On 10 August 991, Saxons and Norsemen fought one of the most famous battles in English history.
The encounter itself was not especially seismic. Lines were drawn near Maldon in Essex on the banks of the River Blackwater, then known as the Panta. On one side were East Saxon defenders under Earl Byrhtnoth of Essex and his thegns. On the other were plundering Norsemen — largely Norwegians — on a vikingr raid.
The battle’s immortality rests on 325 short lines of poetry. The original but incomplete medieval manuscript was destroyed by the fire that devastated Archbishop Cotton’s famous library on 23 October 1731. What remains is a tantalising fragment of the heroic spirit of the Anglo-Saxons, the...
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