Wading into Kudrun; on the Trail of a Legendary Mystery Man

Wade of Kudrun sits uneasily as a migration era hero in a high medieval romance. (Photo illustration by Rachel Hellman.)

Not much is as troubling as the discovery that you’ve lost something, particularly something of value. Medieval writers suggest that we should have a story about a figure that we know just enough about to be tantalized, and troubled. The mystery of Wade is a good tale. Scandinavia recalls him as a sea giant. Mallory knew him to be a great knight. Chaucer obliquely recalls his boat and a tale that could be told. The breadcrumbs are lined up and it’s difficult not to follow.

Every known reference to the legendary Wade has been gathered neatly together for generations. The trail seems to begin sometime in the tales spread by Germanic-speaking tribes as they fanned out across Europe. All of the English literary references to Wade had faded to almost a name. Old English recalls him as a legendary ruler. Middle English celebrates him for his strength, chivalry and the defeat of a dragon. Folklore in England connects his name to sites in the north related to a giant. The Old Norse Wade was a giant, the son of a king and a sea woman (often translated to mermaid.) 

But it is the German Wade, I feel, that requires our attention, as this Wade gives us the most insight into who readers of a specific time knew him to be, and how he may have changed from the distant past. Unlike other extant literary sources, Wade is a major character in the anonymously-written mid-thirteenth-century poem called Kudrun. Kudrun presents a Wade that seems to have become a stock figure of fiction, a blustering, sometimes comic, sometimes troubling old curmudgeon who prefers to do things the old way. But the poem preserves features of Wade that would have been a perfect fit in the Beowulf era and maybe even earlier, when he could have been a mythological figure, even a deity.

Throughout Kudrun, Wade’s most obvious attributes are his age, his strength, and his terrifying violence on the battlefield. What most struck me as a reader though, were clues that this continental, thirteenth-century Wade (Wate in German) was already a known commodity to readers. He performs a function in the story that presumes that the reader is already aware of him. Wade is mentioned by name in the poem before the royal lover, whose difficult suit Wade will facilitate, against a king who murders the envoys of his daughter’s suitors. It is a job only Wade can perform, the young king is told, though the strategy, to sneak into the kingdom disguised as a merchant, does not sit well for him: “I’m not suited to selling pretty trinkets to women.” Wade’s discomfort in this role is the beginning of a series of comic moments predicated on his being a warrior of an earlier time being forced into a courtly romance. 

The character who most dislikes the need to pretend to be something he isn’t, is, of course, the character most comic to be pressed to play a role. Despite Wade’s misgivings to play the part, everyone in the foreign court wants an audience with him. Scholar R.W. Chambers suggested that it is his rich clothing that draws their attention, but the Kudrun poet maintains that all of Wade’s contingent is dressed in the finest clothing possible as a means of disarming the Irish king into allowing them close to his daughter. Yet, in the midst of younger courtiers in his throng, everyone is curious about Wade, whose only described attribute is his large gray beard.

Perhaps it is just the beard that marks Wade as different from the younger courtiers, who would seem more likely to attract the attention of young ladies, but the ladies of the court pay the most attention to “old” Wade. The queen says that Wade “is such a strange man,” that she wishes to see him and even rises from her seat when he enters. The young ladies study Wade to see his behavior, and they flirt as girls might with an aged man they find funny. They ask whether Wade is more comfortable with young ladies or in danger on the battlefield, to which he states his preference is the battlefield. It is hard to know how the ladies would be able to tell that this is a warrior, but perhaps Kudrun’s intended audience already knew that Wade was a man from from before the civilized times of this romance.

The reader discovers that Wade’s lack of control over his rage and tendency to be gruff to the point of rudeness are characteristics that become so predictable about him. Given this, I suspect that the scene with the ladies and others are predicated on dramatic irony, the reader’s knowledge that Wade is only at home slaughtering enemies, and putting him in fine clothes in a courtly setting would effectively be a condition to cause him to blow his cover as a merchant in the scheme. The Kudrun poet must have thought that this scene would be so enjoyed by readers that he wrote two more based on the same joke, one where the princess essentially asks for a second meeting to study Wade (though not to kiss him!) and a scene with her father, King Hagan, a man in the mold of Wade.

