The first 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 wartime. Includes unpublished texts and drafts.

In 991 A.D., the Vikings attacked an Anglo-Saxon defense led by their duke, Beorhtnoth, resulting in fierce battles along the banks of the Blackwater River, near Maldon in Essex. The attack is widely considered one of the defining conflicts of England's tenth century, as immortalized in the poem, The Battle of Maldon.

Written shortly after the battle, the poem survives today only as a 325-line fragment, but its value today is immeasurable, not only as a heroic story but also as a vivid expression of the lost language of our ancestors and honoring the ideals of loyalty and friendship.

J.R.R. Tolkien considered The Battle of Maldon to be ‘the last surviving fragment of ancient English heroic poetry.’ This would inspire him to compose, during the 1930s, his own dramatic dialogue, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, imagining the developments after the great battle when two of Beorhtnoth’s servants come to retrieve the body of their duke.

Leading Tolkien scholar, Peter Grybauskas, presents for the first time J.R.R. Tolkien’s self-adaptation of The Battle of Maldon along with the fundamental analysis of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and accompanying essays. Also included for the first time is his lecture, ‘The Tradition of Funerary Verse in Old English,’ an extensive essay on the nature of poetic tradition. With enriched commentary and notes, he has produced a definitive critical edition of these works and persuasively argues that, aside from Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon may very well have been ‘the old English poem that most influenced Tolkien’s fiction,’ most dramatically within the pages of The Lord of the Rings.

Pages: 208, Dimensions: 14.9x14.9cm