THE ORDER OF WORDS AND PATTERNS OF OPPOSITION IN THE

BATTLE OF MALDON

Abst rac t

Word ordering in Maldon is often mimetic: it enacts aspects of the physical experiencesthe poem describes. Diction and syntax create patterns of opposition and reciprocity, controland firmness. Recurrent lexical sets evoke a sense of muscular movement and gesture in arestricted space, of control of hands and feet, and of aggression countered by aggression.In line with this leitmotif of duality, honour is presented as a choice between two alterna-tives. Aspects of Maldon are compared with Maxims, and with two other battle poemsJudith and Brunanburh. In Judith similar stylistic devices create a very different effect:that of rapid and unchecked movement; Brunanburh presents battle in abstract and visualterms. The patterns of opposition and reciprocity, and the physical evocation of activityand control of hands, weapons, feet and firm stance in Maldon serve to define and under-line the text’s presentation of conflict, payment, and giving, and they have as powerful arole in the import of the text as more overt themes like loyalty and courage.

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The Battle of Maldon provides many examples of mimetic word ordering:word ordering which enacts aspects of the physical events it describes. Itsuse of word ordering and the prevalence of certain lexical sets (especiallythose expressing firmness, standing and stepping, control of hands, andgiving and taking) create a strongly spatial and physical sense of patternsof, on one hand, opposition and reciprocity – relationships involving abalance or equivalence of give-and-take, whether of words, blows or gifts– and on the other, of firmness, resistance and control. These patterns areas important in the overall effect of the narrative as more obvious devices,like the recurrent themes of loyalty or of the relationship of words and deeds,to the poet’s achievement in turning English massacre into English victory.

Before examining these specific patterns, we should look generally at thephenomenon of mimetic word ordering. It appears early in the extant text:

he let him

þa of handon leofne fleoganhafoc wi

ð þæs holtes, and to þære hilde stop. 7–81

The sequence of words mirrors a sequence of actions. It begins with thehawk’s owner and his possession of the bird on his wrist, he . . . him . . .handon, but already the bird is being unshackled and let go, let . . . ofhandon, so that by þa it is being released out of his hands, of handon (theselection and order of words in line 7 mingles possession and letting go).2

The last word that still connects the bird to its owner comes next, thepoignantly placed leofne, his beloved.3 Yet already the sentence, and thesevering of bird from young man, are moving on, and the beloved one is

Neophilologus

81: 117–128, 1997. 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

flying away now: leofne fleogan; by the next half-line we are seeing anew vignette, no longer the bird in relation to its owner, as in line 7, butin relation to the wood, in 8b, a new scene of the hawk outlined againstthe wood as it wings towards it: hafoc wið pæs holtes.4 Typical of the poem,lines 7–8 concern movement and spatial relationships, and also the activityof handling something.

Like the hawk, the lines began with he, the owner, and end with itsdestination, holtes. By the time line 8 is completed we are offered not justthat sequence but a disjunction, a contrast: the free animal flying towardsthe safety of the wood but the young man, bound by human codes of honour,stepping forward to battle.5 Each creature, human and animal, is in itsnatural, ordained environment. Would it be fanciful to see in line 8 a pairof contrasting yet balanced statements analogous to those in Maxims II:

Ellen sceal on eorle, ecg sceal wið hellmehilde gebidan. Hafuc sceal on glofewilde gewunian; wulf sceal on bearowe,earm anhaga; eofor sceal on holte,toðmægenes trum. Til sceal on eðledomes wyrcean. Daroð sceal on handa . . .?6

Both are concerned with lessons for young warriors. In Maxims II, the hawkwhen tamed and forced, though wild, to remain on the glove, parallels thesocial constraints of military duty for a warrior (‘Ellen sceal on eorle . . .Til sceal on eðle . . .’). In Maldon the freed hawk, having left the con-straint of its owner’s hands, provides a contrast with the constraints onthe warrior. In Maxims II thus it is the natural locations of untamed wolfand boar, on bearowe and on holte, which provide the contrast of wildwith societal, whereas in Maldon this is expressed by the single antithesisof the hawk, made newly wild, going towards the wood, and the warrior,newly called to duty, going towards the war. The Maxims II poet is moreconcerned with how everything in its variety must take up its allotedposition. Maldon offers a narrower contrast between hafoc in holt and youngwarrior in hilde, because its focus is rather on the difficult duties properto men and not on the whole spectrum of creation.

