In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a minor classic of Anglo-Saxon poetry
The Battle of the Blackwater was real and not just something that happened in Game of Thrones. It’s an odd fact that the first great poem written in English about a real battle is about a resounding defeat for the English. For ‘English’ here we need to think ‘Anglo-Saxon’, but then we have to go back nearly a century before the Norman invasion, to the year 991, and the Battle of Maldon to find the inspiration for English literature’s first great battle-poem.