The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is an early record in Old English of events from the beginning of the Christian era to 1154. Surviving in seven manuscripts, the early entries are sporadic and short--often a single line per year--but later entries include fascinating historical anecdotes and some lyrical entries such as the present poem. Alfred the Great is credited with demanding more organization and detail of the chronicle.
Following is Alfred, Lord Tennyson's famous 1876 translation of The Battle of Brunanburh.
Athelstan King,
Lord among Earls,
Bracelet-bestower and
Baron of Barons,
He with his Brother,
Edmund Atheling,
Gaining a lifelong
Glory in battle,
Slew with the sword-edge
There by Brunanburh,
Brake the shield-wall,
Hew'd the linden-wood,
Hack'd the battle-shield,
Sons of Edward with hammer'd brands.
Theirs was a greatness
Got from their grand-sires--
Theirs that so often in
Strife with their enemies
Struck for their hoards and their hearths
and their homes.
Bow'd the spoiler,
Bent the Scotsman,
Fell the ship-crews
Doom'd to the death.
All the field with blood of the fighters
Flow'd, from when the first the great
Sun-star of morning-tide
Lamp of the Lord God
Lord everlasting,
Glode over earth till the glorious creature
Sank to his setting.
There lay many a man
Marr'd by the javelin,
Men of the Northland
Shot over shield.
There was the Scotsman
Weary of war.
We the West-Saxons,
Long as the daylight
Lasted, in companies
Troubled the track of
the host that we hated;
Grimly with swords that were sharp
from the grindstone,
Fiercely we hack'd at the flyers before us.
Mighty the Mercian,
Hard was his hand-play,
Sparing not any of
Those that with Anlaf,
Warriors over the
Weltering waters
Borne in the bark's-bosom
Drew to this island--
Doom'd to the death.
Five young kings put asleep by the sword-stroke,
Seven strong earls of the army of Anlaf
Fell on the war-field, numberless numbers,
Shipmen and Scotsmen.
Then the Norse leader--
Dire was his need of it,
Few were his following--
Fled to his war-ship;
Fleeted his vessel to sea with the king in it,
Saving his life on the fallow flood.
Also the crafty one,
Constantinus,
Crept to his North again,
Hoar-headed hero!
Slender warrant had
He to be proud of
The welcome of war-knives--
He that was reft of his
Folk and his friends that had
Fallen in conflict,
Leaving his son too
Lost in the carnage,
Mangled to morsels,
A youngster in war!
Slender reason had
He to be glad of
The clash of the war-glaive--
Traitor and trickster
And spurner of treaties--
He nor had Anlaf
With armies so broken
A reason for bragging
That they had the better
In perils of battle
On places of slaughter--
The struggle of standards,
The rush of the javelins,
The crash of the charges,
The wielding of weapons--
The play that they play'd with
The children of Edward.
Then with their nail'd prow
Parted the Norsemen, a
Blood-redden'd relic of
Javelins over
The jarring breaker, the deep-sea billow,
Shaping their way toward Dyflen again,
Shamed in their souls.
Also the brethren,
King and Atheling,
Each in his glory,
Went to his own in his own West-Saxonland,
Glad of the war.
Many a carcase they left to be carrion,
Many a livid one, many a sallow-skin--
Left for the white-tail'd eagle to tear it, and
Left for the horny-nibb'd raven to rend it, and
Gave to the garbaging war-hawk to gorge it, and
That gray beast, the wolf of the weald.
Never had huger
Slaughter of heroes
Slain by the sword edge--
Such as old writers
Have writ of in histories--
Hapt in this isle, since
Up from the East hither
Saxon and Angle from
Over the broad billow
Broke into Britain with
Haughty war-workers who
Harried the Welshman, when
Earls that were lured by the
Hunger of glory gat
Hold of the land.
Old English (OE), or Anglo-Saxon, is the name given to the English language before the year 1100. Extant documents written in the language date from about 700 to about 1100, but the great bulk of written material represents the speech from about 900 to 1050. The language was spoken in four dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West-Saxon. The majority of the manuscripts, most containing anything worth reading as literature, are West-Saxon.
The dominance of the West-Saxon literature during the period demonstrates the political and artistic vitality of the kingdom of West Saxon (Wessex). The most famous King of Wessex, an important patron of literature and an author himself, was Alfred the Great (who ruled from 871 to 899).
