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features unpublished and never-before-seen texts and drafts.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 .