Hagan also picks Wade out from all of the courtiers, to test his fighting skills. Hagan seems up to mischief and perhaps means to pressure Wade into a sword demonstration with Hagan’s best swordsman. Wade feigns ignorance of swordplay and even a reader who has not seen Wade fight expects a situation in which all are shocked to find Wade to be the greater fighter. Hagan’s fencing master quickly fears for his life fighting Wade, which leads Hagan himself to face him. Hagan’s strength, prowess, and battle rage are all established earlier in the tale and Hagan’s danger is the entire cause of Wade’s charade in his court, to avoid facing him in battle. Testing Wade, Hagan quickly learns that Wade is as strong as Hagan is (it is said of both Wade and Hagan that they have the strength of twenty-six men) and an expert swordsman. Hagan has to steel himself not to lose his temper in their friendly match. For his part, Wade drops the act that swordplay is unknown to him and attacks Hagan “like a wild Saxon or Frank.” The scene is made more interesting supposing the dramatic irony of knowing that Wade is more than a match for Hagan or his sword-master. The humor of Wade’s protesting not knowing how to fight and of Hagan’s patronizing him by offering to teach Wade “out of affection” for him, is greater if the reader knows what happens to anyone who fights Wade. Wade’s response that Hagan must vow not to kill him further raises the comic stakes, and demonstrates a level of coyness that fits the comic scene more than the incendiary Wade.

Wade Represents an Earlier Ethos

Wade’s fighting prowess is essential in all of the military actions in Kudrun, and must have been an understood element of the character. But the developing difficulty in Kudrun, is that Wade represents a theory of war that is out of step with the rest of the characters of the story. This further places Wade as a fish out of water, and is played for humor as Wade goes far beyond what is acceptable for this time. Where Wade’s young prince and princess would prefer to take hostages in battle and enact political marriages, Wade will slaughter to the last, even women and children. He is described as terrible and terrifying, dreadful, wild and ferocious. He fights like a wild lion, bellows like a wild boar. His eyes blaze, his teeth grind and he is at times drenched in the blood of his enemies. He is repeatedly described as merciless. Wade’s friends must continually pull Wade back to save the men he is fighting. But they cannot always stop him. In this manner, he slaughters babies in cribs. He cuts off the heads of noblewomen who have begged quarter. 

Wade’s practice to become enraged in battle, and dangerous to both friend and foe, was a feature of heroes in the Beowulf mold, whom Wade could have once been. Beowulf, like his monstrous adversaries–or our own, modern, Incredible Hulk–physically swells with rage during his fights. Beowulf is once praised for never killing a kinsman, hardly a high bar in many other places and times, certainly in the era of Kudrun. Wade’s friends only approve of his violence to the moment when the enemy is ready to surrender, while Wade is unwilling to stop until he has killed everyone, even threatening to kill both friend and foe to achieve his aims. Wade, the hero, the victor, is censored for his slaughter: “What good would come of it, if you killed everyone in this land of his?” one comrade complains. This version of Wade is more at home with the figure of the berserker of the Lewis Chessmen, biting his shield, ready to storm into battle.

Like the Incredible Hulk, Wade becomes a figure in Kudrun that cannot turn off the violence, and as with the Incredible Hulk, this is sometimes played for humor. After failing to stop him from executing the evil queen and a traitorous gentlewoman in front of her terrified ladies in waiting, Kudrun recognizes that they will just have to agree to disagree: “Wate can do what he wants with his own hostages.” Kudrun’s comment is funny because it understates her lack of control over him.  Just as humorously, Wade complains that his friends are too merciful. To the man who complains about Wade killing children, Wade retorts, “You’re like a child yourself.”  When Kudrun’s kidnapper prays for his freedom, Wade responds, “I would quickly make sure that his chains never bothered him again.” Wade’s frustration with Kudrun and his younger relations is that they would take the opportunity at victory to promote a lasting peace by intermarrying with their enemy’s family, which seems a larger message of the poem. But Wade sees in orphans a future war party returning for vengeance, as has happened in the story already.

