Maldon Books is excited to welcome the editor of 'The Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth' on Saturday (January 6).

The editor of Maldon Books bestselling book of the year 2023, will be visiting Maldon on Saturday and will be signing books from 4 pm at the High Street shop.

J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth', was published for the first time by HarperCollins in 2023. 

The book's editor, Peter Grybauskas, is a leading Tolkien scholar and presents for the very first time J.R.R. Tolkien's very own prose translation of 'The Battle of Maldon'. 

'The Battle of Maldon' is widely regarded as one of 'the old English poems that most influenced Tolkien's fiction', most dramatically within the pages of The Lord of the Rings.

The 'Battle of Maldon' dives into Maldon's Viking history, immortalising the 991 AD attack of the Vikings on the Anglo-Saxon defence force. 

Led by their duke, Beorhtnoth, the attack led to brutal fighting along the banks of the river Blackwater.  

Written shortly after the battle, the poem survives only as a 325-line fragment.

Publisher HarperCollins described the poem as having 'incalculable value', not only as a heroic tale but in "vividly expressing the lost language of our ancestors".