The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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allegorical, charming and elvish child as she may have been, she is not the natural dramatic centre of the play, and she the least deserving of such (in this story) inappropriate mercy. [extended edn., p. 273]
In another rejected draft he links Mary Rose with Barrie’s Dear Brutus (1917), a play in which an aging painter, broken by drink and despised by his wife, is given a magical opportunity to make his life over, but in the end must return to reality. Here Tolkien’s text is similar to the other draft, but ends with an extra paragraph: ‘But Barrie’s mercy may have been: they suffered and died – that is human fate, and God’s redress beyond the grave is not now my concern. But even for those entangled in “Faerie”, pinned in a kind of ghostly deathlessness to the earth God will grant release in the end’ (extended edn., p. 274).
See further, Andrew Birkin, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979); and Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (1997).
Barrowclough, Sidney (1894–1969). A friend of Tolkien at *King Edward’s School, Birmingham, which he entered in 1905, Sidney Barrowclough was involved in many of the same activities: football, the School library and magazine, the Literary Society, the Debating Society (*Societies and clubs). In debate he was said to have had a cold, cynical, elegant style. He was also a fellow member of the *T.C.B.S., though not part of its inner circle. In 1913 he went up to Cambridge to read Classics.
In the First World War Barrowclough joined the Royal Field Artillery and rose to the rank of lieutenant. He fought in the Somme and Salonica, was invalided home in 1916, returned to France in 1917, and due to injuries was placed on Home Service from June 1917 to January 1919.
The Battle of Maldon. Fragment of an Old English poem, known from a single manuscript. The original was almost entirely destroyed in the fire that consumed Sir Robert Cotton’s library in 1731, but the library’s under-keeper, John Elphinston, had made a transcript which he gave to the antiquary Richard Graves. Before the copy was made, leaves already had been lost from the manuscript, with the result that the beginning and end of the poem are no longer extant. The Battle of Maldon is its title by general agreement.
The work is the fullest surviving account of the battle fought at Maldon in Essex in August 991, and appears to be accurate in so far as it can be verified. It is felt to have been composed soon after the event, perhaps by one of its participants, but not written down until the eleventh century. During this battle, the local defence force, commanded by ealdorman Beorhtnoth (Byrhtnoð), opposed invading Vikings camped on the opposite side of an arm of the river Pante (Blackwater) which could be crossed at low tide only by a causeway. The narrow path might have been held by determined men, but Beorhtnoth, out of overmastering pride (for his ofermōde), agreed to his foes’ request to be allowed to cross so that a fair fight could be joined. Outnumbered, he and the men of his household were killed and the English routed, excepting only a few who fled the battle, even on their lord’s horse – an act of great shame in Anglo-Saxon culture.
At the last, just before the end of the fragment, the old retainer Beorhtwold (Byrhtwold) exhorts his men: Hige sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēntre, / mōd sceal þē māre, þē ūre mægen lȳtlað (‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens’, in Tolkien’s translation). These, according to Tolkien, ‘are the best-known lines of the poem, possibly of all Old English verse. … [They] have been held to be the finest expression of the northern heroic spirit, Norse or English; the clearest statement of the doctrine of uttermost endurance in the service of indomitable will’ (*The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, in Essays and Studies 1953 (1953), p. 13).
*E.V. Gordon has said that The Battle of Maldon has an
aristocratic quality … evident both in the glorification of the military ideals of the comitatus and in the close kinship in art and sentiment with other Old English court poetry. Maldon is of the same school as *Beowulf and nearer to Beowulf in heroic art and social feeling than any other Old English poem. … It is significant too that Beowulf and Maldon are the only Old English poems in which the heroic attitude is fully realized and described’ [The Battle of Maldon, ed. E.V. Gordon (1927), p. 23]
It has long been a set text for undergraduates studying Old English or medieval history, and was used as such by Tolkien as an undergraduate at *Oxford. Later, as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, he himself gave lectures on the poem, at least in 1928 and 1930; and it was apparently in the 1930s that he conceived of an epilogue of sorts, the alliterative verse-drama The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son (published 1953), which tells of two servants of the slain leader as they recover his body.
The transcription of Maldon by Elphinston passed from Graves to his friend Thomas Hearne, who printed the text as an appendix to his edition of the Cronica of John of Glastonbury (1726). The manuscript eventually reached the Bodleian Library, *Oxford (*Libraries and archives), where it was identified (in MS Rawlinson B 203) by the palaeographer *N.R. Ker. An edition of the transcript, made by E.V. Gordon, was published in 1937 in the series Methuen’s Old English Library. In his preface Gordon thanks Tolkien, together with Miss F.E. Harmer, ‘who read the proofs of my edition and made many corrections and contributions’. Tolkien also, ‘with characteristic generosity, gave me the solution to many … textual and philological problems’ (p. vi). An unpublished translation of the poem by Tolkien is among his papers in the Bodleian Library.
For criticisms of Tolkien’s views of The Battle of Maldon, see the relevant section in *The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son. Of these, for the present article, the most notable is T.A. Shippey’s opinion that Tolkien in ‘Ofermod’, which follows the verse-drama proper in Essays and Studies, presents ‘a veiled attack’ on Gordon’s edition. ‘The main drive of Tolkien’s piece’, he writes, ‘is to say that Gordon is wrong … in seeing this poem as the supreme example of the northern heroic spirit’ (‘Tolkien and “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth”’, in Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction (1991), p. 13). According to Shippey, Tolkien held that The Battle of Maldon ‘was an attack on the northern heroic spirit which had led to Beorhtnoth’s act of disastrous folly; but this had not been understood by modern critics like Gordon, who had preferred in a way to revive that heroic spirit by praising retainers like Beorhtwold instead of criticising leaders like Beorhtnoth’ (p. 14).
Some scholars, such as Jane Chance in Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England (rev. edn. 2001), have suggested parallels between the ideals of heroism in The Battle of Maldon and actions of characters in Tolkien’s fiction. See further, Stuart D. Lee and Elizabeth Solopova. The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien (2nd edn. 2015).
The Battle of the Eastern Field. Poem, first published as by ‘G.A.B.’ in the King Edward’s School Chronicle n.s. 26, no. 186 (March 1911), pp. 22–6. Tolkien’s authorship is revealed in his papers; his pseudonym ‘G.A.B.’ may be related to his sometime schoolboy nickname ‘Gabriel’. The poem was printed also in Mallorn 12 (1978), pp. 24–8, and in Mallorn 46 (Autumn 2008), following Maggie Burns’ article on pp. 20–2.
The poem is a parodic account of a rugby match and the feast that followed:
Ho, rattles sound your warnote!
Ho, trumpets loudly bray!
The clans will strive and gory writhe
Upon the field to-day.
It is presented as ‘a curious fragment’ of lofty antique verses ‘found … in the waste paper basket, in the Prefects’ Room’, but ‘much of it was so blotted that I could not decipher it’ (p. 22). The verses are interrupted by ‘blots’ and by ‘comments’ by ‘G.A.B.’, with a ‘correction’ as if by the editor of the Chronicle. The Eastern (Road) Field was the playing grounds for *King Edward’s School, Birmingham, which Tolkien attended as a boy. The poem also includes references to other local places, and to persons well known to Tolkien