Translation and adaptation in Tennyson's Battle of Brunanburh.

Dost thou think Alexander look'd o' this fashion i' the earth?

Hamlet, 5.1.217

Because of the special (some would say insurmountable) difficulties posed by the genre, literary translations commonly fail or succeed with critics based on their local faults or merits. (1) The analytical reader who is conversant with a translation's original will fret over the particular accuracy of this or that word, phrase, or passage in a new version, rather than responding to the effectiveness of the translation as a whole. (2)

Alfred Tennyson's version of the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon Battle of Brunanburh is in general an interesting exception to this rule, praised in its own day and in ours as a faithful, sensitive, even eloquent recreation of its source. The original Old English poem, which appears in four manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as an entry for the year 937, (3) recalls the successful defense of England by allied West Saxon and Mercian forces against the Scots, who betrayed sworn allegiance to the Saxon king, Athelstan, by joining with Irish Danes to invade an area possibly near Northumberland. (4) Tennyson explains the historical background briefly in a headnote to his translation: "Constantinus, King of the Scots, after having sworn allegiance to Athelstan, allied himself with the Danes of Ireland under Anlaf, and invading England, was defeated by Athelstan and his brother Edmund with great slaughter at Brunanburh in the year 937." (5) Tennyson apparently became interested in these historical events and in translating The Battle of Brunanburh as a result of his son, Hallam's, work on the Old English text in the 1870's. He wrote his own version sometime after Hallam's "The Song of Brunanburh" appeared in 1876, and published it in 1880 in his late collection, Ballads and Other Poems. (6) Since its publication, Brunanburh has been widely admired and anthologized. Indeed, its most enthusiastic twentieth-century advocate, Christopher Ricks, praises it as "probably the best verse-translation of any Anglo-Saxon poetry." (7)

One phrase alone in the poem has bedeviled readers, however, persisting as a blot on its reputation and a strange fetish in Brunanburh criticism: Tennyson's description of the slain son of the retreating Scottish king, Constantinus (Causantin mac Aeda II), as "Mangled to morsels" (74). In what follows I argue, against the prevalent censorious view of the phrase, for its immediate verbal aptness to Brunanburh as a translation, and then propose a new source for Tennyson's words. I also maintain that the phrase epitomizes a key theme of Brunanburh and connects this poem thematically with Tennyson's sustained reflections about the complex nature of heroism, in Ballads and Other Poems and elsewhere.

All of this might seem like a heavy load of interpretation to hang on a slender textual peg. My approach, however, is a direct answer to readings of Brunanburh that I feel neglect connections between Tennyson's choice of phrase and his comprehensive intentions in the poem. These are not only or even primarily concerned with close fidelity to the poem's Old English original, although Tennyson achieves a high level of such accuracy in Brunanburh, but with the multiple literary purposes an updated version of the Anglo-Saxon account of an important and bloody national victory might serve. Analysis of the status of the phrase "Mangled to morsels" in relation to the poem's structure and to the new source I propose for the words both, in my view, clarify Tennyson's larger purposes in Brunanburh.

"Mangled to morsels" is the disturbing penultimate line of a long passage from Brunanburh's central section (OE, 37a-44a) describing the English rout of the Scots--the decimation of Constantinus's men and the extreme physical violence done to his unnamed son, who lies dead and abandoned on the field. Following the Old English original, Tennyson's passage moves, almost cinematically, from a tight focus on the individual warrior, King Constantinus, to a panoramic view of the general slaughter, and then back to a single focused image again, this time of the corpse of Constantinus's son: