The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (April 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Le_Retour_de_Beorhtnoth,_fils_de_Beorhthelm]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Le_Retour_de_Beorhtnoth,_fils_de_Beorhthelm}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son

Statue of Beorhtnoth in Maldon, Essex
Author	J. R. R. Tolkien
Language	English
Genre	play-script (historical fiction) in verse, & commentary
Publication date	October 1953[1]
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print
Preceded by	Farmer Giles of Ham
Followed by	The Lord of the Rings

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son is a work by J. R. R. Tolkien originally published in 1953 in volume 6 of the scholarly journal Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, and later republished in 1966 in The Tolkien Reader; it is also included in the most recent edition of Tree and Leaf. It is a work of historical fiction, inspired by the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon. It is written in the form of an alliterative poem, but is also a play, being mainly a dialogue between two characters in the aftermath of the Battle of Maldon. The work was accompanied by two essays, also by Tolkien, one before and one after the main work. The work, as published, was thus presented as:

• "The Death of Beorhtnoth" — an introductory essay concerning the battle and the Old English fragment that inspired Tolkien.
• The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son — the alliterative poem.
• "Ofermod" — an essay following on from the main work, discussing the meaning of the Old English word ofermod "overconfidence, foolhardiness".