Duty for humans in Maxims II, being presented as a theoretical ideal,is expressed as a necessary, obligatory location: courage sceal be in a leader,a good man sceal in his fatherland do deeds which brings good repute. Dutyfor humans in the language of Maldon is repeatedly represented explicitlyas choice, an act of personal decision or volition, usually choice betweenalternatives: this is a further element in the poet’s tendency to imagine eventsand experiences as dualities (time and time again the poem speaks notjust of loyalty and courage but of choice, wish and intention: ‘hi woldonþa ealle oðer twega’, 207–8, ‘feran wille’, 221, ‘þæt ic heonon nelle . . .ac wille furðor gan’, 246–7, ‘þenceð’, 258, ‘wendan þenceð’, 316, ‘fram

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ic ne wille’, 317, ‘licgan þence’, 319, etc.; those who reject the moralconstraints (to go forward to battle) are similarly described: ‘Hi bugon þafram beaduwe þe þær beon noldon . . .’, 185–97). The warriors of Maldonare not simply found to be in their right place, doing the right thing: theyhave to choose where they will be.7

The wild/societal contrast in Maldon 7–8 is strengthened by contrast inmovement towards opposite destinations, a double contrast already intro-duced in lines 2–3, between hyse and hors, and feor and forð:

Het þa hyssa hwæne hors forlætan,feor afysan, and forð gangan.

These multiple contrasts in the opening lines (between animals and menand their appropriate locations, between going back and going forward,and between forest and battlefield) prefigure, of course, the later contrastbetween Godric who flees on Byrhtnoth’s horse from ‘guþe’ to the safetyof ‘wudu’ (‘þone wudu sohton, / flugon on þæt fæsten’, 193–4) and thethegns who act as thegns should: ‘þa ðær wendon forð wlance þegenas’,205. There is obvious symbolic spatial morality: Godric is ‘on þam gerædumþe hit riht ne wæs’ 190, and he goes ‘fram þam wige’ towards ‘wudu’,193. Heroic values are often exposed in this narrative by focus on places:where and whither individuals choose to locate themselves.

We have seen how the movement in 7a to 8a, from he to holtes, tracesthe changing location of the hawk. A similar sequence occurs in 25–28.

þa stod on stæðe, stiðlice clypode,wicinga ar, wordum mælde,se on beot abead brimliþendraærænde to þam eorle, þæ he on ofre stod . . .

Here the mimetic enactment is both of events and of a gradually evolvingperception of what is going on. We see events from the point of view ofone of the Anglo-Saxons, initially puzzled by the appearance of someonestanding on the opposite bank: the sentence begins with his first visualdata – someone is standing on the bank, þa stod on stæðe – which isfollowed by sounds: the figure has begun to shout, stiðlice clypode. In thenext half line we have interpreted his identity: it is a wicinga ar, and hispurpose: he is making a speech, wordum mælde; next the import ofannouncement become clear: se on beot abead brimliþendra ærænde to þameorle.

At this point something not uncommon in Old English, and found alsoin later medieval verse, happens: a word or phrase belonging initially to oneidea comes, as the sentence evolves, also to belong, Janus-like, to a sub-sequent one.8 Here to þam eorle, 28a, which in the unfolding sequence ofwords first belongs syntactically with the Viking’s action, in 25–7, on the

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further shore (he takes up a position on the island-shore, shouts andannounces a message to the leader), comes by the close of line 28 also tocontribute to a vignette of what is happening on the river-shore: the listeningleader standing on the shore, eorle, þær he on ofre stod. The action of25–8 begins with the originator of the communication, on one side of theriver, and – crossing over – ends with its recipient on his side. As withlines 7–8 about the hawk, there has also been a switch of final cameraposition, as the phenomenon (message or hawk) is depicted as travellingfrom one place to another during the sentence.9

We can see word order in a different way enacting a gradually evolvingmeaning in

þa ðær wendon forð wlance þegenas 205

In this sentence they are not ‘wlance þegenas’ until after they havegone forward, as their thegn-like response to Byrhnoth’s death. The samekind of sequence, and consequence, occurs in

bæd gangan forð gode geferan 170

Another example is Wanderer 45:

ðonne onwacneð eft wineleas guma;

he awakens from a happy dream, to perceive himself to be a ‘lordlessman’.

