Cnut the Great (The English Monarchs Series) Paperback – March 12, 2019

The author provides plenty of context about the societies Canute lived, ruled and interacted with.

Given the limitations of sources and the surprising (to me) brevity of the reign, the author has written a very informative history. I was amazed at the original source material the author mastered, much of it fragmentary, to squeeze out his account.

The author is very knowledgeable. The book is well laid out, very readable, and very informative.

This is the latest and eagerly awaited title in Yale's prestigious English Monarchs series. This book centres upon the Danish king, Cnut whose coronation took place exactly 1000 years ago in 1017. Cnut was schooled in the traditional viking mould of Scandanivian monarchs. He was a fearless warrior and possessed a formidable intelligence that went beyond the traditional viking qualities of ravage , pillage and rape! Cnut had a far more subtle and adroit personality then the normal viking persona. He had been trained by his legendary and notorious father, Sweyn Forkbeard in the art of war and kingship and its a lesson Cnut put to good effect after his successful conquest of the English throne in 1016. His father's quest for the English throne ended in failure in 1013. Yet, England remained bitterly divided under the weak rule of its ageing king Aethelred II. After the disputed sucession of Edmund Ironside, the vikings invaded and Cnut seized his chance and won the English throne after Edmund Ironside had been killed at the battle of Ashdown. Cnut became king in turbulent times and yet his rule provided England with the firm and stable government it had lacked for so many decades. Eventually, the English forgot his viking ancestry and accepted him as their own master and ruler. Like his noble predecessor Alfred, Cnut was a law-giver and created a court of wordly sophistication unheard of in the eleventh century.England prospered under Cnut's wise and strong leadership until his sudden and unexpected death in 1035 restored England to anarchy and chaos. This remarkable king has long been neglected and overlooked by historians. This professor Timothy Bolton puts right in this exhaustive and comprehensive biography that will surely remain the standard work for generations. It is a tremendous and surprisingly readable book on a truly incredible monarch. I urge you to go and reserve your copy from Amazon without delay!

What an oddity of a book, which I came to love by the end! Because of the scarcity of source materials, presumably, much of the book includes detailed discussion of source elements and variants, of the kind you'd normally see in footnotes/endnotes. Here, the main body of the work weaves between these, plus tetchy asides and half-concealed insults. (So it's like reading Nabokov's Pale Fire!). The essential story is so so interesting though, with all the unexpected threads linking the young English state to northern European people and places.

There is no doubting the erudition that has gone into this book. One of the problems for any biographer of Cnut is the limitations of sources, which leave large gaps in our knowledge. The book is padded out with lengthy digressions, some giving background and others relating to major figures who interacted with Cnut. As a result it lacks sufficient focus on Cnut himself. Even with the problems with sources, there is more that can be said about him and the way he ruled his realms.

I am 3/4 of the way through and am liking it very much. The introduction is fairly academic, detailing the sources and methods for studying the rein. It is the most complicated part, and important for understanding the more biographical chapters which follow. There is some discussion of the academic debates and disagreements about interpretation. For someone who did not even know the king of 'England and Denmark, Norway and parts of Sweden' were at one time all the same person, it has been a revelation.

A decent series of books if you are looking a bit more detail about individual monarchs.