TOLKIEN'S MALDON

N August 991, on the coast of Essex in south-east England, an Anglo-Saxon army fought a battle against a force of Viking raiders. For the Anglo-Saxons, it was an unqualified disaster: they were defeated, and their leader Byrhtnoth was killed, along with many of his army. Battles like this were not an unusual occurrence in Anglo-Saxon history, but this one is famous because it's the subject of a superb Old English poem, which tells the story of Byrhtnoth’s last battle and the loyalty of his men. The Battle of Maldon is celebrated as one of the finest achievements of Anglo-Saxon literature – a fierce, proud, moving poem born from a terrible loss.

It's also unique among Old English poems in turning a contemporary event into tense, vivid narrative poetry. Written towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, The Battle of Maldon is one of the last major poems composed in the traditional style of Old English alliterative verse. Its language looks back to a heroic era of great warriors, who fight to the end against overwhelming odds, bound together by loyalty and honour. But it's also something new: the only Anglo-Saxon poem to tell a detailed story of a recent, real-life event. Most Old English narrative poetry is set far away from Anglo-Saxon England, in time and space; whether the subject is an early Christian martyr or the Scandinavian monster-slayer Beowulf, the story usually takes place at a distance from ordinary English life. There are a handful of short poems which celebrate the deeds of Anglo-Saxon kings, but nothing comparable to Maldon in depth or detail. No other poem pays such precise attention to the physical setting and psychological trajectory of a real battle, or records so carefully the names and deeds of the men from across the social scale who fought and died on that day. These were not legendary warriors, but plain men of tenth-century England, remembered in language which elevates them to the status of heroes.

The relationship between the real-life event and the poem it inspired is a complex one. Without the battle we wouldn’t have the poem, but without the poem, not many people would have heard of the battle. As it survives The Battle of Maldon is a fragment, lacking both its beginning and ending, so we don't know how the poet might have chosen to introduce his story. However, by contrast to the murky, half-forgotten heroic age in which Beowulf is set, we know a lot about the England of 991, and can put the battle in some context. The Vikings were not a new threat on English shores. About 120 years earlier, fearsome raiding armies from Scandinavia had overrun the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, conquering and settling across the north and east. The rulers of the only remaining independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom – Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, and his successors – held on and fought back. Out of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Viking territories which replaced them, Alfred’s descendants over the course of the tenth century forged one kingdom: England, a unified country for the first time. In 991 England was a prosperous kingdom, confident in its new identity, enjoying the fruits of religious, literary and artistic revival.

But the Vikings were back. It began with a spate of raids along the south-west coast, the opposite side of England from Essex. Viking leaders from Denmark and Norway were once again taking an interest in England’s wealth, but their attacks did not immediately seem like a serious threat. In 991 most English soldiers had not faced a Viking raiding-army for decades, so when the ships appeared in Essex Byrhtnoth and his men might be justified in setting out with confidence, sure at least that they were fighting on home ground. 

Defeat was unexpected, and the blow must have been felt across England. Among Byrhtnoth's army were promising young men of prominent families, as well as the local militia of Essex, and Byrhtnoth himself was one of the country's leading men, respected as a wise and venerable counsellor. He was a staunch supporter of the church and king, devout and generous to his local monastery, Ely Abbey. At his age (he was probably in his sixties), he must have expected to die a quiet death, not be hacked to pieces on a battlefield by an anonymous Viking. But, as the poem tells us, that was his fate.

As it stands, minus its lost opening, the poem begins as the armies are squaring up to fight. The English are lined up on the shore, the Vikings on an island in the estuary, and Byrhtnoth is going around encouraging and arranging his men. The Vikings send him a faux-polite, insinuating messenger, who demands money and says that if they get it, they'll go away peacefully. It's an opportunity to avoid battle, but Byrhtnoth refuses in a powerful speech, full of proud, angry irony:

Here stands undaunted an earl with his company,

who intends to defend this homeland,

the land of Æthelred, my leader,

people and ground. The heathen shall

fall in battle. It seems too shameful to me

that you should go to your ships with our money

unopposed, now you have come

so far into our country!

You shall not get treasure so easily;

spear and sword shall settle this between us,

fierce battle-play, before we pay tribute.

His firm defiance is impressive, but this proves to be the pride that goes before a fall. He states his intention to defend the ground he stands on, 'this homeland, the land of Æthelred', yet that land seems unstable, in more ways than one. They're in a tidal estuary, where as the tide goes in and out it reshapes the landscape into new islands and causeways – slippery ground for a battle, where this confident authority soon starts ebbing away. Though Byrhtnoth tries to present a united front, the Vikings, like the sea, can't be kept from encroaching on the land.

This becomes clear when Byrhtnoth makes what the poem considers to be an error of judgement: rather than continuing to defend the causeway which is the Vikings’ one path to the shore, he allows the enemy to cross unhindered, so they can fight at close quarters. The poet says he did this 'because of his ofermode’, a word which has caused much discussion; it means something like 'pride’ or ‘over-confidence'. This is a bold decision, in keeping with the dignified courage of his speech, but Byrhtnoth has made a choice which will lead to his own death and the deaths of the men who follow him.

