Boromir, Byrhtnoth, and Bayard: Finding a Language for Grief in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien explores many forms of grief. Grief can be a response to change as well as to death, and while in either case it may express a profound sense of loss, it can also signal transition of a positive kind. In any narrative, the circumstances in which a death occurs control its reception, as does the language in which it is conveyed. The circumstances surrounding the death of Boromir evoke the deaths of two warriors from earlier literature, deaths that separately define Boromir's nobility as well as his faults. Together, as these earlier deaths access a rhetoric of grief that enables the expression of male emotion, they impart a redemptive significance to Boromir's death that initiates important transitions in the plot, character development, and the structure of Tolkien's story.

The death of Boromir provokes ambivalent reactions in both readers and characters that recall the death of Byrhtnoth in the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, the modern response to which has focused on the relationship between martial heroism and arrogance. Details of Boromir's death and subsequent mourning rituals also recall the death of Bayard, the early sixteenth-century knight "without fear or reproach" whose exploits and status shed additional light on Tolkien's flawed hero. The deaths of these warriors challenge the conventional view of Boromir and the notion that his arrogance is simply hubris. Moreover, they signal changes in Tolkien's depiction of heroism, which shifts, through the expression of grief, from Old English heroic pessimism to the optimism of Christian redemption.

The Battle of Maldon commemorates the battle fought in 991 between the Anglo-Saxon army commanded by earl Byrhtnoth, ealdormann of Essex, and a large force of Vikings who had been raiding East Anglia.¹ Byrhtnoth's strategy of allowing the Vikings to cross a causeway resulted in his death and the massacre of his army, and his motivation for adopting that strategy has generated much critical comment. Tolkien was deeply interested in the poem. He assisted his friend E. V. Gordon in his work on his 1937 edition of the text, offering philological insights and advice, for which Gordon thanked him in his Preface (Gordon vi), and in 1953 he published a seminal essay discussing Byrhtnoth's motivation.

The poem preserves the best-known occurrence of the rare Old English noun ofermod. Twenty examples exist of verb forms but the noun occurs only three times in poems, including the present reference,² and once in a glossary. Helmut Gneuss notes that almost without exception ofermod "occurs in religious contexts, whereas The Battle of Maldon is a Christian, but not a religious poem" (Gneuss 103). The survival of the word in texts such as the Old English The Fall of the Angels, where it defines Lucifer's presumptuous pride,³ is, as Tom Shippey points out, liable to taint its translation in other contexts, since in its religious use it glosses Latin superbia with its implication of sinful pride (Shippey, "Boar and Badger" 227).⁴ Although the use of ofermod in a secular heroic context is unique to The Battle of Maldon and calls up a range of philological possibilities, not all of which are necessarily pejorative (Shippey 228), some commentators on the poem still accept the translation of ofermod as simply "pride" or "arrogance." ⁵

Tolkien had very definite ideas about the translation, or perhaps more accurately, the interpretation, of ofermod as it is used in the poem. Accordingly, the following analysis while acknowledging the range of opinions, discusses the implications of Tolkien's preferred translation for our understanding of his treatment of Boromir.

In The Battle of Maldon, ofermod is applied to Byrthnoth when the poet relates how he conceded ground to the Vikings. Tolkien defined the meaning of this word in an essay that accompanied his short play The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son,⁶ which dramatized its emotional consequences.⁷ In the essay, Tolkien asserted that ofermod should be translated as "overmastering pride" or...