noted only that it was ‘in existence by 1945’. The significance of this date is clarified by Christopher Tolkien’s remark in the Note on the Text published with The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun: ‘My father visited Aberystwyth as an examiner in June 1945 and left with his friend Professor Gwyn Jones several unpublished works, ...