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current, throughout the poem as well as in its climax, then it is also possible to see the
reoccurrence of the word as a sign that the good has been restored. This, in its turn,
means that the poem starts by pointing out what must in the given situation be good,
namely to fight and not pay tribute. This decision eventually brings those who do the
good into a severe crisis and we come close to the breakdown of the ideal, but as
there are still men who are prepared to do the good, which is actually to honour a
bargain with a master who has been good to you, and for whom one is expected to
give one’s life in order to make the deal fair and even, the ideal can be saved. The
East-Saxons as a people are represented by 20 or so men, similar to the Geats, who
are represented by Beowulf and his 14 men, and they overcome the crisis and restore
the ideal by sacrificing themselves. For a man to be caught up by age and to be
lacking in judgement and physical strength it is a harsh fate to be called upon to be
good, but that is certainly no reason to depart from the good. National football teams
and their managers, modern equivalents of Byrhnoth and his men, can count themselves
fortunate in that they risk only defamation by media, the murder of Escobar
being the exception.
Being called upon to be good often restricts one’s possibilities of action. The poem
shows this splendidly by letting Byrhtnoth make the initial decision to fight the Danes.
This is a good decision since to Byrhtnoth it is the right way in which to repay his king,
but it leads to other decisions which make it easy to be wise after the event and at the
same time quite pointless, since earlier that day, in the assembly before the decision
was taken, Offa—in what was probably a most typical epic digression in the unknown
beginning of the poem—had already told the Earl what would probably happen if his
men were tried in battle against the Danes.
The good is in other words best in the long run and it may lead to immediate disaster
for the individual or a hard-won victory for one side or the other, since it must not be
forgotten that also the Danes acted in a good way, not least the young men who went
forth and got themselves killed trying to get at Byrhtnoth.
It seems clear that in a crisis the only right thing to do is to return whatever benefits
or gifts we have received by sacrificing our lives for the sake of our benefactor. Seen in
a long perspective the crisis for the prehistoric ideal of the good in the battle situation is
no doubt a sign of mental health and, to many, a proof of the development of society,
but probably even in prehistoric times the normality of being good was hardly a matter
of killing as many opponents as possible before getting killed oneself.
It is worth wondering if the author of Maldon was aware of his own use of the word
good. I think that there can be little doubt that he knew that he was writing about a
mainly military ideal of the good and that he felt obliged to connect it with a Christian
goodness, at least formally. God, moreover, is a king whose thane it is worth being; he
grants the good in the same way as a worldly king and whatever Heaven may look like
Byrhtnoth prefers to belong to God. Using the word good probably occurred quite
naturally to the author when he reached the most solemn parts of his poem—when
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