Timothy Bolton
That element of research on Cnut the Great which still seems to raise the greatest number of eyebrows is the use of late North Scandinavian narrative sources for parts of the history of Scandinavia during the reign of Cnut. These sources are: the synoptic Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium of Theodoricus monachus (ca. 1177–1178 and certainly before 1188) and its Old Norse vernacular sister text Ágrip af Nóregskonungasǫgum (probably soon after 1180); the later Norwegian and Icelandic sagas and saga-compilations: Fagrskinna, Morkinskinna (both ca. 1220), the so-called Oldest saga of St. Óláfr (ca. 1200), and its part-descendant, the Legendary Saga of St. Óláfr (early thirteenth century), as well as the surviving fragments of Styrmir Kárason’s Lífssaga (probably from the early decades of the thirteenth century) and lastly Heimskringla (ca. 1230) and Knýtlinga saga (probably 1250s). Other more contemporary sources that shed light on these do exist for Cnut’s reign, including his letter of 1027 and fragments of skaldic verse, but these are brief and few. The study of Cnut both as an English and a Scandinavian ruler, together with the totality of his dominions, forces us to consider as many of the Scandinavian sources of evidence as possible. An examination of how historians have engaged with, or avoided, late Scandinavian narratives in the last one and half centuries, reveals much, not only about the changing fortunes of these texts in that time, but also about some of the problems that followed the rejection of these sources or attempts to continue to work with them. It is the uses and abuses of this material by modern historians that I shall attempt to set out here, followed by some observations about how and where we might appropriately use this material in future.1 In keeping with the theme of this book, I shall restrict myself to studies relevant to Cnut.
The Source-Critical Approach: its Arrival and Effects on the Uses of these Late Scandinavian Narratives
In a short span of years following 1910, there was a sea-change in Scandinavian historiography and its critical approach to late narrative sources. This was initiated by two Swedes – the brothers and medieval historians Lauritz and Curt Weibull – closely followed by the Norwegian Halvdan Koht. Such events are well known in Scandinavian circles, but perhaps need a little rehearsing for an English readership.2 The earliest indications of the new source-critical approach by one of these authors may be found in two articles by Lauritz Weibull printed side-by-side in Historisk tidskrift för Skåneland (Historical Journal for Skåne) in 1910.3 The same author then set out his new approach in more systematic detail in 1911 with his Kritiska undersökningar i Nordens historia omkring år 1000 (Critical Studies in Nordic History around the year 1000). This was closely followed in 1913–1914 by Halvdan Koht’s “Sagaernes opfatning av vor gamle historie” (The Sagas’ Perception of Our Old History), which he initially gave as an address to the Norske Historiske Forening (Norwegian Historical Association) on November 24, 1913 and then published in the following year. In 1915 Lauritz Weibull’s brother Curt joined the charge, with his Saxo: Kritiska undersökningar i Danmarks historia från Sven Estridsens död till Knut VI (Critical Studies on the History of Denmark from the Death of Sven Estrithsson to Knut IV). Only one of these lengthy studies even mentioned Cnut the Great, but they were to have a great influence on his historiography in the years to come.4 Their important legacy in our subject was to bring vigorous source criticism into this region of medieval history. Primarily, they exposed the central problem in using late-twelfth- and thirteenth-century narratives for the study of the late Viking Age. In Cnut’s case, such sources were separated by a century or so from the events they describe, and were thus suspect in their record of events and especially so in their interpretations of those events.5 This consideration naturally leads to another: the question of where writers in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries could have turned for the basis of their narratives, and to what extent they used pure invention to fill the gaps in such narratives.6
Notwithstanding these developments, earlier doubts about the veracity of such sources had appeared throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the years leading up to 1910–1911. The Danish historian Kristian Erslev, while never mentioning the eleventh century, let alone Cnut, published writings through the 1880s which contained the beginnings of a critical approach to medieval sources.7 These works led to his “Erik Plovpennings Strid med Abel. Studier over ægte og uægte Kilder til Danmarks Historie” (Erik Plovpenning’s Fight with Abel: Studies of Genuine and Illegitimate Sources of Danish History) in 1890, an essay which contained a definitive statement about the value of primary sources over later materials.8 Only a few years before, in 1877, the English historian E. A. Freeman had recorded doubts about the late Scandinavian sources.9 Of Cnut’s northern wars, Freeman stated that “the Norwegian sagas and the rhetorical Latin of the Danish historian help us to abundance of detail, if only we could accept them as authentic.” Attached to these words is a footnote to which he relegated a statement on a work he read through the 1844 translation of Samuel Laing, namely Heimskringla: “I use it freely, though with caution, for Northern affairs.”10 His relief is palpable, when, incidentally quite at odds with my own approach, he concludes: “Happily, to unravel the difficulties and contradictions of their various statements is no part of the business of an English historian.” A similarly dawning awareness of source problems appeared in King Cnut’s first biography, which was written by Laurence M. Larson, a Norwegian-born émigré to America. Larson notes that Knýtlinga saga’s description of Cnut’s outward appearance and abilities was “[i]dealistic … [due to being] composed two centuries or more after his time” and that the speeches in these accounts “are doubtless the historian’s own.”11 Probably due to these doubts, Larson was quick to cite skaldic verse, which he called “fragments of contemporary verse” and “court poetry of the scalds,” as supporting evidence in preference to saga-material – this was decades before Finnur Jónsson collected and edited the skaldic corpus.12
This source-critical approach was very necessary to the scholarship, from which it cleared out much dead wood. Larson’s biography is a case in point. Despite the statements of doubt noted above, his use of such material is naive and clearly of the period before the revelations of the Weibull brothers and Koht.13 Larson uses Heimskringla for the marriage of Sveinn Forkbeard without any discussion of the problems of this source;14 Knýtlinga saga he uses for the supposed late arrival of Eírikr Hákonarson and his forces in 1015;15 Heimskringla, again, for the erroneous embassy between Cnut and St. Óláfr in the mid-1020s, and for the pact between Magnús “the Good” and Harthacnut;16 Fagrskinna, for Cnut’s meeting with Emperor Conrad II outside of Rome;17 and he was completely taken in by the literary exaggerations of Jómsvíkinga saga.18 Indeed, the new source-critical approach to these texts came at probably the worst moment for Larson, and did great damage to his biography within months of its release. Since his preface to the biography is dated 1911, his book was almost certainly in preparation at the same time as Lauritz Weibull’s own study, and most probably in press while the latter’s conclusions were making themselves felt in Scandinavian scholarship. In 1912, perhaps as a consequence of this, Larson withdrew almost entirely from publications on medieval history and confined his research to works on American-Scandinavian history, the British Empire, and World War I, with the exception of his two modern English translations of Old Norse sources: The King’s Mirror in 1917 and The Earliest Norwegian Laws: Being the Gulathing Law and the Frostathing Law in 1935.
Reactions to the Emergence of this Source-Critical Approach
From our perspective, a little over a century later, the emergence of these critical approaches to later medieval Scandinavian sources seems an inevitable part of the similar European trends sweeping medieval studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Scandinavian medieval studies in the English-speaking world and Scandinavia, however, the consequences of this source-critical approach were anything but straightforward or uniform. Historians in both these regions began to withdraw from such sources. In Scandinavia many scholars withdrew from the fields associated with these sources almost entirely, shifting their attention to the mid-twelfth century or later, periods for which primary sources are more abundant. Historical commentary on the eleventh century, especially on Cnut’s reign, either confined itself in the main to English or German primary or near-primary sources where these covered events relevant to Scandinavia, or took refuge in other disciplines, such as numismatics, archaeology, and art history, which boasted more abundant and trustworthy material.
The three Scandinavian nations which were principally engaged in studies of Cnut seem to have reacted according to the availability of source material for their own histories. Denmark, though not served well by late Scandinavian narratives, was better served than its northerly neighbours by the more contemporary sources from England and Germany. Denmark thus had the least to lose from an outright rejection of the late Scandinavian narratives wherever these could not be corroborated by more reliable sources. The source-critical approach had profound effects in Denmark, in which only a small amount of historical scholarship engaging with Cnut, in any form other than historical survey, exists for much of the twentieth century.19 One exception is Søren Balle’s “Ulf Jarl og drabet i Roskilde” (Earl Úlfr and the Murder in Roskilde), published in 1983. This essay returned to the subject matter of the 1910 article on the same subject by Lauritz Weibull, and in so doing had to engage with saga accounts of this apparent political murder on Cnut’s orders. It includes sections on the “Fortællingerne om drabet på Ulf” (Narratives about the Murder of Úlfr) and “Dateringen af drabet” (Dating of the Murder), each of which rehearses much saga material, assessing this against itself and other sources.20 Lauritz Weibull’s doubt about these sources is examined and for the most part agreed with; what is absent from Balle’s essay, however, is anything like a conclusion regarding their worth. We are offered the saga narratives one after the other and warned of their pitfalls, but without much attempt to assess their worth beyond where they find support in other more reliable English or numismatic evidence. The reader might be forgiven for suspecting that these narratives are there because the subject forces their inclusion, and that they are repeated at length for the sake of completeness rather than as an integral part of the building blocks of the analysis. Likewise, Niels Lund had to engage with some saga material in his contribution to The Reign of Cnut volume, which was published in 1994. Here, towards the end of his paper, his comments turn to Cnut’s actions elsewhere in Scandinavia, which are of course intrinsically linked to those in Denmark. As he does so, his words “[a]ccording to later Old Norse sources” signal a shift away from the more reliable sources used previously, to the late Scandinavian narratives, which he classifies as “suggestions.”21
Norway, though it had some occasional notices in the English and German historical sources, was the principal subject of the late Scandinavian narrative sources and so had the most to lose from any rejection of these. Thus the new source-critical approach made its presence strongly felt in historical studies throughout the half-century following the years 1910–1915. Saga sources were allowed back in, but only in cases where they had support from other more contemporary sources.22 Nonetheless, a new approach emerged in 1977 with the publication of Per Sveaas Andersen’s seminal study, Samlingen av Norge og Kristningen av Landet 800–1130 (The Unification of Norway and the Christianization of the country in 800–1130). In this work the author sought to take a long and wide view of history across three and a half centuries; doubtless he was influenced by the longue durée approach of the Annales school, which examined grand themes of the centralization of society and, within that, the roles of the major power structures of society. This approach to Norway’s history necessitated the use of late Scandinavian narratives. While there is no direct comment on methodology in Sveaas Andersen’s work, it is clear that he sought to address the inherent problems of his sources by drawing attention to advances in literary studies on this material and by employing only the barest of details from such sources in an effort to eliminate as many later accretions as possible. In his introduction, Sveaas Andersen rehearses and endorses the same doubts raised by the Weibulls and Koht, but follows this up with a lengthy quotation from Anne Holtsmark on the sources that were employed by the thirteenth-century saga authors.23 When his study arrives at the reign of Cnut’s contemporaries, we are reminded again of the textual relationships which created the sagas we have today. Citing the work of the literary scholars Sigurður Nordal (whose groundbreaking work on the interrelation of the narrative sources appeared in 1914, during the same period as the Weibulls’ and Koht’s studies), O. A. Johnsen (1916), Johan Schreiner (1926), Jón Helgason (1941), and Anne Holtsmark (1967), Sveaas Andersen does expend some effort to define an “eldre sagatradisjon” (older saga tradition), whose positive and negative qualities he attempts to weigh.24 His bare narrative is mostly established by these sources, backed up by any relevant skaldic verse, numismatic, legal, or runic material or by relevant non-Scandinavian sources where available. Thus, allowing for some brief speculation on the potential interpretations of the latter sources, he creates a sparse thumbnail sketch of a historical narrative.25 More often than not, somewhat worryingly, he introduces such details without footnotes, reducing our ability to approach the supporting sources critically as readers and giving the impression of a consensus-agreed base narrative. This position has prevailed in Norwegian scholarship that touches on Cnut, more or less until the present day. The same focus on larger social themes rather than detail can be found in Claus Krag’s survey Norges historie fram til 1319 (Norwegian History up to 1319), published in 2000. This book produces a thumbnail sketch of the period relevant to Cnut with barely a reference to individual sources beyond phrases such as “I skaldekvadene hører vi at” (We hear from the skaldic verses that).26 This sketch is augmented by some brief general comments later in the book on the problems commonly associated with later Scandinavian sources, and there are assessments individual to each chapter alongside lists of sources and published collections of sources.27 The situation is much the same in Jón Viðar Sigurðsson’s Det Norrøne Samfunnet, Vikingen, Kongen, Erkebiskopen og Bonden (‘Old Norse’ Society: Viking, King, Archbishop and Farmer), published in 2008, albeit this work refers to the sources more accurately.