Hints of a Mythological Past

Chambers detected the hint that Wade began life as a storm deity in the manner of his death in Thidreks Saga: being buried by an avalanche. There are myths about storm gods being trapped underground or in the underworld realm of death. Chambers’s logic works on the premise that mythological tales sometimes undergo changes that make them appealing to audiences that no longer seek mythology or deities in tales. Gods then become mortal heroes, here a storm god demoted to a giant who wades across the sea and happens to be killed by a landslide. Chambers’s logic applied to Kudrun reveals details that could also suggest a mythological figure transformed into an exceptional man. One may start with Wade’s perpetual stage of agedness.   

Ever Gray

Kudrun does not imbue its characters with the sort of detail one expects of modern fiction. No character’s age is addressed with specificity. So it is not strange that Wade’s specific age is never stated. What does seem to be unusual, even within the style of the poem, is that Wade is old at the beginning of a story that spans generations and is old at the end. Wade kidnaps a princess at the beginning of the poem, and then rescues that princess’s adult daughter at the end. Wade, who was an old man when he met the mother, says he will have to wait for children to grow up to seek vengeance. Wade has no doubts of his longevity, but the mother’s response is “Ah, if only I could live that long.”  It may not be exceptional for a normal person to live through several generations, but it is strange that the queen, who viewed Wade as an aged curiosity when she was young, expects that she will not outlive him.

A Man with a Storied Past

Of the characters of Kudrun, Wade is the only one with a past that extends beyond the action of the narrative. Not only does Kudrun’s Wade have a past, but all of the details of his past are remarkable for their connections to magic. In the first bloody battle of the tale, when Wade faces off against the similarly powerful Hagan, Hagan’s kidnapped daughter begs her captors to stop Wade from killing her father. It is then revealed that Wade is a “master” healer: “They had heard a long time ago that Wate had learned healing from a forest woman.” Kudrun translator William Whobrey shares that his translation of wilden wibe has the possible sense of herbalist, healer, witch, and even creatures half woman, half animal. He shares the glosses “woman adept in magic,” and “wise woman of the woods” that two other translations have used. After all of Wade’s bloodshed in this battle, he is able to save lives and bring wounded men back to health. Wade’s sudden willingness to heal his enemies, if not his ability to heal itself, is incongruous with his behavior in the rest of the story.

Wade also tells a story when his fleet of ships is captured by a magnetic force when they pass the mountain at Givers, a geographically indeterminate location given the hazy geography of Kudrun: “Long ago as a child, I heard tell seafaring stories that in the mountain at Givers a great kingdom was founded. People live in comfort there.” Wade goes on to describe rivers of silver and gold and says that all who are pulled to the mountain are rich forever. Wade, on his dire mission of rescue and revenge, then prays they are pulled to the mountain, as if lost in reverie, while his companions remain in the moment and wish to escape the magnetic power. The overpowering strength of the seas on ships has probably led to many myths. The Odyssey has the whirlpool Scylla, the Sirens and Circe, who all overpower seafarers in various ways. By sharing his story, Wade recalls a childhood that gives him a history outside the boundaries of the story, which make him exceptional in Kudrun.

Mythological Connections to the Sea

Wade frequently travels in ships in the poem Kudrun, but I noticed details that I think have the flavor of a deity connected to the sea. The first is Wade’s horn, which he uses to rouse his troops to battle at dawn. His first horn blast can be heard thirty miles from shore. His second blast moves all of the troops into position, but the description of the third blast stuck out to me: “He signaled a third time with such great force that the shore quaked and the waves echoed the sound. The cornerstones of Ludwig’s castle could have been shaken loose.” The horn and the power of creating earthquakes are attributed respectively to the sea gods Triton and his father Poseidon, the earth shaker. This is also not the first time in the poem that Wade shook the earth. In his fight with Hagan early in the story, the text runs: “Then old Wate bore down and the shoreline shook.” 

The three major battles Wade fights in Kudrun are on the shore near ships that he has piloted, as others have noted, “strong rudder in his hand.” It seems unusual, if not implausible, that each of these battles take place on the beach, as if to accommodate a figure traditionally connected to the sea, or who may have traditionally gained power from the sea. In the first battle, Wade’s forces debark to find Hagan’s forces approaching from sea. During the second battle Kudrun’s kidnappers debark on an island that is not their destination for reasons not explained. Finally, Kudrun’s kidnappers’ castle that Wade shakes with a blast of his horn is also on the sea, above a beach that Wade’s forces have landed on.

