I was quite excited when an Italian scholar of Germanic philology, Verio Santoro, wrote to me saying he’d like to send me a copy of his book La Ricezione Moderna della Battaglia di Maldon: Tolkien, Borges e gli altri; “The Battle of Maldon” is a work I’ve always been very interested in, since long before my undergraduate attempt to write a translation of it; my first introduction to it was Tolkien’s play “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son”, which I read as a child. I didn’t at first realize that Dr. Santoro was sending it to me because there’s half a chapter in it about my prose-poem “Anno Domini Nine-Hundred and Ninety One: Two Voices”, which is included in The Storyteller.



It’s a book I’m quite eager to read, and not just for the discussion of my reinterpretation of “Maldon”; the whole subject is something I’m interested in. As I don’t read Italian, though, my progress is slow, using Latin and a huge Cambridge Italian dictionary (which for some reason is the second-largest dictionary in this dictionary-filled household, outweighed only by the Oxford Universal).