HEN battle starts Byrhtnoth and his men fight bravely, but events swiftly begin to turn against them. Halfway through the poem Byrhtnoth is killed, and from that point on defeat seems inevitable, though many of his men keep fighting to the end. Although he is partly responsible for the defeat, Byrhtnoth dies a noble death. Fatally wounded, he fights as long as he can hold a weapon, and when he can stand no longer he dies with a prayer on his lips:

Then the fallow-hilted sword fell to the ground;

he could not hold the hard blade,

wield the weapon. Yet still the grey-haired warrior

spoke words, encouraged the soldiers,

commanded them to press onwards as good comrades.

Then he could no longer stand steady on his feet.

He looked up to heaven:

'I thank you, Ruler of nations,

for all the joys which I have experienced in this world.

Now, merciful Lord, I have the greatest need

that you grant good to my soul,

that my spirit may journey to you

into your power, Lord of angels,

and depart in peace. I beseech you

that the fiends of hell may not injure me.'

There's something very poignant and human about this. Byrhtnoth is presented in a nuanced way – neither a flawless hero, nor a proud warrior punished for his hubris. He's an old man, courageous but vulnerable, fierce in battle but anxious for the fate of his soul. As his spirit is on the brink of its last journey, he's still encouraging his comrades, even as he's dying, even as his sword falls to the ground.

After this, the rest of the poem is about other men making the choice to die. Each warrior faces the decision whether to stay and fight or flee to safety. Some run away, for which they are roundly condemned by the poet and their fellow soldiers. But others remain on the field, loyal to their lord and their comrades, willing to fight to the end. To stay, as they see it, means choosing honourable death over dishonourable survival. One by one, these men get brief moments in the narrative spotlight as they go to their deaths. Several of them give speeches, explaining why they choose to go on with the fight, speaking of the vows they have sworn and their desire to avenge their leader. Others don’t speak, only act, and the poem becomes a catalogue of names as they rush eagerly towards death: Ætheric, Wistan, Godric, Eadweard the tall.

It’s notable that unlike Byrhtnoth, who speaks of defending King Æthelred’s country, none of these men talk of dying for their country or king. For them it seems to be about closer personal ties of loyalty and affection, for Byrhtnoth, their comrades, and their family at home. We only see these men for the briefest of moments; we know scarcely more about them than their names. But we know what they loved, and what the poet felt they died for.

ETWEEN the battle and the composition of the poem, there must have been a gap. There would have been a space of time when the news was spreading, families were grieving, survivors were telling their stories. The dead were buried. The king and his counsellors debated what to do next. The military situation grew for a time better, then much worse, and eventually developed into a prolonged and devastating war against the Danes. Political leadership in England fell into disarray, and within thirty years of the battle at Maldon England came entirely under Danish rule.

We don't know the length of that gap between battle and poem. We also don’t know who decided to commemorate the dead of Maldon in poetry, or what their aim was in doing so. The poem doesn't make it explicit whether its primary intention is to mourn defeat, celebrate valour, or level pointed criticism at the leadership which contributed to this loss. It manages to do all three, but scholars of the poem have disagreed where its chief emphasis lies. As The Battle of Maldon is so unusual in retelling a contemporary event as a real-life version of a story from epic legend, what did the poet think he was doing? What did he think poetry could do, in the face of so painful a disaster?

One attempt to explore that question is J.R.R. Tolkien’s verse drama, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son. Tolkien published the Homecoming, together with a short essay on The Battle of Maldon, in the scholarly journal Essays and Studies in 1953 – a year before the publication of the first part of The Lord of the Rings. Characteristically, he had been producing different versions of this work over some years as his thinking on it developed; some are in rhyming verse, though the published drama is in a form of alliterative metre.

The play is a dialogue between two characters of Tolkien's invention, Torhthelm and Tídwald – Totta and Tída, as they call each other familiarly. They have been sent by the monks of Ely Abbey to retrieve Byrhtnoth’s body from the battlefield for burial, and as they pick through the carnage in the darkness of the night after the battle, they discuss what they have heard about the events of the day. Totta is an idealistic young man, a minstrel's son, with a head full of heroic poetry and no experience of real-life fighting. Tída, older and world-weary, punctures Totta's dreams of valour with reminders that actual war is rarely glamorous or romantic. All wars are the cause of horror and grief, even those which have been dignified as the subject of heroic songs: ‘You can hear the tears through the harp’s twanging’, Tída says.