This Norwegian approach has its merits. While it comes with wider margins of potential error in its findings, due to the dearth of source material, it does seem likely that true “kings’ sagas” (that is, those sagas not framed in such literary style as Jómsvíkinga saga) relate, more or less correctly, the major political events of the eleventh century and perhaps some from the last decades of the tenth.28 These were events that occurred less than a century or two before they were put to parchment. While such accounts of events most probably suffer from erosion of detail (especially of the detail which played no further part in future events), and from a telescoping of the narrative, the general audience was probably prevented by mutual scrutiny from making wanton inventions; and at least some of that audience must have continued to recite and enjoy contemporary skaldic verse about many of these events. What such accounts do badly, however, is interpret why events happened, for the interpretations within these accounts frequently reveal concerns of the writer’s own time rather than the events as they happened.29 With the exception of statements in skaldic verse, if these are introduced in the prose as the works of named poets or from named poems, direct speech in saga prose is never to be trusted. In addition, from the eleventh century onwards, genealogy does seem to have had an important social role in Scandinavia. As long as it relates to contemporary links (and not to a far distant and legendary past) and as long as it relates to geographically close relationships, genealogy may perhaps be trusted. The check on wanton invention that the medieval audience might give such material does not apply if such relationships are set either in a distant past or outside of Scandinavia (or perhaps even outside of northern Scandinavia). Examples of this last potential error are probably the isolated and clearly erroneous statements of the so-called “Supplement” to Jómsvíkinga saga, that Eadric Streona was Queen Emma’s brother and had fostered Edmund Ironside.30 In these cases, the geographical borders and distances ensured that the text’s audience knew less and that the writer was freer to embellish for literary effect, here turning eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon politics into the form of drama that one finds in thirteenth-century Icelandic family sagas. That said, this approach cannot be proved so valid that the above “rules” may be applied without significant caution and careful qualification.
Early medieval Sweden has few notices in the contemporary or near-contemporary English or German historical sources, nor is it comprehensively served by the late Scandinavian narrative sources, which give but little coverage. The one exception is the Battle of Helgeå, in which Cnut appears to have defeated a number of his most powerful Scandinavian enemies, cementing his supremacy in the region. Most probably the site of the battle was in Skåne, now the southernmost part of modern Sweden, then a region in medieval Denmark. In the twentieth century, debates about this battle were few and far between and driven by the research of a single Swedish scholar, Ove Moberg, from 1941 until 2008, when Bo Gräslund wrote a single article in response to research that Moberg had carried out a generation earlier in 1986.31 Moberg, while partly studying under Lauritz Weibull himself, received guidance in his later studies from a skaldic scholar, E. A. Kock, as well as from the literary scholars Eilert Ekwall and Jón Helgason. This literary aspect of Moberg’s training most probably lies behind his unconventional historical approach.32
English-language scholarship on Cnut in this period has been in much the same boat as the Danish studies, for it can afford to set the late Scandinavian narratives aside. Where these do have a part to play is in surveys of Cnut’s whole life or dominions, and here some interesting solutions emerge. One need look no further than Sir Frank M. Stenton’s seminal Anglo-Saxon England, which was published in 1943 with a second edition in 1947 and a third in 1971. When Stenton had to comment on Cnut’s activities in Scandinavia, he cited the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s report that Cnut went to Norway and seized control there in 1028, otherwise merely noting that “[l]ater Old Norse authorities amplify this outline.”33 Further comment on these “authorities” is given in his sources section and restricted to their “bearing on English history.”34 He notes their literary merit and the role they play in bringing out the importance of certain Scandinavians. However, he also says that they are hampered by “their innumerable mistakes on points of fact [that] show the weakness of a tradition which is uncontrolled by written record.” Nonetheless, he goes on to follow (or perhaps