Dingesmere is a place known only from the Old English poem of the Battle of Brunanburh. The name is found in versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from the year 937.
Lines 53-56 of the poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (version A) read: Gewitan him þa Norðmen nægledcnearrum, dreorig daraða laf, on Dingesmere ofer deop wæter Difelin secan, eft Iraland, æwiscmode. (The B, C, D and W versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contain the variant spellings Dyngesmere, Dingesmere, Dynigesmere and Dinnesmere.)
These lines have been translated Chadwick, Nora Kershaw. 1922. Anglo-Saxon and Norse Poems. Cambridge University Press. as: Then the sorry remnant of the Norsemen, who had escaped the spears, set out upon the sea of Dinge in their nail-studded ships, making for Dublin over deep waters. Humiliated in spirit they returned to Ireland.
As Dingesmere does not correspond to any known place-name its meaning has caused considerable controversy. Apart from “sea of Dinge”, suggestions have included: “dingy sea”;Ellis, George. 1801. Specimens of the Early English Poets. 2nd ed. See also the Oxford English Dictionary, ``dingy´´ 2.a. “sea of noise”;Bosworth, Joseph. "An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online." Dynge. Ed. Thomas Northcote Toller and Others. Comp. Sean Christ and Ondřej Tichý. Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, 21 Mar. 2010. Accessed 27 Aug. 2018. and “wetland of the Thing (assembly)”.Cavill, Paul. ‘Revisiting Dingesmere’, Jnl English Place-Name Society, 30 (2003–04), 25–38.
One of the locations that has been cited is situated on the Dee Estuary at Heswall, Wirral. Another possible location is Lingham, on the Irish Sea coastline of Wirral at Moreton. In an article in Notes and Queries in 2022, Michael Deakin argues that such a wetland on the tenth-century Wirral coast of the Dee was unlikely.
It has also been proposedEngland, S.A., 2013, The Battle of Brunanburh, Archaeological Forum Journal: CBA Yorkshire 2, 35-48. that Dingesmere corresponds to Foulness Valley in the East Riding of Yorkshire, which in Anglo-Saxon times would have been a wetland, or mere, from the region of Holme-on-Spalding-Moor to the Humber estuary. The name ‘Foulness’ comes from the Old English fūle[n] ēa, meaning “dirty water”,hull-awe.org.uk/index.php/Foulness because iron deposits in the water produced a brown discolouration; i.e. a ‘dung-coloured wetland’, or, in Old English, ‘dinges-mere’ (Old English ding, dungClark Hall, J.R, 1960, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th ed., Cambridge University Press. + mere, wetland).
See also Battle of Ringmere
References