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Home , Cnut the Great

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The reign of marks a pivotal point in the history of both and , yet his route to power and the development of his authority over the countries he ruled remains under-appreciated and rarely studied. His career was relatively short, from commanding armies in England under his father in 1013 to his early death on 12 November 1035. Yet, in the intervening twenty-two years, he claimed and held the thrones of England, and , all the while accumulating power, infl uence, skill and wealth. English language scholars have commented on some aspects of this remarkable ruler, Freeman initially in 1877, and subsequently Stenton in 1943, as part of their respective general studies of Anglo-Saxon England, but it was Larson who made the fi rst comprehensive studies of Cnut’s reign in 1910 and 1912, producing assessments of his actions in England and Scandinavia which have set the scene for almost all comment in the following century.1 Larson’s studies are now often some- what dated, and in recent decades scholars have returned to the study of Cnut, with Lawson’s study of his rule which was published in 1993 and the collection of articles discussing diverse aspects of his rule which was published in 1994.2 While these publications have brought debate about Cnut up to date, and opened many new avenues of research, they have fought shy of the Scandinavian sources of evidence. Lawson expressly avoided these sources, stating in the preface to his work, that he had “concentrated largely on the English aspects of Cnut’s reign”, because “the English material has proved a richer fi eld, as well as being more central to my own interests”.3 The collection of articles published in 1994 included more Scandinavian material, but many aspects were

1 Freeman, NC, i, 380–479 and Stenton, A-SE, 386–419; L. M. Larson, “The Politi- cal Policies of Cnut as of England”, American Historical Review 15 (1909–10), and the same author’s Canute the Great 995–1035, and the Rise of Danish Imperialism During the (: Putnum, 1912). 2 Lawson, Cnut, and Rumble, Reign of Cnut. 3 Lawson, Cnut, x. Indeed, his work includes only minimal comment on Cnut’s actions in Scandinavia in a chapter entitled ‘Cnut, England and Northern Europe, 1017–35’, where only eleven pages out of a possible thirty-fi ve (pp. 89–91 and 93–102 out of 81–116) contained such comment. 2 general introduction left uncovered.4 In particular, as Jesch has noted in a review of this work, it almost entirely avoided discussion of the diffi cult Scandinavian narrative sources. As she notes, the only contributor to discuss these in any detail was Keynes, paradoxically in his contribution on the English diplomatic evidence.5 The poor state of the historical evidence appears to have inhibited modern Scandinavian historical study of Cnut’s hegemony. After Steen- strup published his wide-ranging study of the Viking Age in 1878 there have been no large-scale studies of Cnut in a modern Scandinavian language, and scholars seem to have confi ned themselves to debating individual aspects of his reign.6 The problem is simple: the contempo- rary native sources which do inspire confi dence (such as ) are few, commonly fragmentary, and offer little concrete information. Native narrative sources survive from the mid twelfth century onwards for Denmark, but are not numerous, and like the notoriously unreli- able material often require a great deal of work to establish their veracity. The only supposedly clear light through this dark period has been that of the handful of foreign sources which comment on events in Scandinavia. Within these Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontifi cum holds a commanding position, but its record is often the only coordinated witness to events, and worryingly, it is an openly partisan account. Thus, for the early eleventh century, history seems to have slowly become the ‘poor cousin’ of the other disciplines in Danish medieval studies, such as archaeology and numismatics, whose sources of evidence are more plentiful and reliable; and as technical develop- ments throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries increased the reliability of the fi ndings of the latter two disciplines, awareness of the

4 There are discussions there of Cnut’s rule in Denmark (N. , “Cnut’s Danish Kingdom”, in Rumble, Reign of Cnut, 27–42); his coinage there, as well as in England (K. Jonsson, “The Coinage of Cnut”, ibid., 193–230); the verse composed for him by his Scandinavian court-poets (R. Frank, “King Cnut in the Verse of his ”, 106–24); and a general discussion of his Scandinavian hegemony with an appendix discussing some of the runic material (P. Sawyer, “Cnut’s Scandinavian Empire”, 10–22, with an appendix by . Sawyer, “Appendix: the Evidence of Scandinavian Runic Inscriptions”, 23–6). 5 J. Jesch, in her review of the book for Saga Book 24 (1996): 273–4. 6 J. C. H. R. Steenstrup, Normannerne (Copenhagen, 1876–82) 3: 290–412; for one such debate see O. Moberg, “The Battle of Helgeå”, Scandinavian Journal of History 14 (1989) and B. Gräslund, “ den Store och Sveariket: Slaget vid Helgeå i ny Belysning”, Scandia, Tidskrift för Historisk Forskning 52 (1986), regarding the details of the battle of Helgeå.