reinvent) the Norwegian approach, deploying the same sources over two densely packed, event-filled paragraphs in a representation denuded of any potentially worrying detail. The late Peter Sawyer follows suit, offering the most recent English-language survey of the field in his “Cnut’s Scandinavian Empire,” published in The Reign of Cnut volume in 1994. His is a thorough survey, but what he does not cite in evidence is revealing. In his discussion of northern Scandinavia, Sawyer notes skaldic verse often, as well as the late-twelfth-century Ágrip af Nóregskonungasögum, but not the later sources.35 While there is no explicit comment in this essay, other publications by Sawyer make clear his acceptance of the problems of using later Scandinavian sources for the study of the eleventh century.36 However, when his narrative in “Cnut’s Scandinavian Empire” must enter territory for which there is no source other than late sagas, this is done without comment on the nature of these sources and the citations in the footnotes are to Sveaas Andersen’s survey (which, as noted above, is largely based on the sagas and bereft of footnotes of its own).37 Sawyer’s choice of source here was doubtless informed by his years teaching and living in Norway. I do not include these examples to point fingers at individual historians, but instead to show the inherently problematic nature of the current way in which such late Scandinavian sources are handled. That is, the source-critical approaches of the early twentieth century dictate that such texts must be set aside as untrustworthy, but then if one is to say anything about northern Scandinavia in the period, one is forced to use these same sources in some fashion, often in a convoluted or less-than-fully-acknowledged form.
An alternative approach in English-language scholarship is to be found in the appendices attached to Alistair Campbell’s edition of the Encomium Emmae Reginae in 1949. Here, however, we have what appears to be a mixed approach, perhaps even a confused approach, one suggesting that Campbell was torn between literary and historical camps. These disciplines had over the previous four decades drifted far apart from each other on the subject of these late Scandinavian narratives. Campbell came from a literary and linguistic background and was well versed in Scandinavian languages. He was clearly aware of the saga material and the criticisms directed at it. However, despite a lengthy discussion of this material in his edition of the Encomium, he offers the reader no open statement of his position on such sources.38 We might discern some hints that he does not intend to cast out all such material, in his introductory address to “those who wish to use Scandinavian sources for the history of the eleventh century,” and in his direction of these users to “Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson’s excellent work Om de norske kongers sagaer [“On the Sagas of the Norwegian Kings”] (Oslo, 1937) and to the enduring value of Sigurður Nordal’s Om Olaf den helliges saga [“On the Saga of Saint Óláfr”] (Copenhagen, 1914).” Another hint may be taken from from Campbell’s later rehearsal of Nordal’s views on the interrelation and relative antiquity of the various saga materials.39 At first sight, the reader might even be forgiven for thinking that Campbell is in support of the cautious use of such materials. The thought appears to be confirmed when we turn to the lengthy biographies of Cnut’s Scandinavian followers in Campbell’s Appendix III, which weigh up the various sources for them one against each other, resting in some substantial part on saga material.40 Nonetheless, despite rehearsing such material and assessing it at length, Campbell goes on to state, in a few throwaway but fundamentally important lines, that Heimskringla and Fagrskinna are “[h]istorically worthless,” while he observes that the so-called “Supplement” to Jómsvíkinga saga, which he includes in the biography of Thorkell the Tall and edits in full in his monograph, is of historical value only where its facts are confirmed by other earlier sources.41 The reader could be forgiven for being confused, or at least could be left questioning why nearly thirty pages of a forty-four-page appendix have been given over to a thorough rehearsal of material that is then announced to add nothing other than late confirmation to our other more reliable sources.42