This dominance of Old English literature by West-Saxon documents adds a twist to the study of the development of English. It was the Mercian dialect, not the West Saxon, that eventually dominated and evolved into Chaucer's Middle English and our Modern English. West-Saxon literature is the ancestor of nearly all English literature, but the West-Saxon language is not.
The dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians at the time of their initial settlement in Britain were, of course, no different from the dialects spoken in their Germanic homelands. As the generations passed, and as the Anglo-Saxons became relatively isolated from their European cousins, spoken language evolved into the dialects mentioned above.
In 597, with the introduction of Christianity, came the introduction of Latin literacy. The Anglo-Saxons had made use of a runic alphabet before this date, but they had compiled no substantial literature; the pagan culture was essentially oral. Eventually documents of the spoken dialects of Old English were recorded using a modification of the Latin and runic alphabets. A few letters differ from our modern alphabet: the "eth" (which looks something like the letter "d" with a cross line through the vertical) and "yogh" (printed as a g in modern editions) were borrowed from Irish Latin; the "thorn" (which looks something like the letter "P" but with the vertical extending above nearly as far as below) and "wynn" (printed as w in modern editions) were runes; the "ash" (the letters AE and ae merged into one symbol) is a Latin digraph. Thorn and eth are equivalent to"th" in modern English and because of technical limitations are printed as such in this text. In comparison to Modern English, Old English was written relatively "phonetically." When reading, each letter is individually sounded, even double consonants and those occuring in initial consonant clusters, such as hring, hlaford, and gnornian. Vowels, because of the origins of the spelling system, had a similar value to that in Latin or modern European languages.
Like German, Old English is a highly inflected language. Nouns exhibited agreement for number, gender, and case. There were four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative) and three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). Traces of dual number and of instrumental case existed in the personal pronouns and definite article respectively. Nouns possessed distinct sets of inflectional endings, by which they can be classified as strong or weak nouns. Adjectives could adopt these strong or weak endings. Verbs also underwent complex inflectional changes indicating tense.
Old English was a mature and rich language. The vocabulary available to describe the world of nature was copious and precise. The same is true of the vocabulary of war. The poet of The Battle of Brunanburh uses several different word combinations to describe battle and battle-field: saecce, campe, wiges, guthe, bill-gesliehtes, cumbol-gehnastes, gar-mittunge, waepen-gewrixles; and, camp-stede, folc-stede, wael-felda. Each is rich with its own nuances.
The information above is based largely on the introduction to The Elements of Old English, by Samuel Moore, Thomas A. Knott, and James R. Hulbert (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The George Wahr Publishing Co., 1977) and on The History of the English Language, by David Burnley (London: Longman, 1992).
The powerful accents of the Anglo-Saxon language supply a natural basis for a heavily accented verse form. The standard Anglo-Saxon line consists of four strongly stressed syllables arranged, together with any number of unstressed syllables, in two hemistichs (or half lines) of two stresses each. Stressed syllables frequently alliterate, and lines are normally not structured within stanzas; instead they follow one after another. The two hemistichs are separated by an invariable medial ceasura, or innate pause. "Rests" and the occasional omission of stressed syllables (especially in the second hemistich) provide a sort of syncopation or counterpoint which keeps the verse structure varied and expressive.
The information above is based largely on the entry for "English Prosody" in the Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke and O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974).
Seven Old English Poems, ed. John C. Pope. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981.
Burnley, David. The History of the English Language: A Source Book. New York: Longman, 1992.
Campbell, A. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
Crossley-Holland, Kevin. The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984.
Hall, J. R. C. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th edn. with a Supplement by Herbert Dean Meritt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1960.
Moore, Samuel, Thomas A. Knott, and James R. Hulbert. The Elements of Old English. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The George Wahr Publishing Co., 1977.
Oman, C. W. C. The Art of War in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1953.
Internet Resources:
Alfred the Great, Eadweard, and Aethelstan
Throughout the ninth century there were periodic Viking raids on the east coast of Britain. These intensified after 865, with a Danish king ruling East Anglia late in the century. The Vikings began to expand westward, encroaching upon the kingdom of the West Saxons, Wessex. After years of fighting, Alfred the Great (king from 871-99) was able to win a singular battle over the Viking king, Guthrum. Eadwearde, son of Alfred, ruled from 899-924, maintaining the superiority of the West Saxons over all others. It was Aethelstan, grandson of Alfred, who won the battle of Brunanburh, signaling the end of Viking raids for more than a century and also the beginning of Wessex domination over all of Britain.
