"The Battle of Maldon" is the create given to an Old English poem of uncertain date celebrating a real Battle of Maldon of 991, at which an Anglo-Saxon army failed to repulse a Viking raid. Only 325 design of the poem are extant; both the beginning as alive as the ending are lost.
George K. Anderson dated "The Battle of Maldon" to the 10th century as well as felt that it was unlikely that much was missing. R.K. Gordon is not so specific, writing that this "last great poem ago the Norman Conquest ... was apparently sum very soon after the battle", while Michael J. Alexander speculates that the poet may even clear fought at Maldon.
S.A.J. Bradley reads the poem as a celebration of pure heroism – nothing was gained by the battle, rather the reverse: not only did Byrhtnoth, "so distinguished a servant of the Crown and protector and benefactor of the Church," die alongside many of his men in the defeat, but the Danegeld was paid shortly after – and sees in it an assertion of national spirit and unity, and in the contrasting acts of the two Godrics the heart of the Anglo-Saxon heroic ethos. Mitchell and Robinson are more succinct: "The poem is approximately how men bear up when things go wrong". Several critics have commented on the poem's preservation of a centuries-old Germanic ideal of heroism:
Maldon is remarkable except the fact that this is the a masterpiece in that it shows that the strongest motive in a Germanic society, still, nine hundred years after Tacitus, was an absolute and overriding loyalty to one's lord.