RANK LINK 7

The Battle of Maldon

This text is in the Trapp anthology. The poem is very short and is important because it has the status of a historical document.

Since the poem is clearly about a known confrontation in 991, it has often been assumed that the poem has some kind of near-journalistic status as a witness to contemporary events. In this sense it is readily contrasted to Beowulf: the latter poem is thought to describe the heroism of a mythical age and therefore to be a text with epic, even metahistorical importance (that is, importance that transcends a specific place and time). while Maldon is about heroism in a specific time and place. Maldon also describes how warriors abandon their valiant lord on the battlefield, an unthinkable act of treason and the worst form of cowardice in early medieval warrior culture.

Consult the introduction to The Battle of Maldon in Trapp or in the Norton Anthology, volume 1, for a digest of views of the poem as heroic and even historical. These arguments are contradicted by Earl R. Anderson in an essay called The Battle of Maldon: A Reappraisal of Possiblel Sources, Date, and Theme, in Modes of Interpretation in Old English Literature, ed. P. R. Brown et al. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1986.

• What evidence could one use to undercut the traditional claims about the poem, and what kind of historical value does the text have in terms of these sorts of arguments? What do we know about the manuscript history of this text? (Both Trapp and the Norton give you clues.)

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