The most powerful effect of mimetic word ordering in Maldon is to bringpatterns of balance and opposition into the very fabric of sentences. Astriking example is:

Wod þa wiges heard, wæpen up ahof,bord to gebeorge, and wið þæs beornes stop;Eode swa anræd eorl to þam ceorle;ægþer hyra oðrum yfeles hogode. 130–3

Obviously the first four half-lines mimic the Viking’s series of physicalactions. More interesting, however, is the poet’s use of thrice-repeated verbsof walking. The two lines giving us the Viking’s actions begin and endwith wod and stop; Wod pa . . . gives us the first inkling of what ishappening; by wið þæs beornes stop his sequence of actions has broughthim into a posture of hostility wið Byrhtnoth.10 The poet then places Eodeimmediately after stop: so, with matching action, Byrhtnoth acts to counterthe Viking’s threat and movement.11 This juxtaposition stop/Eode createsparallel physical opposition (of feet) and ‘swa anræd’ expresses an equallymatched mental aggression. Next we get a frozen still: ‘eorl to þam ceorle’,

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two men facing each other: both balanced opposition and unbalanced status,eorl and ceorl. This half-line also balances out the aggression: it is nowcoming reciprocally from the eorl to the Viking, rather than just from theViking ‘wið þæs beornes’. The next line

ægþer hyra oðrum yfeles hogode

fuses, as it were, the two opponents facing each other into one in theiridentical antagonism and captures the culminating moment of this inter-locking of hostile advance with hostile advance, and intention with intention.

The slow-motion, movement-by-movement naturalism of Byrhtnoth’sdeath (130–180) manifests an almost balletic gestural style of patterns ofbalance and opposition: each attach meets its counter attack. The pirateattacks Byrhtnoth; Byrhtnoth repulses the missile back ‘ongean’, and killsthe assailant; a Viking wounds him with a spear and his companion sendsback the very same spear ‘eft ongean’ (152–8); the next attacker, the pillager,is counter-attacked by Byrhtnoth himself with a sword; another Vikingwounds Byrhtnoth, dislodging precisely that sword.12 On the detail ofBeowulf’s companion employing the same weapon which had woundedhis lord to avenge him on that attacker, Richard Abels observes that thisseems to be evidence for the re-use of weapons during battle, and mayhave meant a certain slowness in action, but in the context of the recur-rent patterns of parallelism and reciprocity, the significance of the detailsis more its contribution to this pattern than its factual accuracy.13 Thispassage alone contains three instances involving parallel handling ofweapons by the opponents: first Byrhtnoth’s manoeuvre in making themissile ‘spring back’, then the detail of his companion sending back aspear to wound its original wielder, and finally the action by a Viking whichdisables Byrhtnoth of the sword he had just used to wound a Viking.

The passage is an exemplum of meeting opposition with opposition:the only long, detailed scene of fighting in the poem, it makes the readeraware in a physical, muscular sense of what the duties of standing firm,loyalty and vengeance, which will be posed as choices in the second halfof the poem, involve.

Line 4, ‘hicgan to handum and to hige godum’, introduces two motifswhich will become recurrent: one is the linking of mind and body, modand mægen; the other the focus on hands and on the physical holding,wielding and control by hands of offensive and defensive battle equip-ment. Constant references to hands and holding are elements in two ofthe poet’s most important effects in creating the illusion that an Englishdefeat is an English victory: the motif of firmness and the tendency to focuson small-scale bodily action and on action by an individual. The narrativesays much about the wielding of spears, shields and swords, little aboutbows. This may be partly, as Nicholas Brooks says, because the bow was

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‘the weapon of the unfree or semi-free, not of the noble or well-armedwarrior’, but it also intensifies the bias, for whatever reason, towardsconcentrating on relatively closely limited space and body movement, andon patterns of opposition and engagement by individuals.14

