The poem known as Maxims II is found in a mid-eleventh-century manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. i, fol. 115r–v), where it is sandwiched between a metrical calendar, recording liturgical feasts and saints' days of the church year, and a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The OE maxims present an intimate viewof the world in literal terms. Indeed, on the face of it, they may seem to state the obvious (‘a king must rule his kingdom’), but that is the point. Their effect derives from their economy of expression, pared down to the simple unqualified statement of fact, which allows no escape into metaphorical interpretation, and so they demand a direct confrontation with meaning. There are numerous references in Maxims II to the Germanic ‘heroic’ culture out of which the Anglo-Saxons came: a king sharing out treasures, young men being exhorted to battle, the dragon guarding its hoard. The sense of order which the maxims cumulatively promote reflects and reinforces the divinely ordained laws of the natural world and the laws (by implication no less divinely inspired) of social hierarchy.

The essential simplicity of gnomic utterance in OE literature does not lead to ease of translation into ModE. Two main verbal formulae are used to present the maxims. The first one uses byð (or bið), ‘is’ (from bēon), known as the ‘gnomic’ present tense and in general expressing universal, unchanging truths, but used also to indicate future action (‘will be’).