The Battle of Maldon, page 13
And then our task is done. Now up! That’s right!
Cover him over with that cloth. It should be white,
but it must do for now. The monks now wait
in Maldon with their abbot, and we’re late.
Get in! And weep or pray, my lad. I’ll drive.
TOTTA
God guard our going, and grant that we arrive!
[A silence in which a rumbling & creaking of wheels is heard.]
Where first tonight? Lord! How these wheels do creak! …
… Hey, Tudda! Tudda! Speak! Why don’t you speak?
TUDDA
(Heavily) Tonight? To Maldon; then to Ely, lad,
with monks and all, slow; and the road is bad.
Without a rest. Did you think to get to bed?
TOTTA
’Tis a long road.
TUDDA
But a short one for the dead.
Creaking won’t break his rest. Lie by, and sleep!
[To the horses.]
Gee up! boys. You’ve been fed. No need to creep.
Good stable have the monks. Don’t heed the sound.
None now will try to steal what we have found.
[The creaking and rumbling and sound of hoofs continues for some time. Lights glimmer in the distance. There is a faint sound of chanting borne on the wind.]
TOTTA (Drowsing half in dream.)
Ay! Candles and singing, and the holy Mass
in Ely, ere he’s buried. And days will pass,
and men – and women weep in Angelcynn –
and new days follow … … and his tomb begin
to fade, and all his kith pass out of ken.
The candles gutter in the wind. Like men.
They soon go out, the candles in the dark.
Come smite the flint, and strike a spark!
A flame – a light – a fire that won’t go out!
A yes, I hear them. Good words those, and stout!
A solemn voice says slowly:
Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,
mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægen lytlað.
TOTTA
Well said the scop! And that won’t be forgot
for many an age … an age … an age … [sleeps]
[The cart bumps and he starts.]
What?
Hey, rattle, rattle, bump! Tudda, I say,
No sleep! The roads are rough in Æthelred’s day.
[Complete dark and silence for a while.]
[Voices chanting low and faintly, but slowly and with distinct words.]
Dirige, Domine, in conspectu tuo viam meam.
Introibo in domum tuam: adorabo ad templum sanctum tuum in timore tuo.
A voice (not of Tudda or Totta).
Sadly they sing, the monks of Ely isle!
Row lads, row! Let us listen here a while.
[The chanting slowly grows louder and clearer.]
Dirige, Domine, in conspectu tuo viam meam.
Introibo in domum tuam: adorabo ad templum sanctum tuum in timore tuo.
Domine deduc me in justitia tua: propter inimicos meos dirige in conspectu tuo viam meam.
Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto: sicut erat in principio et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum.
Dirige, Domine, in conspectu tuo viam meam.
[The chanting fades into silence.]
V
NOTEWORTHY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE DRAFTS OF THE HOMECOMING
[The Homecoming underwent many fascinating twists and turns over its twenty-year development from early scraps of rhyming dialogue to the finely tuned alliterative drama of more than 350 lines. I document some of the most remarkable of these revisions below, focusing chiefly on those that bear on the drama’s most critical themes and episodes. Each of the four sections opens with my own commentary before tracking significant changes in the manuscripts (following Honegger’s classification and the Bodleian pagination).]
THE SCUFFLE
What would a drama, let alone a ‘sequel’ to the Battle of Maldon, be without some clash of arms? Yet in the ironic mode of The Homecoming, the thrill of battle even for Totta is short lived, giving way to confusion, embarrassment, and shame as his opponents are shown to be not ravaging viking warriors but local wretches and petty thieves – more Gollum than Grendel. The drafts show Tolkien keen to perfect the discovery of Beorhtnoth’s sword, its ignoble use, and the inspiration for his ‘double-barrelled joke’ in Maldon.
Version α:
This early fragment begins with Pudda (> Totta): ‘Come, hurry. There may be more. Let’s get away / or have the pirate pack on us’ (ToI 106). Presumably the scuffle has already occurred off-stage, though many elements of the final work are already present: Pudda mistakes the figures for Northmen and is corrected by Tibba (> Tída); a third scavenger is later spotted, though any threat he poses is dismissed by Tibba.
