The late tenth-century Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon, was once one of the staples of the undergraduate study of Old English, along with Beowulf, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. But though Beowulf has had a rich afterlife in film and the popular imagination, and has been translated by Seamus Heaney, and Pound had a stab at The Seafarer, The Battle of Maldon has largely passed into oblivion, even among today’s dwindling band of poetry lovers. Yet it is one of the glories of not just English but European literature and should, today, resonate more than ever.

The battle of Maldon was fought in 991, when a Viking fleet which had been plundering the coast of Kent moved north, first sacking Ipswich before sailing up the estuary of the Blackwater and establishing a base near Maldon. There it was met by a native army led by Ealdorman Byrhtnoth, one of the great men of his generation and famed as a zealous defender of his country. The poem that commemorates the encounter, which is recorded in many other documents of the time, was probably written not long after the event.

The single Old English manuscript, most likely done in the West Country in the first quarter of the eleventh century, was destroyed by the fire that engulfed the Cottonian Library in 1731. Fortunately it had been transcribed by John Elphinstone, the underkeeper of the Cottonian, and printed by Thomas Hearne in 1726. It is an interesting insight into the world from which the poem emerged that the MSS ...