II Æthelred and the Politics of The Battle of Maldon

Scholarship on The Battle of Maldon has focused largely on the poem's historicity: 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 passing, 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 discussion. 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 sympathies lie."³ Similarly, Ralph W. V. Elliott suggests in passing, "Perhaps the poem is intended as a deliberate criticism of the policy of appeasement so characteristic of Æthelred's reign."⁴ John Scattergood, reading Maldon as pro-warfare propaganda, makes the fullest case for this argument and concludes: "The poet defines how, in his opinion, the Danes should be opposed. His attitude is clear: he believes in military opposition, a refusal to pay tribute, decisive leadership and a determination to see battles through to the end."⁵

In this essay, I wish to challenge this reading of Maldon by focusing on two related issues that have been insufficiently considered in the poem's criticism: first, the poet's puzzlingly benign representation of the Vikings; second, the political demands that a policy of tribute payment would exert on a poet depicting recent Viking conflicts. Fred C. Robinson observed thirty-five years ago that the Vikings in Maldon are represented "not as heinous villains but as a vague inimical force,"⁶ yet critics have not fully appreciated the implications of this observation, nor have they reconciled it to the prevailing understanding of the poem's politics. Robinson noted even earlier that "the poet's terms for the foe seem curiously restrained and dispassionate, a remarkable feature when we remember that these marauders constitute the nemesis of the heroic English."⁷ The poet represents the Vikings in this way, according to Robinson, in order to render them "merely the occasion for the Englishmen to display the varying moral qualities within their own ranks."⁸ Yet Robinson's observations on the representation of the Vikings raise an important question: if the poet intended to encourage battle against or resistance to the Vikings, why would he describe them in such "curiously restrained and dispassionate" terms? His muted treatment suggests to me that he was working in a context where a more incendiary representation would have been either impolitic or impermissible. Just such a context would have existed if the poet were composing shortly after a tribute agreement—a possibility that chronology permits, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle encourages,⁹ and the restrained representation of the Vikings makes all the more likely. The document known as II Æthelred, while belonging to 994,¹⁰ sheds important light on the political context that would have been created by the tribute agreements made in 991 and throughout the reign of Æthelred.¹¹ The text suggests that a poet composing after such an agreement would have needed to use considerable tact and delicacy while representing the events that led to the agreement...