The Man from Stormland

Finally, Kudrun’s Wade is from a place that Whobrey gives alternately as Stormarn and Stormland. No detail is ever given of this location, but Wade is summoned from there frequently and returns there between quests for his king. Though the geography of Kudrun is hard to relate to real places, locations are often named, some, like Ireland, seem to correspond to a real location, others, like Waylays and Ormanie, which bear similarities to the lands Wales or Normandy, but do not seem to correspond to them. Stormarn could refer to the district of Schleswig-Holstein of modern Germany, but, again, the inner logic of place names in Kudrun, if there is one, is not understood. Obviously, a figure associated with storms and the sea hailing from Stormland would seem significant.

There are details of Wade’s battles that can be interpreted as related to storms. In his battle with Hagan, “many brave men saw sparks flying off the helmets like flashes from a smithy’s fire…then old Wate bore down and the shoreline trembled.” Though I have suggested that the ground trembling could be the hint of a figure able to cause earthquakes, it is also possible to envision the flashes of fire and trembling earth as thunder and lightning. In a later battle, Wade’s charge in battle darkens the sun with a cloud of dust, which could hint at a gathering storm cloud.

A Retirement 

Wade ends his story in Kudrun being given a position of honor in the queen’s household, which seems a bit of a downgrade from his job of commanding one of the king’s castles, which was his role at the beginning of it. Whobrey’s translation says he is made “seneschal,” which is a court officer in charge of ceremonies and feasts (the German was truhsæze), but the etymology of seneschal indicates that it once meant “old servant,” which Wade clearly was in the history of this kingdom. I see the shift as an indication that the queen recognizes that the time of Wade as the commander of armies and warrior-in-chief have passed. I like to see it as a fond farewell to a figure whose time had really passed in the era of Kudrun, to the extent that he has fairly or unfairly lapsed into the role of a comical figure. In this manner Wade sits uneasily in Kudrun given that he is the only figure who enables the happy ending that this romance wants as its proper conclusion. 

We have lamented the loss of a “Tale of Wade,” that elaborates on his magic boat and whether that version of Wade relates to the giant of the sea. However, here we have a Wade that seems modeled on the wild Saxon or Frank (or Geat) that would have fit into migration age stories represented in the poems “Widsith,” and “Deor.” That may not bring us closer to understanding who Wade was in his lost English tale, but it fills in a gap for a character long enough lived for literature to ease him into retirement. 

‘In Olden Days’ with Spike and Ilja

Ilja Zendman and Spike Bakker, members of the Dutch musical duo, Moro.

In a track on the band Moro’s recent album, “In Geardagum,” a bog sacrifice finds herself up to her chin in the muck. “I’m sinking,” said writer and performer, Ilja Zendman.

“There’s a lot of dying in our songs,” said her partner, Spike Bakker.

And there would be for a couple with a shared passion for medieval instruments, balladry, and the history behind it.

Moro’s new album with the Beowulf-inspired title, “In Geardagum.”

Bakker and Zendman formed the duo Moro in 2019, and released their first album this summer. The band performs folk music, covers, and their own, folk-inspired music, all with medieval instruments. “In Geardagum,” takes its title from the first sentence of the poem Beowulf. It can be translated to “in olden days,” or “days of yore.” The album covers traditional ballads like the Swedish “Herr Mannelig,” and “Villeman og Magnhild,” and original tracks like “Grendel,” but also reflects the couple’s story as Dutch reenactors who were asked back to lecture and perform at the Sutton Hoo burial site in England, after visiting as tourists with their Germanic lyres.

Bakker and Zendman caught the historical reenactment bug on a rainy day when they visited a medieval market. “We felt at home there,” Bakker said. It wasn’t long before his interest in all things musical got him into Germanic lyres, and as historic perfectionists, the couple traded their viking kit for 7th Century Anglo-Saxon garb. “We’re the only Anglo-Saxon reenactors from the Netherlands,” joked Bakker.

Moro demonstrating at the preHistorisch Dorp, pre-historic village, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

Moro’s musical history got interwoven with Sutton Hoo and Beowulf when the couple planned a trip to the site as tourists. Sutton Hoo is a site that derives its fame from the extraordinary Anglo-Saxon artifacts and ship burial found there in an archaeological dig in 1938. The ship and a lyre were quickly recognized as material evidence for passages from the Old English poem Beowulf. 

