Welcome to Litsy!

"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..

"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

“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"]

"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 ?️??

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.?