Cnut ruled three kingdoms, yet nobody knows who his mother was
Cnut the Great became king of England in 1016, of Denmark in 1018 and of Norway in 1028, a realm historians call the North Sea Empire. Yet his birth date is a guess somewhere between about 980 and 1000, and the medieval sources cannot agree on who his mother was.
His father was Swein Forkbeard and his grandfather Harald Bluetooth, one of the first Scandinavian kings to accept Christianity. His mother is murkier. Snorri Sturluson's sagas call her Gunhild, daughter of a Wendish king on the southern Baltic; a chronicle written for Queen Emma and the German bishop Thietmar point instead to a daughter of Mieszko I of Poland; and Adam of Bremen confuses her with a former queen of Sweden, an identification most historians reject. Many scholars now treat her as semi-legendary, perhaps a blend of several Baltic marriage alliances. The Polish link remains only a hypothesis.
His birth year depends on reading a skald's poem saying he was of no great age at his first war. If that meant his father's attack on Norwich in 1003 and 1004, he was born near 990 or even 980; if it meant the conquest of 1013 and 1014, nearer 1000. A later Icelandic saga describes him as unusually tall, strong and handsome, apart from a thin, high, rather hooked nose.
Firm history begins in 1013, when Swein conquered England and left Cnut guarding the fleet at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. Swein died on 3 February 1014, the English recalled King Æthelred from Normandy, and Cnut retreated to Denmark. He returned in 1015 with perhaps 10,000 men in 200 longships, fighting Edmund Ironside for fourteen months before winning the crown.
Once in power, he worked to bind Danes and English together through shared wealth and custom. After a victory over Norway and Sweden in 1026 he attended an emperor's coronation in Rome and styled himself king of England, Denmark, the Norwegians and some of the Swedes. In the view of the historian Norman Cantor, no Anglo-Saxon ruler governed more effectively. He died on 12 November 1035, though popular memory mostly recalls him through the legend of the king and the tide.
Source: Cnut
