II Æthelred and the Politics of The Battle of Maldon

Scholarship on The Battle of Maldon has focused largely on the poem’s his-toricity: it has grappled primarily with questions of how faithfully the poet represents the events of 10 August 991, how many of the poem’s details derive from firsthand knowledge of the battle, and how many of those details derive from the literary conventions of Old English heroic poetry.1 A question that this scholarship often neglects, or deals with only in pass-ing, is that of the poem’s politics: how it engages with pressing political questions, what ideologies it supports, what policies it encourages, and so forth. The apparent reason for this elision is that, for many scholars, the poem’s politics seems so obvious that it does not merit lengthy discus-sion. The longstanding assumption has been that, if the poet is making any contribution to contemporary debates over whether the Viking threat should be handled with battle or with tribute money, he surely advocates the former; and if the poet is asking anything of his audience, it surely is fiercer and more heroic resistance to the Vikings.2 Simon Keynes, in an essay on The Battle of Maldon’s historical context that touches briefly on the poem’s politics, writes: “[I]t is possible that the poem on the battle of Maldon was formulated against the background of such a [tribute] debate; and while the poet, through the messenger, presents a reasoned case for the payment of tribute, there is no mistaking where his true sym-pathies lie.”3 Similarly, Ralph W. V. Elliott suggests in passing, “Perhaps th