TOLKIEN, J.R.R. Edited by GRYBAUSKAS, Peter. - The Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.

HarperCollins, 2023. Deluxe Collector’s edition, 8vo., pictorial hardcover, gilt, colour frontispiece, ribbon bookmark; mint copy, housed in matching slipcase, and still in shrinkwrap. Includes a digitally remastered recording of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth read by J.R.R. Tolkien & Christopher Tolkien, available on CD for the first time. Written shortly after the battle, the poem survives only as a 325-line fragment, but its value to today is incalculable. 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 first time 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 the lecture, ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’. Illuminated with insightful notes and commentary, he offers 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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