war-king

plural war-kings

1. A king in times of war; a warrior king.

   [T]he fire-dragon had rased the coastal region and reduced forts and earthworks to dust and ashes, so the war-king planned and plotted his revenge.

   1999, Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page 74

   2 more examples

   All the inhabitants, excepting the Druids, were trained early to war, and every clan or family fought in a separate band, under the King of its particular nation, and a War King elected as chief general.

   1828, Richard Thomson, Illustrations of the History of Great Britain, volume II, Edinburgh: Constable and Co., page 82

   Turner thinks that the Bret-walda [...] was a war-king, elected by the other Anglo-Saxon kings and their nobility, as their leader in the time of war.

   1882, Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, volume I, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, page 131, column 2