390 Mediaevistik 31 . 2018 victory over Scots and Dublin Vikings at mended. It is about real issues in a com- Brunanburh in 937 as “almost certain- plex and dramatic period where lack of ly fought in the Wirral” (p. 189) in mod- written records brings archaeology to the ern Merseyside. But he is quite wrong. It fore. One would like more volumes on was surely won and lost near Durham, at the same lines. A combination of papers Lanchester, where there is a Roman fort dedicated to a single subject, and careful or burh by the River Browney or Brune. attention within those papers to primary Hence Brunanburh. See Eilert Ekwall, material, is a program for progress. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Andrew Breeze.University of Navarre. Place-Names, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon
[email protected] Press, 1960), pp. 70, 285. On the same page he is also mistaken in describing Edgar at Chester in 973 as staging a “submissive pageant of his being rowed on the river” Venantius Fortunatus, Poems, edited with Viking and Celtic rulers at the oars. and translated by Michael Roberts. Hines misses the point. Edgar’s conference Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 46. was not about imperial power, but interna- Cambridge, MA: Harvard University tional co-operation against aggressors. It Press, 2017, pp. 944. was even attended by two Breton counts, It doesn’t pay to sing about the poor! Lit- on whom one may dismiss the doubts ex- erary patronage in the Middle Ages is as pressed in T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wales old as poetry itself.