“I had this fantasy in my head. I would love to play in front of the barrows,” said Bakker. He wrote to the British National Trust, which manages the site, and got permission. The couple soon found themselves explaining their lyres to other tourists and staff, and it wasn’t long before Sutton Hoo management asked them back for proper gigs, most recently to perform and lecture. A hit with the academic set, Bakker and Zendman have made contacts in the broader English medievalist community and have been invited to other sites. “They treat us like rock stars, but of course, we think they are the rock stars,” Bakker said.

Moro performing at Sutton Hoo this year.

“In Geardagum” is full of folk narrative. Their cover of Garmarna’s “Varulven,” or werewolf, a grisly sort of Red Riding Hood tale, is a story of a woman going to meet her lover, who is waylaid by a wolf. She tries to bargain with the wolf, offering him her shoes and other articles of clothing, but ends up devoured. “Ramund hin Unge,” is about a Danish folk hero charged with killing seven giants. Moro’s own “Grendel,” is about the man-eating ogre from Beowulf. Written with Dutch lyrics, the song has recitations from Beowulf performed by the English musician and Old English reciter, Russell Jenkins.  

Zendman and Bakker write original songs in their native Dutch, but Zendman, the lead vocalist, sings all folk songs in their original languages, which, for her, are part of the stories. “I like languages. The music that we make has the languages that go with it. It’s all the pieces of the puzzle coming together,” Zendman said. Zendman is currently studying Old English so we may hear her reciting in future performances.

Zendman plays Germanic lyres on the album, mostly for rhythm and chords. She also plays background percussion. Bakker leads melodies with bowed lyres, the nyckelharpa, a fiddle with keys, or plays the lyre as well. The couple provides all lead and background vocals on the album. 

Bakker and Zendman include songs inspired by the Sutton Hoo burial site as well. The instrumental “Raedwald’s Dance,” is named after the supposed nobleman who was buried in the ship burial. “Gimm,” is the Old English word for gem, in honor of “the Anglo-Saxon bling.” 

The name Moro is Norwegian for “fun,” and Bakker and Zendman, for all their concern with getting historical details right, are definitely fun. They recently posted a video announcing a “Swedish classic,” only to prank viewers with a snippet from the Muppet’s Swedish Chef.

“In Geardagum,” came about almost as a joke, after Jenkins sent Zendman and Bakker a recording on which he covered one of their songs. Museum patrons may treat them like rock stars, but they don’t see themselves that way. But because they are perfectionists, what began as a lark turned into hours of recording for almost two months. Their venture produced an album with good sound and professional marketing, but they recorded it at home and print the compact discs there as well.

The sixteen tracks are lively and tuneful. Zendman’s delivery of folk lyrics is energetic and her voice has the brightness needed to carry the melodies, but also the warmth to make them satisfying. Bakker’s nyckelharpa (or other bowed lyres) is an effective instrument for carrying melodies. The backing chords or supporting melody from Zendman’s lyre playing makes for a surprisingly full sound from only two musicians. This is likewise the case when they both play lyres. The introduction of percussion definitely gives the impression of more players.

Fully half of the songs on “In Geardagum” are original works, played mostly on instruments that haven’t often seen the light of day since they were buried with kings in the Middle Ages. In addition to instruments already mentioned the album includes the bowed lyres, talharpa (tail harp), moraharpa (a keyed fiddle precursor to the nyckelharpa), and percussion instruments including hand drums, a cajon, or box drum, and the ghungroo, or angle bells. “Var nu uit” is a haunting funeral song dedicated to the man buried under mound number one at Sutton Hoo. “Het Veen” (the bog), an instrumental with spoken words over two Germanic lyres, is from the perspective of a bog body and a woman about to be a bog body, people sacrificed to peat bogs in ancient times.

Bog bodies have been dated much later than the age of the (reproduction) instruments Bakker and Zendman play, but this may be the closest the couple comes to what I imagine Anglo-Saxon poetry to have sounded like. In our interview, Bakker and Zendman both sounded frustrated that the Netherlands lacks the extant ancient poetry of England, but perhaps they are making up for this deficit themselves.