The following exerpt, from the entry for 878 A.D. in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, describes Alfred the Great's defeat of Guthrum, the Viking king.
878 In this year in midwinter after twelfth night the enemy army came stealthily to Chippenham, and occupied the land of the West Saxons and settled there, and drove a great part of the people across the sea, and conquered most of the others; and the people submitted to them, except King Alfred. He journeyed in difficulties through the woods and fen-fastnesses with a small force.
And the same winter the brother of Ivar and Healfdene was in the kingdom of the West Saxons [in Devon], with 23 ships. And he was killed there and 840 men of his army with him. And there was captured the banner which they called "Raven."
And afterwards at Easter, King Alfred with a small force made a stronghold at Athelney, and he and the section of the people of Somerset which was nearest to it proceeded to fight from that stronghold against the enemy. Then in the seventh week after Easter he rode to "Egbert's stone" east of Selwood, and there came to meet him all the people of Somerset and of Wiltshire and of that part of Hampshire which was on this side of the sea, and they rejoiced to see him. And then after one night he went from that encampment to Iley, and after another night to Edington, and there fought against the whole army and put it to flight, and pursued it as far as the fortress, and stayed there a fortnight. And then the enemy gave him preliminary hostages and great oaths that they would leave his kingdom, and promised also that their king should receive baptism, and they kept their promise.
from The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology, by Kevin Crossley-Holland (Oxford: OUP, 1984).
The following exerpt, from the entry for 449 A.D. in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, describes the invitation to the Angles and Saxons by Vortigern, the legendary fifth-century king of Celtic Britain.
449 In this year Mauritius and Valentinus succeeded to the throne and ruled for seven years. And in their days Vortigern invited the English hither, and then came in three ships to Britain at the place Ebbs-fleet. King Vortigern gave them land in the south-east of this land on condition that they should fight against the Picts. They then fought against the Picts and had the victory wherever they came. They then sent to Angeln, bidding them send more help, and had them informed of the cowardice of the Britons and the excellence of the land. They then immediately sent hither a greater force to the help of the others. Those men came from three tribes of Germany; from the Old Saxons, from the Angles, from the Jutes. From the Jutes came the people of Kent and of the Isle of Wight, namely the tribe which now inhabits the Isle of Wight and that race in Wessex which is still called the race of the Jutes. From the Old Saxons came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. From Angeln, which ever after remained waste, between the Jutes and the Saxons, came the East Angles, the Middle Angles, the Mercians, and all the Northumbrians. Their leaders were two brothers, Hengest and Horsa, who were sons of Wihtgils. Wihtgils was the son of Witta, the son of Wecta, the son of Woden. From that Woden has descended all our royal family, and that of the Southumbrians also.
These pages were first created as a HyperCard stack by Tom Kinsella during the summer of 1994. They were retooled for the World Wide Web (and Stockton's text-only Lynx reader) during August, 1995. Please send comments or suggestions:
An Appropriate Anglo-Saxon Riddle to close this text:
An enemy ended my life, deprived me of my physical strength; then he dipped me in water and drew me out again, and put me in the sun where I soon shed all my hair. After that, the knife's sharp edge bit into me and all my blemishes were scraped away; fingers folded me and the bird's feather often moved over my brown surface, sprinkling meaningful marks; it swallowed more wood-dye (part of the stream) and again travelled over me leaving black tracks. Then a man bound me, he stretched skin over me and adorned me with gold; thus I am enriched by the wondrous work of smiths, wound about with shining metal. Now my clasp and my red dye and these glorious adornments bring fame far and wide to the Protector of Men, and not to the pains of hell. If only the sons of men would make use of me they would be the safer and the more victorious, their hearts would be bolder, their minds more at ease, their thoughts wiser; and they would have more friends, companions and kinsmen (courageous, honourable, trusty, kind) who would gladly increase their honour and prosperity, and heap benefits upon them, ever holding them most dear. Ask what I am called, of such use to men. My name is famous, of service to men and sacred in itself.