The Battle of Maldon

Folio from the original manuscript of the alliterative Homecoming of Beorhtnoth (MS Tolkien 5 folio 86r) THE BATTLE OF MALDON THE BATTLE OF MALDONtogether withThe Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Sonand‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’ Edited by Peter Grybauskas CopyrightHarperCollinsPublishers Ltd1 London Bridge Street,London SE1 9GFwww.tolkien.co.ukwww.tolkienestate.comwww.harpercollins.co.ukFirst published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023All materials by J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright © The Tolkien Estate Limited 1953, 2023Introduction, notes and commentary Copyright © Peter Grybauskas 2023 Illustrations Copyright © Bill Sanderson 2023® and ‘Tolkien’® are registered trademarks of The Tolkien Estate LimitedJacket design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023Jacket photographs: Shutterstock.comThe Tolkien Estate Limited and Peter Grybauskas have asserted their respective moral rights in this work.The facsimile manuscript page that appears as the frontispiece to this book is reproduced courtesy of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and is selected from their holdings labelled MS Tolkien 5 folio 86rA catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.Source ISBN: 9780008465827eBook Edition © March 2023 ISBN: 9780008465841Version: 2023-02-21 DedicationFor Marie, Bruno, and Flavia CONTENTSCoverTitle PageCopyrightDedicationForewordIntroductionPART ONE: THE HOMECOMING OF BEORHTNOTH BEORHTHELM’S SON(I) Beorhtnoth’s Death(II) The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son(III) OfermodNotesPART TWO: THE BATTLE OF MALDONIntroductory NoteThe Battle of Maldon, translated by J.R.R. TolkienNotesPART THREE: THE TRADITION OF VERSIFICATION IN OLD ENGLISHAPPENDICESI ‘Old English Prosody’II ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’ [continued]III Alliteration on ‘g’ in The Battle of MaldonIV An Early Homecoming in RhymeV Noteworthy Developments in the Drafts of The HomecomingVI Proofing the Pudding: The Homecoming in Dialogue with the LegendariumBibliographyAcknowledgementsFootnotesWorks by J.R.R. TolkienAbout the Publisher 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 INTRODUCTIONPOTTING THE HOMECOMING OF BEORHTNOTHThe 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