as translated by Michael Alexander

The author of The Battle of Maldon is unknown, though many have speculated that he may have participated in the battle itself. His intention was twofold—to document a specific battle between his English countrymen and an army of Viking invaders, and to celebrate the heroic virtues exhibited by the English soldiers in the face of annihilation. As such, he looked at both the immediate past (the poem was probably written very shortly after the battle itself in 991) and at the age-old cultural legacy of the Germanic warrior, the origins of which stretched far back to the time before the forefathers of the English crossed the English Channel in the fifth century to occupy a land inhabited by the Anglo-Saxons. The army that faced the Viking threat in 991 was no tribal band; the Anglo-Saxon society that suffered...