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unpublished and never-before-seen texts and drafts.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 defence-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 immortalised 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 an 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.
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