Related lexical sets, concerned with control of feet rather than hands, andthe motifs of firmness, standing firm and stepping firmly forward, arepowerful elements in the poem’s diction: forms of the verbs standan (19,25, 28, 51, 63, 72, 79, 100, 127, 145, 152, 182, 273, 301), gestandan (171)stemnettan (122), steppan (8, 78, 131) wadan (96, 130, 140, 253, 295)gan/eode (93, 132, 159, 225, 229, 247, 260, 297, 323) gangan (3, 40, 56,62, 170), together with fot (119, 171, 247), fotmæl (275), trym (247), andadjectives and adverbs like fæste (21, 103, 171, 301), fæstlice (82, 254),heard (33, 130, 167, 214, 236, 266, 312) feolheard (108), forheard (156),wigheard (75), gegrunden (109), Heardlice (261), stiðlice (25) stið (301),stiðhicgende (122), stede (19), stædefæst (127, 249). These lexical setsgive particular point to metaphorical references like the contrast between‘swa hearde . . . hilde’ (33) and ‘swa softe sinc gegangan’ (59) in thespeeches before battle, or to the references to determined handling ofweapons and to weakness or slackness, which are introduced as contrastsin lines 4–10 and recur frequently thereafter.15 The battle in Maldon thusoften comes across as physically taut, firm, movements or physicaldecisions, creating patterns of parallelism and antithesis, hostility andengagement, as the language concentrates our attention on grip and stance,firmness and resolution which are visualised in relatively limited space,on the ground, or in relatively self-contained actions.16 There is no needto record every example; some of the most prominent lines in the poemare concentrated upon holding firm and standing firm: the emphasis onthe shieldwall, ‘hu hi sceoldon standan and þone stede healdan . . .’, 19,etc., for instance; Byrhtnoth’s defiance, ‘her stynt unforcuð . . .’, 51; orthe references to English feet, at 119, 246–7, 273. In contrast, the poet ofJudith creates a sense of rapid sweeping movement by large groups oftroops. Both Maldon and Judith capture palpable energy and muscular effort,but with very different overall effect. In Judith everything happens swiftly.The Hebrews rush upon their enemies, overwhelm them and chase them.There is none of the sense, so common in Maldon, of opposition or meetingresistence. Words suggesting speed abound and even the scenes outsidethe battle-descriptions, which have no need to attract verbs of motion,constantly do: for example, Holofernes’ banquet, Judith’s presence in hisbed, Holofernes’ death and fate in Hell, and Judith’s summoning of the Jewsall abound in swift, unimpeded movement.17 Though words denoting Englishmovement forward, like wadan and forð, are frequent in Maldon, thatpoem associates them with a diction which denote firmness and even immo-bility ( fæste, stædefæst, etc.), whereas in Judith verbs of motion areassociation with words denoting speed (ofstum miclum, ofstum, ofostlice,

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snude, etc.) While it is true that forð and georn(e) and its derivatives arecommon in Maldon, they focus attention there usually on an attitude ason movements by armies. In a battle poem which provides us with yet aanother contrast, Brunanburh, we find an abstract, silent and non-muscularpresentation of warfare: visual and figurative language are its chosenmethods.

What seem to have been the real-life facts about the battle of Maldon(Viking rout and massacre of the English army) perhaps made a wide-angledpicture of action by the two armies, whether more in the style of Judithor Brunanburh, an unattractive option for the Maldon poet, but that doesnot lessen the brilliance of his solution or the consistency and intensity withwhich he uses diction and syntax to create patterns of opposition, resis-tance and control.

When considering the poetic and narrative technique of Maldon, Judithand Brunanburh, it would be critically naive to assume that differences arisesimply from differences in the strategy, outcome or terrain of actual, orrealistically imagined, battles.18 We cannot assume that the decisions apoet makes about which details and which events he presents, even abouta historically documented campaign, can provide a mirror of real-life facts.After all, Liber Eliensis says there were two battles of Maldon, separatedby four years, the first a victory at a causeway, the second lasting a fort-night and including the beheading of Byrhtnoth. In Vita sancti Oswaldi, ifone tries to extract an account of fighting from the essentially religiousnarrative, there occurs the exact opposite of the causeway ‘ofermod’ decisionpresented by the poet: Byrhtnoth has to fight fiercely as a response to Vikingaction, as they rush upon his troops; he does not provoke a Viking advancein order to initiate an engagement.19 Yet, presumably because the alterna-tive sources are few, so that the temptation to treat the poem as a guideto events and tactics is irresistible, and because furthermore it is by manybelieved to have been composed within a few years of fighting, and finallybecause it is written, as we have shown above, very much in terms ofdetailed individual events, in a style which gives an impression of physicalexperiences, for all these reasons, some critics have treated Maldon as ifits narrative and stylistic decisions directly follow from prior historical facts,interpreted in the light of social themes like loyalty, whereas no-one wouldtrust with the same readiness Richard III as an account of Richard III orGeoffrey of Monmouth for the ‘Arthurian’ period.20 We simply cannot knowhow much or how little relation Maldon bears to the battle(s) of Maldon.