Bakker and Zendman have carved out an interesting niche as performing reenactors, particularly with their successes in England. For a folk music group that has only been active for about five years, the production of an album and regular gigs is impressive. Despite the paid gigs they occupy that middle space of performers with day jobs, and they are unusually supportive of the performers and artists they share that space with. Full disclosure, Bakker has shared lyre videos with me to help me identify how he has played a song. Of the lyre-players I have met online, Bakker and Zendman have been two of the nicest.

Moro’s music is available online and “In Geardagum” can be purchased by contacting the group through social media or by email at moromuziek@gmail.com.

Of Beasts that Gloat and Plunder

The Twa Corbies, preparing to dine on the dead knight below, from “Some British Ballads,” 1919, by Arthur Rackham, (Wikimedia Commons).

At least twice, in the past thousand years (or so), a writer has observed that in war, men can act so much like beasts, that beasts themselves start to seem to act like men. The two writers include philologist and author, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the anonymous poet of a snippet of narrative poetry describing a battle fought in 991 C.E. Tolkien translated and provided explanations of the medieval Englishman’s words and then went further, writing an epilogue to that long-dead poet’s work for the stage. In it, Tolkien delves into themes and linguistic details from the poem by weaving them into his own writing. Gloating birds and wolflike men blend together in Tolkien’s The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.

In a text so interested in the behavior of scavengers, the admonishment not to crow over an unjust killing stands out. Two loyal retainers of the proud earl Beorhtnoth search for his body among scores of English and Viking dead, an act necessitated after Vikings massacred Beorhtnoth’s English defense force earlier in the day in a battle known to us from history and the remnants of a narrative poem called The Battle of Maldon. The scene is eerie. Tolkien calls for the stage to remain in darkness other than the small light of a searcher’s dark lantern. The ground is covered in piles of men and severed limbs. The more timid searcher starts and calls out in fear repeatedly. His comrade offers cold comfort: “The wolves don’t walk as in Woden’s days…If there be any, they’ll be two-legged.”

The comment is prescient, as comments often are in dramas, and the heroes shortly find themselves in a struggle with plunderers, which ends with the timid man dispatching one of the graverobbers. He shouts his success and his companion chides him for responding too aggressively: “Why kill the creatures, or crow about it?” There are no literal crows in his text, but there are in The Battle of Maldon, and in his notes to the poem, published in June under the title The Battle of Maldon, Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Tolkien responds to the appearance of the carrion birds, along with their typical brethren in Old English poetry, the eagle and the wolf.

Tolkien writes that ravens, eagles and wolves trailed armies and became particularly active on the eve of a battle. Their appearance together, in these circumstances in Old English poetry, is so common that the animals are referred to as “beasts of battle” and their mention before battles became formulaic in poems including any sort of large-scale fighting. Perhaps Tolkien noticed the human qualities the old poets gave the animals. In Aaron K. Hostetter’s translations, the wolf “chant[s] his warsong,” and is joined by the eagle in the poem Elene. The three animals “divide up the carrion” in The Battle of Brunanburh. The slaughtered dead are “a pleasure to wolves, a comfort as well to the slaughter-greedy birds” in Judith. The animals are “eager,” “greedy,” and “rejoice” in the bloodshed.

Of course, Tolkien had a favorite beasts-of-battle passage, and states that it is the Beowulf-poet who “really tunes his imagination on the conventional trappings” of the motif. Tolkien’s own translation of the passage, from his translation of Beowulf, runs thus: “Nor shall the music of the harp awake the warriors, but the dusky raven gloating above the doomed shall speak many things, shall to the eagle tell how it sped him at the carrion feast, when he vied with the wolf in picking bare the slain.” Here the animals reach their most anthropomorphized with the raven becoming the narrator of his own boastful story. The raven, eagle and wolf are in competition for the choicest bits. Returning to Tolkien’s character accused of “crowing” about killing the graverobber, it seems that Tolkien was interested in the semantic possibilities of the word crow, here in an idiom that suggests that crows are braggarts, as the Beowulf-poet suggested.

Wargs, Wolves and Criminals

Illustration from “Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf,” 1899 by Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin. (Wikimedia Commons).