UCH analysis of the Homecoming has focused on its connection to the issue Tolkien discusses in his accompanying essay on the poem, the strengths and weaknesses of what he calls the ‘northern heroic spirit’ in relation to Byrhtnoth’s fatal act of ofermod. What Byrhtnoth did, Tolkien argues, exemplifies a 'heroic-chivalric' ethos which is critiqued by the poets of Maldon and Beowulf, as well as the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It’s an unflinching spirit of honour, courage and the desire to win glory through acts of daring; it might inspire men to greatness, but could easily be taken to excess. Tolkien's interpretation of Maldon (which not all readers of the poem will share) is critical of Byrhtnoth, arguing that he sacrificed the lives of his men because, like Totta, he had listened to too many heroic songs. He wanted to be celebrated as a hero, so he took foolish risks and treated the battle like a sporting match. Too much romantic chivalry, not enough common sense. In his recent edition of the Homecoming, Peter Grybauskas compares Tolkien's approach to Maldon here with the tension between romance and realism explored in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – both narratives in which battles and epic deeds of bravery are taken seriously, but are contrasted with, sometimes undercut by, the much more down-to-earth form of heroism embodied by the Hobbits. Tolkien has done more than anyone in the modern era to inspire readers to return with appreciation to the heroic poetry of the Middle Ages, but his attitude to its values is not uncritical. It’s also clearly shaped by his personal experience of war, and those tears lurking behind ‘the harp’s twanging’.

If heroic songs share part of the blame for Byrhtnoth's failure, what does the Homecoming have to say about poetry, and the complex relationship between real event and literary creation which informs The Battle of Maldon? The Homecoming is set in that in-between moment – after the battle, before the poem – where history starts evolving into literature. During the play, Totta is already thinking about how to commemorate Byrhtnoth in poetry, and it’s left for us to infer that he will go on to become the author of The Battle of Maldon. In this fiction, the Old English poem emerges after, and as a product of, the events Tolkien has imagined – after Totta has witnessed for himself the carnage of a battlefield, and had his lofty ideals countered by Tída's cynicism.

HE details and phrases in the drama which echo the poem thus become instead foreshadowings of it, the raw material out of which Totta will go on to construct his poem. His first high-flown attempts at elegy are very different in style from Maldon, offering an idealised view of Byrhtnoth, and omitting to mention the ordinary men who died with him:

His head was higher than the helm of kings

with heathen crowns, his heart keener

and his soul clearer than swords of heroes

polished and proven; than plated gold

his worth was greater. From the world has passed

a prince peerless in peace and war,

just in judgement, generous-handed

as the golden lords of long ago.

Some of these poetic efforts meet with a dubious reaction from Tída, as too fanciful for his taste; he reminds Totta it’s Byrhtnoth they’re mourning, not Beowulf. He’s also the one who voices Tolkien’s criticism of Byrhtnoth’s flawed conduct in allowing the Vikings to cross the causeway – ‘too proud, too princely’, in his eagerness to fight. But even Tída acknowledges that Totta’s poetry can be a comfort, that ‘the woven staves have yet worth in them for woeful hearts’. Perhaps the idea is that after this conversation Totta will develop a new style of verse, blending his beloved heroic tradition with the more grounded, nuanced perspective of Tída, to produce Maldon’s unique form of poetic realism.

Tolkien's drama ends in a bleak place, as the men make their way home in a cart with Byrhtnoth's mutilated body. Totta has a confused dream of 'candles in the dark and cold voices', women weeping and a sense of gathering doom, as 'the world withers and the wind rises'. Tída has no words of comfort:

When morning comes, it'll be much like others:

more labour and loss till the land's ruined;

ever work and war till the world passes.

The last sounds of the play are the monks of Ely, chanting the Office of the Dead – representing, in some sense, the replacement of the pagan heroic tradition by the newer songs of Christianity. Totta and Tída fade away, their voices lost in the darkness. But other words have also come through in Totta's dream:

Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose,

more proud the spirit as our power lessens!

Mind shalt not falter nor mood waver,

though doom shall come and dark conquer.

These lines are an echo and elaboration of the words of the final character to speak in The Battle of Maldon – an old soldier named Byrhtwold, who makes this speech as he prepares to die. Tolkien believed Byrhtwold's lines were probably not the creation of the author of Maldon, but a quotation from an existing poem, to which the old man turned for strength in the last moments of his life.

They are the most famous lines in Maldon, and the very essence of the 'northern heroic spirit'. The bleak ending of Tolkien’s drama might leave us feeling that there is no value in this old poetry at all, that it has nothing left to offer in a darkening world. But the echo of Byrhtwold’s words suggests that it is precisely in such darkness that this poetry finds its greatest value: the darker the gloom, the more powerful. Common-sense pragmatism like Tída’s might have much to recommend it, but it wasn’t that which helped Byrhtwold go to his death bravely, when the only thing left to him was control over his own mind. It was these finely crafted words, hardening the will and giving shape to half-formed intentions – words whose incantational rhythm brings into being the courage to which they aspire.

And of course we only know about any of this because of poetry – because a poet took a hopeless defeat and made it into an immortal poem. The men who died at Maldon achieved nothing, in practical terms, and like the millions of soldiers who have died through the ages on the battlefields of the world, their names and their bravery could easily have been forgotten. They are remembered because a poet sang of them, choosing to employ an old poetic tradition to tell a new kind of story: about ordinary men who found the strength to become heroes in their darkest hour.