The episode leading up to Byrhtnoth’s decision to let the Vikings overthe causeway is built on interplay between immobile standing and advance,and between opposition and joining. The English ‘stodon’ on the shore (63);the two armies ‘bestodan’ (68) the river, balanced in immobile opposi-tion, ‘Eastseaxena ord and se æschere’ (69), standing on either side ofline 69 as well as the river. The currents of river and sea, as they go in

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their opposed directions, join: the waters both flow and interlock (65–6).The scene is one of symbolic opposition and identicality, as well as ofhostility without engagement, as each army stand on the bank, but ‘Ne mihteþær for wætere werod to þam oðrum’ (64). Ironically, the language suggestsa common desire to be to be joined rather than opposed: ‘To lang hit himðuhte / Hwænne hi togædere garas beron’ (67).

The English stand firm in two positions: first on the brycg (wigheardWulfstan and those who ‘stodon mid’ him, to kill any who ‘stop’ onto it,74–83), and then on the mainland shore, in the shieldwall after they haveceded land to the Vikings (100–129). Already the Vikings are associatedalarmingly with free, swift movement (later to be associated with the otherdestroyers of the English, their own traitors): ‘upgang . . . ofer þone fordfaran, / feþan lædan . . . “gað ricene . . .”. / Wodon þa . . . west oferPantan . . . ofer scir wæter . . . to lande’, 87–94, while the English arecharacterised by the continuing series of references to standing firm:

þær ongean gramun gearowe stodon.Byrhtnoð mid beornum. He mid bordum hetwyrcan þone wihagan and þæt werod healdanfæste wið feondum. 100–4

Swa stemnetton stiðhicgende. . . 122

Stodon stædefæste, stihte hi Byrhtnoð 12721

It has been pointed out that the references to the shieldwall (19–20, 103,242–3, 277) seem to reflect actual Anglo-Saxon battle tactics,22 but thefrequency of the references and the elaborate verbal embedding, in lines100–3 above, of the reference amid other allusions to firmness, also showhow much the poet is using it as a component in his leitmotiv of holdingand standing firm.

Of all the verbal patterns of duality, of balanced opposition and reci-procity in Maldon, the most flambuoyant appear in the two renownedspeeches that precede battle, but the poet’s play there with balanced con-trasts, between synonyms for ‘tribute’ and ‘battle’ (gift and opposition)placed in syntax of balanced equivalence between them, is already too well-studied to need much comment here. The choice of words and syntacticconstructions contribute much to the overall motif of opposition, balanceand give-and-take in the poem: ‘beagas wið gebeorge’ (31), ‘garræs midgafole forgyldon’, (32) ‘hilde dælon’, (33) ‘wið þam golde grið fæstnian’,(35) ‘feoh wið freode’ (39). The preposition preferred in the Viking’s speechis wið, ‘against’, used with the sense ‘in exchange for’.

None of the Viking’s verbal insults get past: each is turned round, refor-mulated into resolute defiance and thrown back again ( just as Vikings’weapons are turned back in 137 and 154–8). Speech counters speech:

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‘Brimmanna boda, abeod eft ongean’, says Byrhtnoth, introducing his coun-terblast, 49. No Old English poet uses contrasting alliterative pairs moreeffectively than here in the Viking’s insulting pairings: beagas / gebeorge,garræs / gafole, golde / grið, feoh / freode, followed by the reformulatedpairings like ‘grim guðplega. . . gafol’). (61) The Viking proposes thataggression should be met with gift; Byrhtnoth insists that opposition willmeet it.

