J.R.R. Tolkien considered the poem The Battle of Maldon ‘the last surviving fragment of ancient English heroic minstrelsy’. It would inspire him to compose his own dramatic verse-dialogue, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son. Leading Tolkien scholar, Peter Grybauskas, presents for the first time Tolkien’s own prose translation of The Battle of Maldon together with the definitive treatment of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and its accompanying essays; also included and never before published is the lecture, ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’. This slipcased edition includes a colour frontispiece reproducing a page of Tolkien’s original manuscript of The Homecoming, and also includes a digitally remastered recording of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth read by J.R.R. Tolkien & Christopher Tolkien, which is available on CD for the first time.