Version A:
In the Bodleian draft marked earliest copy, it is Tudda (Tída) who discovers Beorhtnoth’s famous blade: ‘His sword is over here’. When Totta detects the intruders, Tudda springs immediately to action, encouraging his companion to take up arms: ‘Quick! put him down! Out sword, out! / –well find one then, there are many left about’ (MS. Tolkien 5, fols. 2–3).
Tudda’s reaction to the outcome is also markedly different at this point: ‘Heaven be praised, Totta, I’ve run mine through. / Yours dead? With the gold sword? I am glad he found / the best thing left to plunder on this ground’. As in the final version, Tudda corrects Totta’s mistaken impression that their opponents were Northmen, identifying them as ‘corpse-strippers’.
Version B:
Scene setting in faint pencil is added after Tudda’s call to arms, suggesting a real threat from the approaching scavengers: ‘Two men come up with swords in the gloom from behind’ (fols. 6–7).
Version C:
Tudda here actually takes up Beorhtnoth’s sword in the fray: ‘Heaven be praised, Totta. I’ve run mine through / with master’s sword!’ (fol. 10v).
Version D:
See Appendix IV. The action, while still told in rhyme, begins to resemble its final form. Totta comes into his role as the sword-finder; Tudda calls out a warning, and encourages his companion initially; Totta crows over his deed and inherits the grim joke; Tudda chides his use of the sword.
Version E:
Tudda chides Totta in this first alliterative rendering of the drama: ‘You’re wild Totta. Now wipe it clean, / that blade was made for better uses’ (fol. 26).
Version H:
‘Ha! Take it then! Tída! Hona la! / I’ve slain this one! He’ll slink no more: / a sword he found sooner than he hoped for; / but it turned and bit him. It’s a trove indeed, / the best plunder that the battle left us!’ (fol. 68v).
AT THE CAUSEWAY
When, in the published text, an exhausted Tída and Totta arrive at the causeway, carrying the headless body of their master back, as it were, to the scene of the crime, they pause for reflection. Of all the episodes in the drama, this is the one most plainly connected to the argument developed in ‘Ofermod’ – and it might plausibly be said to have inspired the essay as much as Maldon itself has done. A puzzled Totta wonders why the English appear to have made no use of this strategic position; Tída responds with the morning’s gossip from town and censure of Beorhtnoth’s fatal error. Totta does not deny the charge, though he does respond with a song echoing the Chronicle verse Brunanburh and commemorating Beorhtnoth’s fall. While some allusion to this deadly turning point in the battle is present from early on, the scene undergoes much development in the drafts.
Version α:
Pudda (> Totta) inquires: ‘How did they win / Over the bridge, think you? There’s little sign / here of bitter fight. And yet here the brine / Should have been choked with ’em, but on the planks / There’s only one lying. Tibba (> Tída) responds only: ‘Well, God have thanks’ (107).
Version C:
Here Tudda (> Tída) puts the question, and Totta bears the bad news: ‘They’ve him to thank / Alas! Or so men say now in the town. / Too bold, too proud! But he is fallen down, / made fool of by great heart. So we’ll not chide. / He let them cross to taste his sword – and died, / the last of the true sons of men of old / that sailed the seas, as songs and books have told …’ (fol. 11).
Version E:
Totta again muses: ‘It’s strange to me / how they came across this causeway here / or forced the passage without fierce battle / but there are few tokens of fighting here’. Tudda replies: ‘Alas Totta the lord was to blame / or so in Maldon this morning men were saying / Too bold too proud – but he is beaten down / and his pride cheated, so we’ll praise not chide / He let them cross the causeway so keen was he / to follow his fathers in fearless deeds / and hand to hand to hew foemen / and give minstrels matter for mighty songs. / Doom he dared and died for it’ (fol. 27).
Version H:
Here the text reaches essentially final form, with Tída’s criticism (‘needlessly noble’, etc.) via corrections in blue ink (fol. 69v).
TOTTA’S DREAM
In perhaps the most iconic episode in the drama, Totta drowses in the waggon after his harrowing journey, with only Beorhtnoth’s ‘body for bolster’ on the long road to Ely Abbey. He dreams first of his lord’s funeral mass, but the lights of the candles at mass are soon quenched by a grim and dark vision of the inexorable movement of time. The scene shifts in the second half of his dream, moving not forward but back in time, and in the lighted hall he joins in the song, chanting Beorhtwold’s creed of desperate courage, the most famous lines (not yet written) in all OE verse. The two phases of Totta’s dream emerge already in the early drafts, but Tolkien appears to struggle in deciding whether and how to integrate Beorhtwold’s iconic speech.
