Oaths in The Battle of Maldon

In 1968, in a remark as wise as it is learned, Professor George Clark wrote of The Battle of Maldon that “what the poet does not create does not exist even if history inspires his poem.” Readers of the poem have been mulling this over for forty years. The historical information the poem affords us has been subject, in some degree, to alteration by imagination, to the formulae of verse, and to the genre’s chartered streets, in William Blake’s phrase. Professor Clark has therefore asked readers to abstract “the meaning of the events the poem imaginatively recreates.” Loyalty is one such abstraction. Readers ask whether this character or that character 2 3