The Viking introduces talk of giving and receiving (sendan, gafole forgyldan, dælan, syllan, niman), which Byrhtnoth repeats when he ‘ageafhim andsware’ (44) (gafole, syllan, gegangen), and this lexical set of giving,taking and reciprocity will run through the battle scenes: the poet exploitsopportunities to use words meaning, or having roots meaning ‘give, take,fetch, give back’, etc. (a few examples: gename, onfeng, wiperlean agyfen,gewinnan, forgeaf, geræhte, gefecgan, gesyllan, þanc, geearnunga, sealde,etc.). War in Maldon is often visualised as close, involved, interaction:hostile giving and taking, as reciprocity by both friends and foes.

Not having the Judith poet’s freedom to indulge in descriptions of onearmy overrunning another, since it was his own side which got overrun,the Maldon poet turns English death into a matter of English attitude andchoice, and of wielding a weapon, while Viking triumphant action isexpressed often by wearð constructions which turn it into passive, almoststatic, experience visited upon the English: ‘Wund wearð Wulfmær,wælræste geceas . . . wearð . . . forheawen’, 113–5,; ‘gewundod wearðwigena hlaford’, 135, ‘þa wearð afeallen folces ealdor’, 202 ‘wearð heron felda . . . folc totwæmed, / scyldburh tobrocen’, 231–2.23

Maldon uses prepositions quite lavishly and this may reflect the poet’smarkedly spatial imagination.24 Though word-counting, especially in a shorttext, is an unreliable tool, it may be significant that prepositions and otherwords denoting opposition and linking are relatively dominant: especiallyperhaps wið 10 times, ongean 4 times, mid 22 times, begen 5 times. Thepoet’s presention of honour as a choice, often involves either two parallelpositives: for example,

hi woldon þa ealle oðer twega,lif forlaetan oððe leofne gewrecan 207–8

or between positive and negative alternatives: for example,

hale to hame oððe on here crincgan 292

The word ‘geseman’ (60) is characteristic of the poem’s diction in its fusionof metaphorical arbitration with literal opposition, and while we are con-sidering the leitmotiv of duality, it is perhaps noteworthy that there mustsurely be few poems which so frequently refer to men in pairs or as com-panions positioned beside each other.

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In the last third of the poem, after the backward flight of the cowards,references to forward movement become relatively more prominent indescriptions of English behaviour (when description occurs betweenspeeches); ‘forð’ and ‘eode forð’ are commoner here than earlier.25

Genuinely swift movement against Vikings appears at 277–81. This isapprehended, however, by the reader rather as a contrast to all the refer-ences to the alternative (cowards’) choice of the impulse to move backwards,than as a picture of English forces advancing on Vikings.

It is perhaps apt that there are relatively many references to falling andto lying on the ground: the patterns of opposition and parallelism, offirmness and bodily control which diction and word order create, are spatialpatterns, and the poem is in many different ways about place and posi-tioning, about how to ‘þone stede healdan’ and ‘gealgean eþel þysne. . .eard. . . folc and foldan’. It presents to us in a most palpable and bodilysense the experience of ‘fighting about land’, and fighting on the land youare defending: what it means for

feond with oðrum,lað with laðe ymbe land sacan.26

English Studies Department HELEN PHILLIPS

Nottingham University Nottingham, NG72RD

Notes

1. All quotations are from The Battle of Maldon in The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records:A Collective Edition, 6 volumes, vol. VI, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. Elliott van K.Dobbie (London and New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1942). See also the text inThe Battle of Maldon ed. D. G. Scragg (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981).Bruce Mitchell summarizes the mimetic effect in the word order of these lines, and commentson the ‘riddle-like’ placing of leofne, in ‘The Dangers of Disguise: Old English Texts inModern Punctuation’, RES 31 (1980), 385–413, reprinted in Bruce Mitchell on Old English:Selected Papers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 172–202, p. 198.

2. There is probably a combination of two senses of lætan here: the senses ‘let go,give up, dismiss’ and ‘loose one’s hold of’, in let . . . of handon, and also the causativesenses ‘permit, cause’, in the construction let . . . fleogan, as the sentence continues tounfold.

