The ideal of men dying with their lord in theGermaniaand inThe Battle of Maldon

Abstract

There is a well-known resemblance between the heroic behaviour described in theGermaniaand inThe Battle of Maldon: in his account of the martial code of honour of the Germanic tribes Tacitus says, ‘ Iam vero infame in omnem vitam ac probrosum superstitem principi suo ex acie recessisse’, whilst inMaldonthe poet has the followers of Byrhtnoth affirm one after the other that it would be a disgrace to leave the battlefield now that their lord lies dead. For a long time it was assumed that this resemblance reflected historical fact, ties of loyalty and heroic aspirations having remained unchanged over 900 years. A more plausible modification of this view has been that, whilst the society of the tribes in first-century Germany had to be firmly distinguished from that of the Anglo-Saxons in tenth-century England, Old English poetry archaically preserved some of the ideals of conduct that characterized a much earlier form of society. But more recently still the harking back to Tacitus by students of Anglo-Saxon history and literature has been shown to be fallacious, originating in the ethnic romanticism of German scholars in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless the long-standing view that there is a particular resemblance between theGermaniaandThe Battle of Maldoncannot be lightly abandoned. Indeed the more one becomes aware that there is no evidence that the obligation of a retainer to die with his lord was a pervasive ideal in Germanic society which could well have lived on into tenth-century English life or literature, the more striking and curious the resemblance becomes. My aims in the present article are first to demonstrate the apparently total lack of historical or literary–historical continuity between theGermaniaandMaldonand second, nevertheless, to seek an explanation for a resemblance which is too remarkable to be dismissed as pure chance.