The Battle of Maldon, page 1
Folio from the original manuscript of the alliterative Homecoming of Beorhtnoth (MS Tolkien 5 folio 86r)
THE BATTLE OF MALDON
THE BATTLE OF MALDON
together with
The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son
and
‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’
Edited by Peter Grybauskas
Copyright
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023
All materials by J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright © The Tolkien Estate Limited 1953, 2023
Introduction, notes and commentary Copyright © Peter Grybauskas 2023
Illustrations Copyright © Bill Sanderson 2023
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The facsimile manuscript page that appears as the frontispiece to this book is reproduced courtesy of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and is selected from their holdings labelled MS Tolkien 5 folio 86r
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008465827
eBook Edition © March 2023 ISBN: 9780008465841
Version: 2023-02-21
Dedication
For Marie, Bruno, and Flavia
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
PART ONE: THE HOMECOMING OF BEORHTNOTH BEORHTHELM’S SON
(I) Beorhtnoth’s Death
(II) The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son
(III) Ofermod
Notes
PART TWO: THE BATTLE OF MALDON
Introductory Note
The Battle of Maldon, translated by J.R.R. Tolkien
Notes
PART THREE: THE TRADITION OF VERSIFICATION IN OLD ENGLISH
APPENDICES
I ‘Old English Prosody’
II ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’ [continued]
III Alliteration on ‘g’ in The Battle of Maldon
IV An Early Homecoming in Rhyme
V Noteworthy Developments in the Drafts of The Homecoming
VI Proofing the Pudding: The Homecoming in Dialogue with the Legendarium
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Footnotes
Works by J.R.R. Tolkien
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
‘Coming home dead without a head (as Beorhtnoth did) is not very delightful’. So Tolkien quipped to his publishers Allen & Unwin in 1961, quite aptly capturing the gist of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth (hereafter referred to as The Homecoming), while voicing his frustration about a glib description of the poem as a treatment of ‘another famous homecoming’, one of several misrepresentations of his work by the first Swedish translator of The Lord of the Rings.
Mis-readings like the one alluded to above are not uncommon where The Homecoming is concerned; the text has for many years maintained something of a reputation as an obscurity in the Tolkien canon. We might say that the precedent was set from the start. Its first publication came in a 1953 volume of the academic journal Essays and Studies – despite the fact that The Homecoming is, at its titular heart, a play in alliterative verse. Its awkward fit in the journal was certainly not lost on Tolkien, who issues a kind of sheepish apology in the opening lines of ‘Ofermod’, the critical essay that follows his verse drama. While this scholarly endnote, which probably earned The Homecoming its place in the journal, has gained considerable traction (first among scholars of The Battle of Maldon, and later those interested in Tolkien’s own tales) the rest of the text has been, when not terribly misunderstood, largely neglected. To cite one egregious example: the stock blurb on some online booksellers for Tree and Leaf, the latest collection to include a reprint of The Homecoming, even today erroneously claims that readers will be ‘treated to the translation of Tolkien’s account of the Battle of Maldon, known as The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’.
This new edition of The Homecoming, on the verge of the 70th anniversary of its first publication, aims to clear up such confusion and to let shine its unique poetic and scholarly qualities: as the rare completed specimen of Tolkien’s mastery of alliterative verse in modern English, and the site of some of the author’s most illuminating reflections on heroism, war, and poetic tradition.
To better achieve this goal, I am pleased to present here alongside The Homecoming two closely-related but previously unpublished works: Tolkien’s prose translation of The Battle of Maldon, the anonymous poem which inspired the events of his verse drama, with select notes and commentary; and ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’, a wide-ranging essay on the nature of poetic and artistic tradition and Maldon’s place within the early English canon. For readers wishing to delve further, appendices provide additional excerpts from Tolkien’s scholarly engagements with Maldon, an early version of The Homecoming in rhyming dialogue with an overview of The Homecoming’s creative development, and (in my own hand) a short reflection on the ways in which the text might be said to converse with the stories of Tolkien’s legendarium. I hope that readers old and new will find something of interest here.
INTRODUCTION
POTTING THE HOMECOMING OF BEORHTNOTH
The Homecoming defies easy categorization. It can be read as scholarship, alliterative verse drama, or historical fiction; it has been described as coda, epilogue, sequel, and prequel to The Battle of Maldon – all of which is pretty much true. Some readers may prefer to eschew or at least put off introductory discussion and come at the text fresh; but for those who require a short primer, I offer a bare summary of The Homecoming’s contents in the following three paragraphs.
