Abstract
OVER the last century the ‘ideal of dying with one’s lord’ has occasioned intense scholarly debate. Much of the early discussion of the trope centred on the perceived similarities between the suicidal loyalty attributed to the warbands of Germanic tribal chieftains in Tacitus’s Germania, written circaad 98, and the devotion unto death displayed by Byrhtnoth’s warriors in the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, composed some time after the battle itself in ad 991.1 However, successive scholars have problematized any straightforward link between these two texts by demonstrating the following points. First, Tacitus is an unreliable historian of the Germans, his ethnographical descriptions are indebted to Celtic traditions, and he is intent in the Germania on glamorizing the Germans in order to shame his decadent countrymen.2 Secondly, Maldon is the only Old English text to display examples of specifically Tacitean behaviour (that is, warriors...
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