Intense patriotic feeling also gave birth to the Battle of Maldon, or Bryhtnoth's Death, an ancient poem, fortunately printed before it was destroyed by fire.

This epic relates how the Viking Anlaf came to England with 93 ships, and, after harrying the coast, was defeated and slain in battle.
The earliest Christian poet in England, Caedmon, instead of singing of love or fighting, paraphrased the Scriptures, and depicted the creation in such eloquent lines that he is said to have inspired some of the passages in Milton's Paradise Lost.

Chief among the religious poems ascribed to Caedmon, are Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, but, although in general he strictly conforms with the Bible narrative, he prefixed to Genesis an account of the fall of the angels, and thus supplied Milton with the most picturesque feature of his theme.
Next come the epic poems of Cynewulf, Crist, Juliana, Elene, and Andreas, also written in alliterative verse.

In Elene the poet gives us the legend of finding of the cross[20] by the empress Helena, dividing his poem into fourteen cantos or fitts.
It is in Gildas and Nennius' Historia Britonum that we find the first mention of the legendary colonization of Britain and Ireland by refugees from Troy, and of the exploits of Arthur and the prophesies of Merlin.

This work, therefore, contains some of the "germs of fables which expanded into Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of Britain, which was written in Latin some time before 1147," although this historian claims to derive his information from an ancient British book of which no trace can be found.
There is, besides, a very curious yet important legend cycle, in regard to a letter sent from Heaven to teach the proper observation of Sunday.