The text comprises three parts. At its centre is a dramatic dialogue in alliterative verse (The Homecoming proper) that recounts the fictional journey of two of the Ealdorman (or Duke) Beorhtnoth’s servants, Torhthelm (Totta) and Tídwald (Tída), sent by the Abbot of Ely to recover their lord’s body on the night after a battle between English and viking forces near Maldon in 991, which is commemorated in The Battle of Maldon, an extant fragment of Old English verse. Totta ‘is a youth, son of a minstrel; his head is full of old lays’ about the legends of the North; Tída, on the other hand, is an old ‘farmer who had seen much fighting’, though neither of the two fought in the previous day’s battle.
As this odd couple wanders through the muck and gore of the battlefield, searching in the dark for the headless body of Beorhtnoth, their conversation explores the tensions between youth and age, romance and realism, pagan and Christian worldview. After much toil, and a scuffle with desperate scavengers that leaves one more needlessly dead, the two men succeed in loading the duke’s body onto their waggon and then hit the long road to Ely Abbey. Totta, half-asleep in the cart, has a dream vision in which he mutters the most famous lines of the (as yet unwritten) Old English Maldon, suggesting that he may one day go on to compose that poem. His dream is interrupted by a jolt from the bumpy road, and the curtain falls with the monks of Ely chanting the Latin Office for the Dead. Their chant, briefly interrupted by a mysterious voice in the dark, closes out the sombre story of Beorhtnoth’s homecoming.
This dramatic-poetic core is bracketed on the front end by ‘Beorhtnoth’s Death’, a prefatory historical note on the battle and its outcome; and on the back end by ‘Ofermod’, an essay exploring the treatment of heroism in the Old English poem, arguing (with aplomb, and against the grain) that the anonymous poet expresses severe criticism of Beorhtnoth’s gallant blunder in allowing the much greater viking force to cross to the mainland via a strategic causeway and join in a ‘fair’ fight. These two essays were plainly written to provide context for the verse drama and to accommodate the academic audience of Essays and Studies, and they have been retained in subsequent reprints (the present volume included).
The hybrid nature of the text makes for a challenge in placing The Homecoming on the Tolkien bookshelf. Taken as a whole, it may be the finest demonstration of the ways Tolkien’s ‘scholarly studies fertilized his imagination’, producing what Alan Bliss calls his ‘unique blend of philological erudition and poetic imagination’ (‘Canute and Beorhtnoth’ 335; Finn and He
‘Beorhtnoth we bear not Béowulf here’, cautions Tídwald to his young companion in the verse drama, but he may well be speaking to us, too. After all, the later, shorter, mostly historical Battle of Maldon can hardly compare to Beowulf, that lodestone to Tolkien’s imagination, a seemingly inexhaustible source for his scholarly speculation and creative inspiration. But Beowulf excepted, The Battle of Maldon may well have been ‘the Old English poem that most influenced Tolkien’s fiction’ (Holmes in The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia). I take up the subject in the final appendix to this volume.
MANUSCRIPT AND PUBLICATION HISTORY
A substantial collection of undated manuscripts and typescripts pertaining to The Homecoming are held in MS. Tolkien 5 at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Thomas Honegger, in a 2007 article for Tolkien Studies, labels the eleven texts in Bodleian MS. Tolkien 5 chronologically from A – K, and uses the Greek α to denote the early fragment published by Christopher Tolkien in The Treason of Isengard. The drafts trace the work’s transformation – sometimes subtle, sometimes radical – from a short rhyming dialogue (as in version A) to the full-blown alliterative verse drama with accompanying scholarly apparatus in the final typescript Tolkien sent away to the printers (version K). Other, perhaps earlier, fragments are found here and there. Christopher Tolkien describes a rough text scribbled on the back of a version of Tolkien’s poem ‘Errantry’, and notes that a still earlier text may be found with Tolkien’s artwork held in the Bodleian Library, on the verso of a pencil sketch of a countryside landscape (TD 88, fol. 24). The Tolkien-Gordon Archive at Leeds University also maintains an early draft of the dialogue in rhyme, which seems to slot in between the Bodleian versions B and C.
According to Christopher Tolkien, these earliest extant fragments date as far back as the early 1930s, preceding by more than twenty years the eventual publication in 1953. The stages in the text’s lengthy gestation have not been dated with much clarity; Tolkien’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter noted only that it was ‘in existence by 1945’. The significance of this date is clarified by Christopher Tolkien’s remark in the Note on the Text published with The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun: ‘My father visited Aberystwyth as an examiner in June 1945 and left with his friend Professor Gwyn Jones several unpublished works, Aotrou and Itroun, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, and Sellic Spell’. What state The Homecoming had reached by 1945 remains unclear. But it would eight years later end up sharing a place with Jones’s ‘Language, Style, and the Anglo-Welsh’ in the same volume of Essays and Studies.
