The first modern translation of Anglo-Saxon poetry with much claim to readability and poetic merit was Alfred Lord Tennyson's version of the Battle of Brunanburh, a poem from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 937, celebrating a victory by West Saxons and Mercians over an alliance of Vikings from Dublin, Danes from the kingdom of York, Welshmen and Scots. Tennyson's translation was written probably in 1876 and was first published in 1880 in a volume called Ballads and Other Poems.

With its publication, familiarity on the part of general readers with Old English poetry must have expanded suddenly by a quantum leap. Tennyson was by then the famous Poet Laureate whose splendidly bewhiskered caricature in Punch was assumed to be recognizable without even needing an identifying label attached, a friend of Gladstone and of members of the royal family. His translation drew widespread attention for the first time to a body of poetry that up until then had scarcely been known except to a few scholars and philologists, whose translations, when they provided any, were pragmatic and likely to seem uncouth and repellent to the average reader.

Tennyson's version, based chiefly on a prose translation provided by his son Hallam, was praised at the time in reviews of the volume that contained it, and has been often praised since.