Two of the seven extant versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (see p. 61) 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 ofWessex 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 later annals and histories, and in a much later Norse saga, the location of Brunanburh is not known for certain. It must have been quite near the English west coast, however, at some point between Chester and the Scottish border, and a plausible case has been made for Bromborough in the Wirral, Cheshire, in which case the ‘Dingesmere’ mentioned in the poem is likely to be the River Dee.