“Five Young Kings Put Asleep by the Sword-Stroke''
The Will of the West Mercians: A Nietzschean Perspective on Old English Stoicism
Fought in 937 A.D., the famed Battle of Brunanburh (Bromborough, Wirral) was a decisive clash between King Æthelstan of England and a coalition of Norse, Scottish, and Strathclyde-Brythonic forces. Preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and later rendered into verse for Victorian audiences by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, this rendition exquisitely captures the fighting as fierce and prolonged, with heavy losses on both sides; yet Æthelstan’s men ultimately secured a clear victory. The defeat broke the formidable opposing alliance of Picts, Britons, Scots and Irish Vikings (Norse-Gaels) and strengthened his control over England, making the battle a nation-defining moment in the formation of a unified English kingdom.
What elevates the verse account beyond a one-dimensional martial chronicle is its ontological undercurrent – that characteristically Anglo-Saxon awareness that even decisive victory exists within a larger context of impermanence, that the ravens and eagles gathering at the poem's edges are indifferent to which side they're feeding from. — [“Many a carcase they left to be carrion” / “…the horny-nibb'd raven…” / “…the white-tail'd eagle…” / “Gave to the garbaging war-hawk to gorge it” / “…that grey beast, the wolf of the weald” — canto XIV.] The carnage is enumerated without theatrical sentiment and the dead are accorded no special pleading (not unlike Jünger's Storm of Steel; a book which warrants discussion by itself). At least from a Midgardian perspective, history, the poem seems to understand, is not an abstractly ordained moral exercise but an everlasting pendulum of vitalistic creation and decay in the most it-is-what-it-is Pagan of sensibilities.
What the poem understands, and what a purely martial reading tends to obscure, is that the force Æthelstan deploys at Brunanburh is the Anglo-Saxon comitatus at its most fully realised. This is the voluntary bond of lord and retainer, manifested through mutual honour, gift-giving, and the shared obligation of martial kin loyalty; collectivised across multiple kingdoms into a single, concentrated expression of will. — [“Westseaxe forð” = “We the West-Saxons…” / “…long as the daylight lasted…” / “…in companies troubled the track of the host that we hated.” — canto V.] The West Saxons fight as West Saxons. The Mercians fight as Mercians. But the poem's metaphorical resonance lies in its intuition that these distinct loyalties do not dissolve into one another so much as they intensify through one another. Each man's personal honour, though differentiated and noble in himself, is bound up with the honour of the whole, for to fight in brother-bonding unison is to affirm both the Self and the Lord simultaneously. To retreat is to dissolve both. This is not the conscript obligation of later feudalism nor the proclivitous proxy-warring of modern military mercantilism but something primordial and thus more philosophically clear and meticulous, where conflict and heroism were sacred and transcendent, not avaricious and expansionist for its own sake.
Which is precisely where a Nietzschean interpretation becomes relevant. The Battle of Brunanburh is, in the most literal sense available to the historical record, a poetical expression of the will to power – not in the crude, since-debased sense of a sort of Bronze-Age-Pervert-style domination, but in Nietzsche's more metaphysically exact meaning: the fundamental drive towards the overcoming of resistance, the imposition of form upon chaos, and the transformation of raw struggle into something that coheres. Æthelstan does not merely win a battle against the pesky Vikings and plucky Picts. He wills a nation into existence by virtue of spearheading the sheer, sustained application of collective force against the entropic pressure of fragmentation – and the poem, to its considerable credit (as Tennyson's excellent rendering makes vividly apparent), seems to grasp this instinctively, celebrating not the King's triumph alone but the act of overcoming itself.
There is something in the verse that also anticipates what Nietzsche would later identify as the distinction between master and slave morality. The defeated (but no less renownedly formidable) coalition of Celtic and Scandinavian warriors retreating, diminished, to their respective Western and Northern peripheries while Æthelstan's men stand at the centre of a newly coherent world they have made through will and bloodshed and the refusal to yield upon their possessed Angla-lond. The poem does not moralise about this, nor, perhaps expectedly, does Tennyson simmer down the implied then-nationalistic pride for his intended audience of global empire-boasting Britons in the late 19th century. It simply observes it, with the level, unsentimental gaze of a primordial warrior tradition that understood, long before modern interpreters put names to it, that existence rewards those who impose meaning upon it rather than waiting for meaning to manifest.
What the Brunanburh poet shares with the Stoic tradition—not derivatively, but by a kind of parallel conceptual convergence—is the insistence that the correct response to impermanence is not lamentation but lucid acceptance married to maximal action in the present moment. Like my interpretation of the wanderer poet (see here), Aurelius and the anonymous Anglo-Saxon bard would have recognised one another across the linguistic gulf, for both understood that the cosmos neither rewards nor punishes, that the wolves and ravens are invariably indifferent, and that this indifference is not a cause for nihilistic despair but the very condition that makes genuine courage – as opposed to mere optimism – intelligible at all. The latent Stoic amor fati, Nietzsche's later radicalisation of it, and the Germanic Wyrd-fate are by no means identical concepts, but they do share a structural foundation in that the man who has genuinely internalised the fragility of all outcomes is paradoxically more capable of decisive, unencumbered action than one who fights under the comfortable pretence of guaranteed meaning beyond a conflict of interests. Put simply, Æthelstan's men do not fight under the belief that victory is assured via a macrocosm of an idealised metaphysical morality. They fight because they are West Saxons, because this is the field on which pure Being is actualised, and because the alternative results in nothing but dissolution. That is, from a philosophically engaged standpoint, quite enough to parse from The Battle of Brunanburh as a standalone warrior epic. Thus, everything else is speculative commentary; the field alone serves as confirmation.
Perhaps, then, the Brunanburh verse represents this hyper-pagan and distinctly Indo-European duality of Being and Becoming like no other of its time, or even before, save for Beowulf and the Iliad. Links and details are provided below.
The Battle of Brunanburh
I.
1 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 lindenwood,
Hack’d the battleshield,
Sons of Edward with hammer’d brands.
II.
Theirs was a greatness
Got from their Grandsires—
Theirs that so often in
Strife with their enemies
Struck for their hoards and their hearths and their homes.
III.
Bow’d the spoiler,
Bent the Scotsman,
Fell the shipcrews
Doom’d to the death.
All the field with blood of the fighters
Flow’d, from when first the great
Sun-star of morningtide,
Lamp of the Lord God
Lord everlasting,
Glode over earth till the glorious creature
Sank to his setting.
IV.
There lay many a man
Marr’d by the javelin,
Men of the Northland
Shot over shield.
There was the Scotsman
Weary of war.
V.
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.
VI.
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.
VII.
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.
VIII.
Then the Norse leader.
Dire was his need of it,
Few were his following,
Fled to his warship
Fleeted his vessel to sea with the king in it.
Saving his life on the fallow flood.
IX.
Also the crafty one,
Constantinus,
Crept to his North again,
Hoar-headed hero!
X.
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!
XI.
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.
XII.
Then with their nail’d prows
Parted the Norsemen, a
Blood-redden’d relic of
Javelins over
The jarring breaker, the deep-sea billow,
Shaping their way toward Dyflen [Dublin] again,
Shamed in their souls.
XIII.
Also the brethren,
King and Atheling,
Each in his glory,
Went to his own in his own West-Saxonland,
Glad of the war.
XIV.
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 grey beast, the wolf of the weald.
XV.
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.
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Music track: Hegemonikon
Essay and video narration by Jack Dolan