Although the concept of the warrior was glorified and held up as an ideal in the songs and stories of the scops, these keepers of the Anglo-Saxon imagination also sanitised and curated the concept of the warrior. Many of the Norse skalds were warriors, and there’s no reason to suppose that that was not true of Anglo-Saxon scops too. But we don’t find in surviving Anglo-Saxon poems anything like the unadorned battle savagery of the Iliad.

The reality was grim, dark and bloody. It was the work of the men listening to the scop’s verse, and the scops chose not to amplify that aspect of their lives. Instead, there’s an autumnal feel to Anglo-Saxon verse, a sense of the loss of things, and the long defeat.