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and immediately afterwards he is cut down by the Danes. As a pendant to his last
words to his good men before his prayer and death, and as a proof of the truth of
these words, Ælfnoð and Wulfmær are killed while Godwin, who ought to have been
one of them, flies, forgetful, in line 187, of the ‘goodness’ bestowed upon him by
Byrhtnoth.
The essence of the episode is concentrated to between line 166 when it becomes
apparent that Byrthnoth is unable to fight, when all of a sudden his age is pointed out to
us, and the moment when Godwin leaps into his master’s saddle in line 189. The poem
is centered on the heroic death of a man, who although he made a mistake, died as he
ought to, not forgetting what it means to be good, in his case to his king. He is surrounded
by two kinds of men: the good ones who die with their Earl and some surviving
men whose lack of goodness is proved by their survival. We are also presented
with a hint as to Byrhtnoth’s shortcomings—the discrepancy between his powerful
eloquence and lack of physical abilities—showing that he is too old to live up to his
own ideals. It is a disadvantage to be old, and perhaps that is the reason for the use of
the word ofer-móde to describe the fact that Byrhtnoth invites the Danes to fight on his
side of the river. It must, moreover, be noted that it is the young, rather than the thanes,
who attack him again and again. Byrhtnoth is not killed in a heroic combat with a single
man, he is worn out by a pack of dedicated drengr and lið-men, brothers in terms of
the Hellestad stone or fellows, of whom several are of course killed.
The feebleness of old age, if not as in Byrhtnoth’s case feebleness of mind, seems
also to be the reason for King Hroðgar’s troubles in Beowulf. In Maldon lines 166–
189 are therefore not only an example of a military crisis but also an example of a
leadership crisis. Maldon is a clash between ideals, righteousness versus strategy, and
a poem about the conditions of those whose behaviour is guided by the ideal of the
good. It is so in its nucleus, but also in the larger perspective in which we follow the
build-up to the breakpoint and the development of the catastrophe.
In the later part of the poem there is a tendency to repetition with the aim of assuring
us that none of those who took part in the battle with honour will be forgotten. Obviously
the author is strongly interested in creating an East Saxon myth about what happened.
For this reason the last part of the poem stands out as a kind of restoration of
goodness in order to limit the effects, i.e., the moral effects, of Byrhtnoth’s death and
the guile of Godwin and his brothers.
In the larger perspective we initially meet good in lines 4 and 13; this is in the
section where Byrhtnoth has decided to fight the Danes. He has made up his mind
and he knows that it is good to fight, and so have, and so do, his retainers, after
which we do not meet the word till lines 170, 176 and 187. After the climax a sword
is called good in line 236. Then the word good returns in a more significant way in
line 315 when the time has come for the old and humble retainer Byrhtwold to step
forward and announce his determination to die next to his master and to call his
master good. Byrhtwold starts with a couple of lines that must have made the poet
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