Just for future reference you can save in the middle of a battle, I have, and generally do. Go into your settings and change the save's settings their are multiple things you can do,auto saves every 15, 30 1hr. save when going through doorway's ( this one like )

Sounds like you've only got the autosaves. That really svcks and I hate to say it, but you really should always manually save. Never trust autosaves.

I can usually resolve this problem with the time honored skill of run away.

Yeah sorry, ive edited it now, i struggle to see mistakes when im rereading it, while its freash in my memory whole chunks can even be missing, words/letters mixed up, struggle to understand the mistakes or even go blank at a normaly simple word ect. Ive worked hard to fix this over many years but to no avail.
But i can get there in the end. lol
When my new pc arrives, i promise ill use word to not make such a hash of things lol.

heh. no worries!

I was in this exact situation once. I lowered the difficulty to Novice and killed the enemy to escape the 'death loop'

Guys, thank you all very very much, but especially those who suggested to switch to Novice - IT WORKED!

Thank Thalos, my game is saved and i can continue that great saga. Never loved a game more than this.
I'm really glad for all your help and can't thank you enough.

Yay he's out of the loop of death.

My suggestion was going to be if you didn't have chance to pull up start and chance difficulty before he killed you, start a new game change it to the easier setting then save, this would have put your death looped saved also on the easiest setting.

I too got stuck in a loop once going up these steps I saved then a soul gem weapon blasted me to death in one shot, no previous saves, after ten attempts I managed to pull up b quick enough so I could fast travel out of there.

Congrats!

Learn from this: save often manually, don't rely on auto save in future!

Well done!

Blast, I forgot to mention that a long time ago because that's what i had to do. Well, I'm glad you're out of it. Good luck and I agree that this game is AmAzInG!

Oh yeah, learned my lesson.

It is. I've never been a huge RPG fan except Fallout, but this game is even miles better than Fallout.
I'm totally addicted already. Blown away by it's beauty, fun and length.

If you can bring up your menu by pressing B a bunch of times, try to lower your difficulty too via the main menu. Just for you to be able to escape more easily and you can reset it back to how it was when you escape.