"And Your Eyes Fancied Barrow-Wights and Bogeys"

The Battle of Maldon (together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth) by J.R.R. Tolkien (Edited by Peter Grybauskas), 2023

This year is the 70^th anniversary of the publication of Tolkien’s work, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, in the academic journal Essays and Studies. It became more widely known, of course, when it was reprinted in The Tolkien Reader (1966), and that is where I first read it.

The Homecoming is a play, written in alliterative verse (where the lines do not rhyme but which stress a strong beat on alliterative words within the line), which Tolkien manages to make sound very natural indeed. It tells the story of the aftermath of the Battle of Maldon (991 AD), where Anglo-Saxon forces, led by the Duke ('Ealdorman') Beorhtnoth, met a band of marauding Vikings. When the Vikings (who were a smaller force than the defenders and penned onto a small island connected to the land by a narrow causeway) asked for leave to cross over unmolested so it would be a fairer fight, the Duke (very ‘chivalrously’, or proudly; anyway, in the event, unwisely) allows them to do so. The result is the defeat of the Anglo-Saxon’s army and the slaughter of the Duke and his household warriors.

The play deals, as I say, with the aftermath of this battle. Two servants are sent from the abbey of Ely with a cart to retrieve the Duke’s body under the cover of darkness. One is Torthelm, a youngish man, something of a poet, and still under the sway of the heroic conventions of the North. The other is Tidwald, an older, more realistic ‘carl’, careful to recall the other from ‘heathen’ ideas and with no romantic ideals about the carnage of war. As they search the battlefield for the Duke’s body, chase off human scavengers, and discuss the battle, their conversation acts as a dialectic about the old Northern ideals, their pros and cons, and their passing. The play ends with a Latin dirge, sung by the monks of the Abbey as the two draw near.

This is the first part of the book, and includes of course Tolkien’s introduction and essay, published in The Tolkien Reader. The second part is Tolkien’s own translation of the original The Battle of Maldon (an incomplete Anglo-Saxon work 325 lines long), published here for the first time, and the third part is Tolkien’s essay The Tradition of Versification in Old English, explaining, of course, Anglo-Saxon poetic form, with a special reference to Maldon.

These are followed by six ‘Appendices’; five of these are from notes and lectures by Tolkien that are connected to the play/poem (including earlier versions of his efforts with The Homecoming that Tolkien preserved). The sixth is by Grybauskas, pondering the connection of The Homecoming with the Legendarium of Middle-earth itself.

Each section is illustrated with a single ‘medallion’, done in the style of old English manuscripts, by Bill Sanderson.

I first read The Homecoming of Beorhtnot’s Beorthelm’s Son back when I was in middle school (in fact I have a vivid memory of reading it in Art class while waiting for the bell). I remember being impressed by the ancient words ringing up from the dim past, ‘held to be the finest expression of the northern heroic spirit’: “Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens!” Grim words but noble, and perhaps needed greatly again. But I had no idea back in the day that they would come back to me again in such an intensified form.