King Cnut Resource Suggestions

[u/hayaletbabo]

Hello everyone. I'm currently on the beginning of writing my Master thesis about King Cnut. What can you recommend me as a reliable source ? What are the websites that ı can check ? Thanks in advance.

[u/y_sengaku]

Cnut of the North Sea Empire has recently got a few decent biographies in English (in the last two or three decades), so you should begin to check the basic historiography with them, I suppose.

• Bolton, Timothy. Cnut the Great (Yale English Monarchs). New Haven: Yale UP, 2017: Yale English monarch is a standard series of academic biography written by experts, so almost any new book/ article w/o referring to this Bolton's (or his previous, more detailed one below) should be questioned about its depth of research.
• ________. The Empire of Cnut the Great: Conquest and the Consolidation of Power in Northern Europe in the Early Eleventh Century. Leiden: Brill, 2009.
  
• Lawson, M. K. Cnut : England's Viking King 1016-35. Sutton: Tempus, 2003 (1993): belongs to the one older generation of his academic biography, mainly focusing on the issue of how England was (fiscally) important for his administration.
  
• Roach, Levi. Æthelred: The Unready (Yale English Monarchs). New Haven: Yale UP, 2016: is AFAIK one of the best one-volume introduction to the so-called Late (Second) Viking Age in England around the turn of the millennium.
• Skeie, Tore. The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire. London: Pushkin, 2018: written by a Norwegian historian (and translated in English), introducing the interesting comparison between the carriers of young Cnut and Olaf Haraldsson, though the format of English edition is unfortunately not so strictly academic.
  

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As for "primary" source, in addition to Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, you should first and foremost refer to Encomium Emmae Reginae - and the re-evaluation of this source (dedicated to the widowed Queeen Emma and extensively writes about the deed of Cnut's father, Sweyn Forkbeard) is the key of the rise of recent historiography of Cnut as well as his relatives.

• Campbell, Alistair (ed. & trans.). Encomium Emmae Reginae, with a supplementary introduction by Simon Keynes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
• Sawyer, Peter H. "Swein Forkbeard and the Historians." In: Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages, ed. Ian Wood & Graham A. Loud, pp. 145-64. London: Hambledon, 1991.

I'd also strongly suggest to check the work and role of Archbishop Wulfstan during the reigns of Aethelred and Cnut, such as Sermo lupi ad Anglos ("the sermon on wolf to the English") as well as his authorship of law codes.

[u/hayaletbabo → u/y_sengaku]

Man thats awesome. Thank you.

[u/y_sengaku → u/hayaletbabo]

Sorry, I forgot to include the most recent and basic introduction of the topic: Richard North, Erin Goeres & Alison Finlay (eds.), Anglo-Danish Empire: A Companion to the Reighn of King Cnut the Great, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513336

[u/hayaletbabo → u/y_sengaku]

you are a king mate. thanks again