Tolkien Estate Announces Publication Of 'The Battle Of Maldon Together With The Homecoming Of Beorhtnoth'

TV & Film

Apr 2

J.R.R. Tolkien, best known for his work on Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit has more work to his name than just those two works. His estate is still releasing some of his works, 50 years after his death.

The Battle of Maldon, an Old English Poem detailing the real event of the same name in 991, was considered by Tolkien to be ‘the last surviving fragment of ancient English heroic minstrelsy’. He thought highly enough of the poem for it to inspire him to write The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, in 1953. Tolkien’s views on that book are now being brought to the public in the book The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.

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Publisher Harper Collins summarized it with the following paragraph: “Leading Tolkien scholar, Peter Grybauskas, presents for the very first time J.R.R. Tolkien’s 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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