3. Gale R. Owen-Crocker, ‘Hawks and Horse-Trappings’, in Scragg (1991), 220–37,p. 224, says leof is often used nostalgically in Old English, but gives no examples. Thereare occasions in poetry where it is associated with death or the past, e.g. Beowulf 31, 34,54, 297 (?), 2080, 2823, 3142 (?), Wanderer 97, Genesis A 244, Maldon, 319, but it is hardto see that these are specifically nostalgic rather than expressions of emotion.

4. Mimetic sequences of this kind are common in Beowulf. An impressive example isthe sea-crossing described in 210–28.

5. My assumption of contrast here differs from the interpretation proposed by RobinS. Oggins, ‘Falconry in Anglo-Saxon England’, Mediaevalia 7 (1981), 173–208, p. 184,

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that the release of a hawk would have been interpreted as a ‘gesture of defiance and adeclaration that he was prepared to die in the battle’ (because it implies that his hawk mighthave to fend for itself after his death). Oggins thus sees 8a and 8b as both making the samestatement; I think in view of later contrasts between escaping or remaining on the battleground, and the contrast of ‘feor’ and ‘forð’ for horse and man, in line 3, it seems morelikely that contrast is the main effect in this line too.

6. Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, 55–7.7. Roberta Frank, ‘The Battle of Maldon and Heroic Literature’, in The Battle of Maldon

AD 991, ed. Donald Scragg (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 196–207,pp. 202–3, writes about this motif of choice.

8. Mitchell, ‘Dangers of Disguise’, in Mitchell (1988) 183–4, points to other cases ofwords which look, syntactically and grammatically, backwards and forwards in Wanderer37–57. Middle English examples of this device appear in Sir Richard Roos’s four-stanzaprologue to La Belle Dame sans Mercy. See Helen Phillips, ‘Sir Richard Roos, Prologue toLa Belle Dame sans Mercy’ in The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Brown etal. (Binghamton: SUNY, forthcoming).

9. On point of view in Old English descriptions see Peter Clemoes, ‘Action in Beowulfand our Perception of it’, in Old English Poetry: Essays on Style, ed. Daniel G. Calder(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1979), 147–68.

10. Elizabeth M. Tyler, ‘Style and Meaning in Judith’, N & Q, 237: 1 (1992), 16–9,says that steppan can have ‘martial connotations’, citing Beowulf. She comments that theJudith poet uses ‘key-words and phrases’, especially heroic words and terms like mod andferhð and their compounds, which increase the overall sense of heroic mental attitudes.

11. It is possible we have similar techniques in the description of Beowulf’s surprisecounter-attack against the advancing Grendel in Beowulf 745b–50. I tentatively suggestpunctuating thus:

Forð near ætstop,nam þa mid handa hige-þihtigne,rinc on ræste. Ræhte ongeanfeond mid folme; he onfeng hraþeinwit-þancum ond wið earm gesæt.Sona þæt onfunde fyrena hyrde. . .

The long unchecked advanced of Grendel through the darkened hall (com . . . treddode . . .eode . . . forð near ætstop . . . nam) is suddenly countered by Beowulf (Ræhte ongean, followedby onfeng . . .) resulting in the Maldon-like contrastive line

eoten wæs utweard, eorl furþor stop (761).

Sentences with verbs as the first element are often used for suprise attacks: cf. Beowulf‘Grap þa togeanes . . .’; 1501, ‘Bær þa seo brim-wyl[f] . . .’, 1506, etc.

12. I am assuming ‘wiges heard’, 130, refers to a Viking, and ‘þæs beornas’, 131, toByrhtnoth.

13. Richard Abels, ‘English Tactics, Strategy and Military Organisation in the Late TenthCentury’, in Scragg (1991), 145–55, p. 149, notes that there are more references to missilesand spears than to swords. He also ponits out that there are no references to the Englishwearing helmets or byrnies, and speculates whether this reflects a lack of protective equip-ment as they faced a better-provided enemy. (That, if historically true, might make theconcentration on hard weapons, resolute fighting, standing firm, and minds which are ‘heardra’and ‘cenre’, by ill-protected men, seem, to the modern reader at least, a more poignant literarycreation.)

