How great was Cnut the Great?

 

A 13th-century illustration of Cnut in combat with Edmund Ironside

We hear a lot about the growth of scholarly publishing but even so, it’s not every day that a new book is published about Cnut the Great. It seemed like a good opportunity to find out if Cnut was a candidate for greatness. After all, he successfully invaded England less than a hundred years before William the Conqueror, but somehow the date of his invasion (1013) is not known by everyone in the way that 1066 is. 

This book (by Tim Bolton, appearing in the long-lasting series “Yale English Monarchs”) got good reviews, but the experience of reading it, for this non-specialist reader, was decidedly mixed. It would have been so easy to make the book more accessible.

·       The author must assume we know the main facts already, but I’m afraid I did not. Why not add a chronology of major events? I kept having to check the Wikipedia entry for Cnut to establish where we were.

·       The cover illustration, although it may be referring to Cnut, dates from two hundred years after Cnut’s time. We are quite certain that Cnut did not wear clothes like that. Could an illustration not have been found that was contemporaneous with Cnut?

·       Speaking of illustrations, you would have a hard time trying to link the photos with the main text. There are eight pages of black and white photos, but it seems beyond Yale University Press to indicate in the text where the images might be. For example, a pencase lid was found in a 1961. “Reproductions of both its upper and lower faces are given here in this volume”, states a footnote on page 142. Why so coy? It is plate 4. Here we are in 2021, and book publishing hasn’t yet reached the point where the text can refer to the illustrations with any certainty.

Much, perhaps most of the book is conjecture. This is unavoidable when writing the life of someone for whom so few sources remain. But it leads to a lot of hypothetical assertion.  As an example of “history as it could have been”, how about:

Harald’s death must have had a profound effect on Cnut. In England in 1018 he cannot have expected that Harald would be dead within a few months, and indeed as his brother must have been in his twenties or very early thirties, it was unlikely. The emotional toll may have been great. The brothers seem to have been close. [p131]

As if that isn’t uncertain enough already, a footnote adds: “No source records Harald’s age, but he is unlikely to have been many years older than Cnut, who at this stage must have been in his twenties.”

 The book is an uneasy mix of an academic article, disputing with other scholars, and a general introduction. For a general work of history, I would not include the names of any of the recent scholars in the body of the text. If the author wants to cite the attribution, it can be done in the footnotes. Discussions with other scholars are for academics to argue in journals, not for a biography of this kind.

·       The index is of proper names only, and pretty selective at that: there is no reference to “English Channel”, or “North Sea”, or “Kattegat”. Yet there is an entry for London. The index appears to suffer from an unconscious English bias. There is no entry for Aarhus or Fyrkat, but there is an entry for Abingdon Abbey. Who makes these decisions?

·       In contrast, the footnotes frequently contain material that is highly relevant for the main argument. These should be promoted.

·       There are just two not very adequate maps, one of Denmark, one of routes from Northern Europe to Rome. No map of England, or maps of the places mentioned in the text.

·       There is a fascinating introduction, but this combines a real overview (very helpful) and a detailed description of sources (very intricate, valuable, but making little sense to the general reader until the relevant source is mentioned in the text)

Is the book worth reading? Absolutely! It makes effective use of whatever sources it can find, including archaeology, coins, and poetry. Most impressive, to my mind, is the way it makes a determined effort not to interpret the life of Cnut, a Dane, into the standard narrative of English history, making so many unstated assumptions about the national heritage. Because the English sources are so much more substantial than the Scandinavian records, Cnut tends to be seen through English eyes, but he seems to have been equally at home in England or in Denmark. His life is a fascinating example of monarchy in the days before the nation-state became implanted on everyone’s brains. Finally, mercifully, there is no mention (at least so far in my reading) of the one “fact” that everyone knows about Cnut: his trying to stem the tide.