The Cambridge Old English Reader

Two of the seven extant versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (see p. 97) have the following brief entry for the year 937: ‘In this year Athelstan and Edmund his brother led levies to Brunanburh and there fought with Olaf, and with the help of Christ they had the victory’. It was one episode out of many in an unceasing struggle between Wessex and its northern and western enemies during the tenth century and might have gone unremarked. But the other five versions of the Chronicle expand on the entry with an ardently nationalistic poem of seventy-three lines which celebrates the battle at Brunanburh as a decisive ‘English’ triumph. There King Athelstan and his brother Edmund, leading the armies of Wessex and Mercia, overcame a combined force of Norsemen from Dublin led by Olaf (Anlāf in the text), Scots under King Constantine III, and Britons from Strathclyde.

Although the main events of the battle are corroborated in various other annals and histories, and in a much later Norse saga, the location of Brunanburh is not known for certain. However, it is likely to have been in the northwest of England, and identification with modern Bromborough, a village on the Wirral peninsula – which juts out into the North Sea – has long been popular. It has been shown that the form Bromborough could have evolved from an original Brunanburh and recent topographical research has reinforced the case for the connection, though confident claims for other locations (including one near Durham, in the northeast) continue to be made. The River Dee forms the boundary of the Wirral on its southwestern side and is a likely escape route for the defeated Norse forces heading back to Ireland.

Some critics have suggested that the poet of Brunanburh was influenced by Latin or Norse panegyrics (laudatory verses about aristocrats or heroes), but the poem's emphasis is on English nationalism in an historical perspective, rather than on individual heroics, and nothing specific is said about Athelstan's feats (cf. the treatment of ealdorman Byrhtnoth in The Battle of Maldon, Text 30). Brunanburh concludes with an historical allusion which links the present victors to the conquering ancestral Anglo-Saxons of the fifth century. From this continuity the poet builds a sense of national destiny, using the style, diction and imagery of heroic poetry.