14. Nicholas Brooks, ‘Weapons and Armour’, in Scragg (1991), p. 209.

The Battle of Maldon 127

15. A minor corollary to the theme of firmness are the references to not being weakand not going back: at 6, 10, 81, 118, 206, 221, 246, 254, 258, 268, 275–5, 308, 316, 325.

16. See Paul Dean, ‘History versus Poetry: The Battle of Maldon’, NM, 93:1 (1992),99–188; D. G. Scragg, ‘The Battle of Maldon: Fact or Fiction’, in The Battle of Maldon:Fiction and Fact, ed. Janet Cooper (London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press, 1993),19–31. A. N. Doane, ‘Legend, History and Artifice in “The Battle of Maldon”’, Viator:Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9 (1978), 39–66, observes that ‘narrative elements remainseverely isolated with articulated parts, each one foregrounded, so that nothing, from thesmallest details of clausal structure, to the largest structural elements of the whole, impingeson anything else’, 59. He interprets these effects as corollaries to the clearcut judgementsof the poet’s moral system and contrasts the style of Maldon and the style of Finnesburh:where Maldon presents the individual event, ‘self-contained, self-explanatory and completewithin itself’, Finnesburh’s style produces a cryptic and mysterious effect, 59–60.

17. On style in Judith, see Tyler, 16–19; J. F. Doubleday, ‘Principles of Contrast inJudith’, NM 72 (1971), 436–41.

18. Doane, pp. 55–3, points to the different narratives which represent the same battlein Brunanburh and the Vita sancti Odonis. On oppositional patterns in Exodus see StevenF. Kruger, ‘Opposition in the Old English Exodus’, Neophilologus 78.1 (January, 1994),165–70.

19. Liber Eliensis: the relevant passage, with a translation, appears in Alan Kennedy,‘Byrhtnoth’s Obits and Twelfth-Century Accounts of the Battle of Maldon’, in Scragg (1991),59–78, Vita sancti Oswaldi: in Michael Lapidge, ‘The Life of St Oswald’, in Scragg (1991),51–8.

20. See the survey in Scragg in Cooper (1993), a volume whose contributions interest-ingly incline numerically far more towards investigating ‘fact’ than investigating ‘fiction’.Doane, and also Ann Williams, ‘The Battle of Maldon and “The Battle of Maldon”: History,Poetry and Propaganda’, Medieval History 2:2 (1992), 35–44, discuss the possible relation-ships between the poem and the real-life events and argue against the assumption that itcan provide an accurate or transparent reflection of the historical battle. It may be justifi-able to interpret details of the poem in terms of possible strategy (e.g. Scragg (1981), p.13, note 48), but it is clearly dangerous to try to deduce events in the battle from details.

21. Are the Vikings consciously presented as rapid? The Vikings’ message, at29–30,begins with a note of almost hustling eagerness and urgency, as the ‘saemen snelle’demand that Byrhtnoth ‘most sendan raðe’ tribute if he wants to feel safe. Byrhtnoth bidsthem ‘gað ricene’ (93); his attacker at 142 is ‘færsceaða’; Vikings attack ‘raðe’ at 164 and288. The English army’s other enemies, their own deserters, move swiftly: ‘þa bugan frambeaduwe . . . ærest on fleame . . . he gehleop þone eoh . . . begen ærndon’. But Byrhtnothacts ‘ofstlice’ at 143, and Æscferð ‘fysde forð’ missiles at 269 (this is energetic activity,not movement across ground, though), Æþeric is ‘fus’ at 281.

22. Nicholas Brooks, ‘Weapons and Armour’, in Scragg (1991), 208–219, p. 212.23. Daniel Donaghue, Style in Old English Poetry: The Test of the Auxiliary (New Haven

and London: Yale University Press, 1987), points out the prevalence of wearð.24. It is also possible that greater use of prepositions was characteristic either of a popular

style of narrative or some registers of later Old English, or both, but the assumption thatmore prepositions are a characteristic of Late Old English, or that there was a clear increasein the use of prepositions during the Old English period, has been challenged by BruceMitchell. See Old English Syntax, 2 vols (London, Oxford University Press, 1984), vol. 2,518–23.

25. 205, 209, 225, 229, 260, 269.26. Maxims II, 52–3.

128 Helen Phillips