Version A:
Totta, drowsing in the cart, begins to describe a vision of Beorhtnoth’s burial and the slow ruin of time: ‘Ay! Candles and singing and the holy Mass / in Ely, ere he’s buried. And days will pass, / and men; and women weep in Angelcynn; / and new days follow, and his tomb begin / to fade, and his kith … Candles soon go out! …’ The dream vision then shifts: ‘Ay! yes, I hear them – good the words, and stout. / Well said the scop! That will not be forgot / for many an age … an age … an age …’ It is jarred, then, by much the same bump as in the final version: ‘What? / Hey, rattle, bump! Tudda, I say, / no sleep! The roads are rough in Æthelred’s day!’ (fol. 4).
Version C:
The good, stout words only implied in the earlier drafts are inserted explicitly here, with a ‘solemn voice’ calling within the dream: ‘Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægen lytlað’ (fol. 12).
Version D:
See Appendix IV. The call for a light provides a transition between the two dream phases.
Version E:
In this first alliterative draft, the vision reaches near final form, with the OE expression rendered in modern English and extended through three additional lines: ‘Let heart be prouder, harder be purpose, / more stern the will, as our strength weakens! / Mind shall not falter nor mood waver; / though doom shall come and dark conquer, / and our flesh fail us, fire we kindle!’ (fol. 29).
While in the final text it is Totta who chants the lines (albeit in the dream), Tolkien considered other presentations. A crossed-out ascription here clarifies: ‘A deep voice neither of Totta nor Tudda says slowly’. A pencilled note suggests that Tolkien was still undecided whether to quote the lines from the old poem or render them in Totta’s voice. The rendering of the heroic code is again different: ‘Mind shall not falter nor mood waver, / will shall not weaken, though the world tremble / and our flesh fail us. The fire liveth’. Totta then adds: ‘Well sung and said. The song is fading, / but while the world remains the word shall linger!’ (fol. 30).
Version K:
Tolkien appears to have tinkered with Totta’s rendering of these lines to the very end: even here, in the typescript sent to the printers, marginal corrections were needed to bring it to the published form (fol. 111).
THE MALDON POET
The suggestion – and its attendant implications – that the young Torhthelm, ‘son of a minstrel’, may very well represent Tolkien’s imagined Maldon poet in the making is sometimes missed. Just as a first-time reader of The Lord of the Rings, ravenous for heroic romance but having little appetite for prologue and appendices, might pay little attention to the conceit of the Red Book of Westmarch, and to the role that Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam have in the very making of the tale, so too might the reader of The Homecoming be forgiven for seeing it as no more than a dramatic coda to the battle. While some hint of Totta’s role as poet remains in the final text, Tolkien dabbled with but ultimately abandoned an explicit designation of Totta as the future poet.
Version C:
In the introductory scene setting, Tolkien describes Totta as ‘a young stable-lad’ though this is crossed out and replaced by ‘the gleeman’s son, a young man’ (fol. 9).
Version D:
At the top left margin of the opening page of the verse drama, in faint pencil, Tolkien writes: ‘Totta is of course imagined later to have made the extant poem, from hear-say’ (fol. 16). This is the last extant copy in rhyme.
Version H:
‘For the purposes of this modern poem, it is suggested that Torhthelm (Totta) afterwards, when the duke’s body has been brought to its long home at Ely, composes the poem, The Battle of Maldon: made up from his own knowledge, from survivors’ reports, and from imagination and epic tradition – the last surviving fragment of ancient English heroic minstrelsy’ (fol. 63v). This passage, along with other draft material under construction for the introductory note ‘Beorhtnoth’s Death’, is crossed out.
In another draft of ‘Beorhtnoth’s Death’, a footnote to Tolkien’s remark on the originality of Beorhtwold’s famous expression reads: ‘It is here supposed that Totta afterwards becomes the author of the poem the fragment of which survives. It is based (on this theory) partly on survivors’ reports, partly on imagination and epic tradition’ (fol. 65v). The entire page is crossed out.
