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Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth | J R R Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas
5 posts | 1 read
The 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poetic dramas, that explores timely themes such as the nature of heroism and chivalry during war, featuring previously unpublished and never-before-seen texts and drafts.In 991 AD, Vikings attacked an Anglo-Saxon defense-force led by their duke, Beorhtnoth, resulting in brutal fighting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 considered one of the defining conflicts of tenth-century England, due to it being 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 to 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 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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Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth | J R R Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas
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"Coming home dead without a head (as Beorhtnoth did) is not very delightful." Foreword
"The Homecoming defies easy categorization." Introduction
"In August of the year 991, in the reign of Æthelred II, a battle was fought near Maldon in Essex." Beorhtnoth's Death
"The sound is heard of a man moving uncertainly and breathing noisily in the darkness." The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son
It was hard to decide which first line to quote, so..

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Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth | J R R Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas
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"The Homecoming" is a wonderfully atmospheric & poignant verse drama, as 2 common men search amongst the aristocratic dead for the body of their slain lord, Beorhtnoth, who foolishly wasted the lives of his loyal warriors in an act of heroic bravado, forgetting his higher duty to protect his people.
I loved Grybauskas' too-short essay (I would have enjoyed 2 or 3x as many pages) on the relevance of these works to Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium

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Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth | J R R Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas
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“Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose,
more proud the spirit as our power lessens!
Mind shall not falter nor mood waver,
though doom shall come and dark conquer.”

An unlikely pairing of Anglo-Saxon poet and French emperor, but they seem to resonate with each other ?
[Image: painting of Napoleon Bonaparte, with the quote attributed to him: "Courage isn't having the strength to go on, it's going on when you don't have strength"]

TheBookgeekFrau Wow! I have a lot of courage every week when I clean my house then!! 🤣🤣🧹🧽 2y
Bookwomble @TheBookgeekFrau 😂 2y
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Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth | J R R Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas
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"Thus ages pass,
and men after men. Mourning voices
of women weeping. So the world passes;
day follows day, and the dust gathers,
his tomb crumbles, as time gnaws it,
and his kith and kindred out of ken dwindle.
So men flicker and in the mirk go out.
The world withers and wind rises;
the candles are quenched. Cold falls the night.
It's dark! It's dark, and doom is coming!
Is no light left us?”

It's not cheery ?️??

dabbe That looks like an Anglo-Saxon mask! 🤩 2y
Bookwomble @dabbe It's the Sutton Hoo helmet from the Anglo-Saxon ship burial, imaginatively rendered on the head of a warrior. The book I'm reading is Tolkien's treatment of an Old English elegiac poem about the death in battle of an Anglo-Saxon Earl, so the most famous example of war gear from that culture seemed a fitting image 😊 2y
dabbe @Bookwomble Heck ya! 😃 2y
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The Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth | J. R. R. Tolkien
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The full title of the latest from the Tolkien archive is the snappy, "The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, & 'The Tradition of Versification in Old English'".
Not surprisingly, HarperCollins hasn't shelled out on getting Alan Lee to illustrate this one, presumably as they're not expecting this example of Tolkien's Professorial Old English studies to shift as many units as his sideline hobby-works about Hobbits & shit.?

psalva I remember enjoying the Battle of Maldon when I took a Tolkien class in college. If I‘m not mistaken we focused on kennings and the influence of the language on LOTR. (Kennings might have been more Beowulf- it‘s been a while). Brings back some good memories! 2y
Bookwomble @psalva I'll let you know when I get to The Battle of Maldon 🙂, though the introduction says it's a partial prose version, so how much of the poetic techniques he kept I'm not sure. 2y
psalva @Bookwomble I hope you enjoy! 2y
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Bookwomble @psalva I haven't yet read anything by Tolkien that I didn't like, so prospects are good, still🤞😊 2y
Bookwomble @psalva I've finished the section containing Tolkien's prose translation of Maldon. The editor's preface says, "... the text plainly is not concerned with poetic effect but with the struggle to pin down with some precision the poem's narrative." So no kennings, but still an interesting rendering of a fragment of an epic, and with Tolkien's working notes and commentary, so ? 2y
psalva @Bookwomble Excellent! I went looking for a copy of these poems in my collection and I found I have the Penguin Classics translation by Michael Alexander. He mentions Tolkien in the intro and clearly disagrees with him about translating choices. The esoteric drama is so fun :) Maybe reading a combination of translations would be the best way to get the full meaning and poetic effects. I‘d love to see Tolkien‘s notes! 2y
Bookwomble @psalva Tolkien's translation of Maldon seems to have been preparation for him writing Beortnoth, which he submitted to a journal and then had to write additional academic piece to justify its inclusion, so there's a fair bit of critical work with it. I'm into a purely academic piece now about "versification", which feels like it might be drier, but I've hardly started it, so I'll have to see ? 2y
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