Tolkien was also interested in the word wolf, particularly as it applied to wolfish men, and here also he seems to have taken some inspiration from the Maldon-poet, who describes the ravening Viking warriors as waelwulfas, or “slaughter-wolves” as they rush unheeding through the surf at Beorhtnoth’s assembled warriors. Recall also Tolkien’s character warning his comrade of two-legged wolves, which come in the form of English graverobbers, instead of Danish sea-pirates. However, as the Vikings arrived specifically to plunder the English coast and even offer to leave if paid off, is there much of a difference in motive between the Vikings and the native robbers?

It should be noted that waelwulfas, though literally means slaughter-wolves, conveyed the poetic meaning of warriors, and similar compounds meant to convey warriors can be found in other extant texts, such as heorowulfas, “sword-wolves” or “battle-wolves” used to describe pharaoh’s soldiers in the Old English version of the Exodus story. The word wulf itself was a popular name for men in Old English poetry and features in many compounds. Two men, Wulfstan and Wulfmaer, fight on the English side in “The Battle of Maldon.” Consider also Beowulf, perhaps the most famous -wulf of all.

Linguistic anthropologist and Tolkien aficionado Marc Zender suggested that Tolkien showed interest in the etymologies of the words crow and raven in his more popular fiction, The Lord of the Rings. In a lecture I attended at Harvard University in 2011, Zender pointed to Tolkien’s invention of a word for crow in Sindarin Elvish: crebain, a plural form from which close-readers of Sindarin can assume the unattested singular form, craban. For raven, the old Germanic languages have hrabn-, hrafn, and hraefn. Curiously, even though craban seems closer to the Germanic words for raven, Tolkien glosses the word as crow in English. Like the camp-following ravens of Old English poetry, Tolkien’s crebain take on a militaristic posture by traveling in “regiments.” Tolkien uses the word regiments twice to describe their movement, eschewing the English expression, murder of crows. The ominous birds appear in the chapter titled “The Ring Goes South,” in the second book of The Fellowship of the Ring.

The editor of Tolkien’s The Battle of Maldon, Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Peter Grybauskas, also points out that Tolkien had an interest in the older forms of the word wolf, inventing warg from Old Norse vargr or Old English wearg, which are words that could mean wolf or human outlaw, or criminal. Tolkien’s wargs certainly seem inspired by the beasts of battle passages. In The Hobbit, the wargs work with the goblins and “shared the plunder” with them. The wargs speak a “dreadful language” and, using human-like ingenuity, set guards below the company of dwarves in the tree before Gandalf frightens them off in the chapter titled, “Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire.”

Finally, Tolkien himself suggests a direct link between the gloating raven of Old English poetry and birds of the folk tradition that brings us the ballads, “Three Ravens” and “Twa Corbies,” including this stanza:

Twa Corbies

Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane

And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een,

Wi’ ae lock o’ his gowden hair

We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

The songs are about crows or ravens discussing the eating of a knight and seem to relate to one another in that they both refer to the knight’s hawks, hounds and lady, who in “The Three Ravens” version protect the knight’s body, but in the “Twa Corbies,” have abandoned his body to the crows.

Statue of Byrhtnoth in Maldon, made by John Doubleday. The text of The Battle of Maldon refers to the doomed leader by the West Saxon spelling in which the only existing manuscript of the poem is written. Tolkien amended the spelling to Beorhtnoth to reflect the East Saxon dialect that scholars believe the poem was originally written. (Source: Wikipedia.)

But in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and in history, the doomed earl is not left to scavengers. In the manner of Tolkien’s more famous work, loyal and loving followers stand by his side to the death and even after. The two men retrieve Beorhtnoth’s body from the pile of corpses that cover him. He lies beneath the men who fought first to support him, then avenge him, and the Viking dead they took with them. The searchers carry his heavy bulk to a wagon bound for the monks who will tend to him, and lay him to rest, singing over his bones. Evil men and beasts exist in Tolkien’s works, but they are often overcome by loving friends, who fight on when hope seems dimmest. In this they embody the most famous quote from The Battle of Maldon, a speech by an aged servant determined to fight to the death to stand with his leader: “The mind must be harder, the heart braver, courage greater, as our might diminishes.”

In Practical Mythology, Ben Hellman writes about the intersections of society, art and folklore. If you know of a story that suits Practical Mythology, email the idea to newenglandbard@gmail.com.