VI
PROOFING THE PUDDING: THE HOMECOMING IN DIALOGUE WITH THE LEGENDARIUM
‘without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless’. – J.R.R. Tolkien, in a letter to Milton Waldman
It is to be hoped that readers of this volume will find in The Battle of Maldon and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth something of that ‘intrinsic’ interest that Tolkien describes in his introductory notes to the OE poem. But many will inevitably and understandably also wish to explore their ‘accidental’ significance, to ask what light Tolkien’s engagements with Maldon shed on The Lord of the Rings and the legendarium. As it is, I think, a good question, and I count myself squarely among such readers, I devote these final pages to its exploration.
Tolkien himself hinted that such an inquiry might yield fruit. In a 1964 letter to Anne Barrett at Houghton Mifflin, he claims to have ‘had for some time vaguely thought of the reprint together of three things that … really do flow together’, naming The Homecoming alongside ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ and ‘On Fairy-stories’ – two texts often considered the critical bedrock of any significant study of Tolkien’s work (Letters 350). More pointedly still, he once remarked to Rayner Unwin that The Homecoming is ‘very germane to the general division of sympathy exhibited in The Lord of the Rings’ (Chronology 696).
While The Homecoming may not have properly monopolized Tolkien’s attention for years at a time, its long and robust development – which almost uncannily tracks the publication of his major works of fiction – also suggests that it was seldom very far from his mind. Early drafts share the page with artwork and verses like ‘Errantry’ (see Introduction). It is difficult to say how far work on The Homecoming had advanced in the early 1930s, but it had certainly begun long before 1937, when both The Hobbit and E.V. Gordon’s edition of The Battle of Maldon were published. Fifteen years later, Tolkien would write euphorically to a Mr Burns of two forthcoming publications:
I also heard both that a dramatic dialogue in real alliterative verse (of various styles) on chivalry and common sense (in the mouths of two fictitious Anglo-Saxons) had been accepted; and more remarkable, a ‘romance’ of at least 500,000 words: exhilaration. (Chronology 414)
When The Homecoming finally appeared in the 1953 volume of Essays and Studies, it was followed just nine months later by The Fellowship of the Ring in July 1954.
On the surface of things, The Homecoming would seem an odd prelude to The Lord of the Rings, even if it is, in barest summary, a story of two ordinary companions traveling through a nightmarish landscape on a difficult quest. While such surface-level analysis has clear limitations, it is not a bad place to start. We have only to recognize that the discoveries made here at this level may represent, borrowing from the cookery metaphor that runs through Tolkien’s studies of OE verse-making, less the essential ‘recipe’ and more the light ‘seasonings’.
The quest motif that Tolkien found so valuable may be one thing, but we should not forget the return journey. When Tolkien wryly quipped in 1961 of The Lord of the Rings’ Swedish translator’s ignorance of Beorhtnoth and the poem he had written about him – ‘coming home dead without a head (as Beorhtnoth did) is not very delightful’ – he could look back on more than a few awkward homecomings in his tales. ‘But lock nor bar may hinder the homecoming spoken of old’, declares Thorin (prematurely) to the men of Lake-town in The Hobbit. While the old prophecies, as Bilbo later notes, do come true after a fashion, Thorin is not around to enjoy them. Bilbo himself gets off fairly easy; unlike Beorhtnoth, Mr. Baggins is only ‘Presumed Dead’, returning in time to recover his house and most of his possessions from auction, though we are told that the ‘legal bother … lasted for years’. Frodo’s return to the Shire in The Lord of the Rings is somewhat grimmer. On the heels of the miraculous completion of his quest at Mount Doom, he defines the ruffian-occupied Shire with tragic succinctness: ‘Yes, this is Mordor’. And although the companions succeed in setting things right, Frodo soon ‘dropped quietly out of all the doings of the Shire, and Sam was pained to notice how little honour he had in his own country’. Túrin, the tragic hero of The Children of Húrin, may fare worst of all. Returning to his mother’s home in Dor-lómin, with his (and Morgoth’s) work still unfinished, ‘he came at last to the house that he sought. It stood empty and dark, and no living thing dwelt near it’. The mother and sister he sought there were long gone.