Following its initial publication in October 1953, The Homecoming has since been reprinted in various anthologies, including The Tolkien Reader (1966), Poems and Stories (1980), and later editions of Tree and Leaf. Apart from a limited-run booklet in 1991, celebrating the 1000th anniversary of the Battle of Maldon, the present edition is the first standalone publication of The Homecoming.
PERFORMANCES AND RECORDING
The first footnote to the ‘Ofermod’ essay declares that the verse drama was ‘intended as a recitation for two persons, two shapes in “dim shadow”’, though it ‘has, of course, never been performed’. But this ceased to be true soon after The Homecoming’s publication: the BBC Third Programme produced a radio performance that was first broadcast on 3 December 1954, and was then repeated on 17 June of the following year. Some record of Tolkien’s correspondence with Rayner Happenstall of the BBC survives from this time – he was ultimately displeased by the production. Tolkien actually produced his own rendering of the drama during the build-up to this BBC performance; he ‘recorded the whole thing on tape’, complete with sound effects conjured up in his study. This recording was packaged on cassette, alongside Christopher Tolkien’s reading of ‘Beorhtnoth’s Death’ and ‘Ofermod’, and gifted to attendees of the Tolkien Centenary Conference held in Oxford in 1992.
TOLKIEN’S ENGAGEMENT WITH THE BATTLE OF MALDON
As the present volume will show, The Homecoming is only a choice late fruit of Tolkien’s much longer engagement with The Battle of Maldon. Thus it seems appropriate to close this introduction with a few words on what is known about Tolkien’s encounters with the poem he describes as ‘the last surviving fragment of ancient English heroic minstrelsy’.
Such encounters certainly stretch back at least as far as his undergraduate days (1911–1915) in Exeter College, Oxford, when The Battle of Maldon would have been a small but inescapable part of the English curriculum – as it is today for students of Old English. Stuart Lee notes that Tolkien’s personal copy of Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, inscribed and dated to the Michaelmas term of 1911, contains various marginal annotations on The Battle of Maldon (‘Lagustreamas’ 158). Years later, the poem naturally formed part of his repertoire as a professor, particularly during the period in which he was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon (1925–1945) at Pembroke College, where his scheduled lectures on Maldon are recorded at least twice, in 1928 and 1930 (Chronology 156, 165). In 1937, Tolkien’s friend and former University of Leeds colleague E.V. Gordon published what became for many years the standard edition of Maldon. While this was not, as in their 1925 co-edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an official collaboration, Gordon’s preface nonetheless thanks Tolkien for his ‘many corrections and contributions’, and notes that Tolkien, ‘with characteristic generosity, gave [him] the solution to many of the textual and philological problems discussed’ in the edition (vi).
Maldon’s footprint in Tolkien’s published writings outside of The Homecoming is slight, though it is plainly not far from Tolkien’s mind in the famous 1936 lecture ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, where ‘the words of Byrhtwold’ (lines 312–13 of Maldon) are described as the ‘doctrinal expression’ of ‘the exaltation of undefeated will’ (MC 18). Some thirty years later, in the poem, ‘For W.H.A.’, part of the Shenandoah collection of sixtieth-birthday tributes to W.H. Auden, Tolkien recalled his friend’s legendary namesake: ‘Wighelm’s son who in war was slain / at Byrhtnoth’s side by the Blackwater / in the famous defeat’. Yet these scant and scattered allusions belie the remarkable breadth and depth of Tolkien’s interest in Maldon which even a cursory glance at Tolkien’s academic papers in the Bodleian Library shows. Published here for the first time is a taste of this long and fruitful engagement.
A final word on my arrangement: though presented first in this volume, The Homecoming is clearly the latest of the texts assembled here. The reader may fairly ask why Maldon, as the inspiration for The Homecoming, does not open the volume. While this placement may on the one hand acknowledge The Homecoming’s broader appeal and status as a remarkable culmination of much that Tolkien thought and felt about Maldon, it also implicitly emphasizes Tolkien’s abiding interest in poetic craft and in the process of literary sub-creation. For in placing the journey of Tída and Totta before The Battle of Maldon, this edition follows the internal chronology of Tolkien’s fictional investigation: it is only after the action of The Homecoming that the famous Old English poem can be made.
