Abstract
This article reconsiders the emotional tone of The Battle of Brunanburh, which has been seen alternatively as a piece of cold, hard triumphalism or as conveying a subtle sympathy towards the defeated enemies, especially Constantine. I begin by surveying all possible explicit references to emotion in the poem, identifying a key sequence at lines 37–52 which depicts a counterfactual scene of Constantine and Anlaf boasting and exulting over the victory they did not achieve. This scene of emotional performance raises questions about how the poem itself works as an emotional performance. I suggest it functions quite differently depending on whether we see it as a praise-poem for Athelstan delivered at his court in the aftermath of the battle or—which is perhaps more probable—as composed some years later for inclusion in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In the latter case, the poem conveys undercurrents of anxiety over victory and the ability to hold on to territory and glory. Considering how texts work as emotional performances offers a way, fraught with uncertainty yet I believe worthwhile, to approach not simply the emotion concepts but the emotional experiences of the past.
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Notes
Some might question “emotion” as an analytical category, since the term has no precise equivalent in Old English or medieval Latin. For discussion of the theoretical issues, see Jorgensen (2015, pp. 3–8).
There are other possibilities for the composition context, but these are the dominant hypotheses. See Walker (1992), for an alternative view.
All references to Brunanburh and to other Old English poems are to the appropriate volumes of Krapp and Dobbie (1931–1953). Translations are my own.
Werig is an understatement for “dead”, and sæd clearly does not yet have the sense of NE “sad” but rather means “full-up, sated”, but especially in combination these terms convey that the spirit of the enemy quails and turns away from war—the Norsemen and Scots are “fed up”, have “had a belly-full”. See Lewis (1967, p. 77). This reading gains force in light of Lockett’s work on the hydraulic conception of emotion prevalent in Anglo-Saxon literature and the sense that painful emotion produces a sense of internal pressure and fullness: sorrow, anger and the like well up and swell around the heart (Lockett 2011).
Fry (1981, pp. 65–66), reads this phrase as part of a literal description of how the boat is bounced loose from the sand to launch it, but still sees the passage as depicting “Anlaf’s frantic haste” and his “disorganized flight” (p. 65).
For the complex implications of litotes, see Graham (2015) (on this passage, pp. 84–85 and 87–88).
Records for these charters and references to secondary literature assessing their authenticity can be found online in the Electronic Sawyer website, www.esawyer.org.uk [consulted 13/8/15].
See Lawlor (1973, pp. 61–64), on the Brunanburh-poet’s use of antithesis, including the construction of symmetrical two-against-two forces in the battle.
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Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge the opportunity to present this paper first at a workshop on The Writing and Representation of War in Medieval Europe sponsored by the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen, and second at the Medieval Cultures Seminar at Queen’s University, Belfast. I wish to thank Susan Foran and Craig Taylor for inviting me to speak in Bergen, Else Mundal for being the respondent there, Marilina Cesario and Sinead O’Sullivan for inviting me to Queen’s, and all who commented on it on both occasions, especially Ivan Herbison.
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Jorgensen, A. Reading Emotion in The Battle of Brunanburh . Neophilologus 100, 663–676 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-016-9479-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-016-9479-3