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poetic dramas, that explores timely themes such as the nature of heroism and chivalry during war, and which features unpublished and never-before-seen texts and drafts.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 regarded as one of the defining conflicts of tenth-century England, 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 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 inspired him to create, 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, along with the definitive edition of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and its accompanying essays; also included and never before published is Tolkien’s remarkable lecture, ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’, a comprehensive essay on the nature of poetic tradition. Featuring insightful notes and commentary, he has produced a definitive critical edition of these works, and argues convincingly that, aside from Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon may well have been ‘the Old English poem that most influenced Tolkien’s fiction’, most notably within the pages of The Lord of the Rings.

Pages: 208, Dimensions: 12.9x12.9cm