Recently another English version of the robustly source-critical approach has appeared in a 2016 article by Ann Williams on Thorkell the Tall, who, as we have seen in earlier chapters in this volume, was a powerful associate and sometime enemy of Cnut.43 The main thrust of Williams’s paper makes the quite reasonable assertion to “pay more attention to contemporary sources and to mistrust anything which cannot be corroborated,” but she goes on to question the connection between the Thorkell who is described in our contemporary and near-contemporary English sources (augmented by a brief appearance in the skaldic poem Liðsmannaflokkr) with the figure by this name in the late Scandinavian narrative sources. These late Scandinavian narratives identify him as a member of a dynasty which ruled over Skåne at the southern end of what is now Sweden. Urging caution, she notes the lack of prominence of Thorkell in the narratives of the earliest saga sources, in which he is only ever a supporting actor in the drama there, using this to suggest that, in Scandinavia, “while Thorkell’s name survived, little was known of his actual deeds”; and that, “[a]s Thorkell’s historical career faded into the mists of time, his legendary life began to develop,” by which she means that subsequent Scandinavian writers merely invented these details in their accounts.44 She continues in this vein, and turns her attention to the appearance of potential family members with similar groups of names in both sets of sources, as first noted by Freeman in 1877 and since supported by Campbell and then tentatively by Simon Keynes, among others.45 These similarities, however, she sweeps aside with the line: “[i]t is on coincidences like these that historians pounce like leopards, lifting juicy titbits out of their contexts and stringing them together into a plausible story – what does not fit … is ignored or explained away as the inevitable confusion of oral tradition.” A further late Scandinavian source, the so-called “Supplement” to Jómsvíkinga saga edited by Campbell, is written off by Williams with a flourish: “the less said the better.”46 It is a difficult source, but as Campbell noted, it contains a surprising amount of accurate material which we must account for in some way.47
A view entirely focused on primary sources is an excellent thing, but, as noted above, unachievable for the scholar who wishes to look at much of Cnut’s activities in Scandinavia as well as those in England. As Cnut had an equal presence in both of those regions during his lifetime, I believe we have a responsibility to take in as many sources as possible and to see what can be done with them. To ignore our Scandinavian sources risks confining our attention to only the English part of his realms and weighting our view of him in that direction.
A crucial part of Williams’s argument rests on the assumption that medieval Scandinavian authors invented details of the life of Thorkell the Tall to fill a void created by an absence of sources between the contemporary skaldic verse and the subsequent thirteenth-century sagas. To borrow a term from modern forensic science, this would be a “break in the chain of evidence.” When seen in the light of a century of literary studies of the texts involved,48 this assumption does not bear much scrutiny. The more closely we look at this perceived void, the more it shrinks. The complex meter and linguistic intricacy of skaldic verse, which are features ensuring that it has been, in the most part, transmitted without substantial tampering, are well known and I will not rehearse them here.49 Equally well discussed by others are the forms of introduction used by later saga-authors, which signal the difference between, on the one hand, the more reliable verses, which are being quoted from poems that were already in existence and often named and ascribed to known poets, and on the other, the lausavísur (loose-verses), which come without such indications that they existed before the saga-writer put pen to parchment.50 As has long been noted, much of the narrative of late Scandinavian sources is directly based on such verse.51 This is true of the sagas produced in Norway and Iceland in the heyday of such writing, the thirteenth century, as well as of the so-called synoptic histories composed in Norway in the second half of the twelfth. Two of these synoptic histories are of interest here: one is Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium, which is a Latin account of the history of Norway from the mid-ninth century until 1130, written by “Theodoricus Monachus”;52 the other is a closely related sister text, the vernacular Ágrip af Nóregskonungasögum. The Ágrip, though fragmentary at its beginning and end, covers the period from the late ninth to the early twelfth century.53 The monk Theodoricus’s opening address to Eysteinn, archbishop of Nidaros (Trondheim), fixes his work within Norwegian writing of the period between his consecration in 1161 and death in 1188.54 He knew of events of September 1176, while the lack of any definitive statement about Eysteinn being away from his see suggests a date for this work in 1177–1178.55 Theodoricus makes frequent mention of Icelanders as separate from him and his audience, refers to Óláfr Tryggvason as “our king,” and shows a knowledge of Nidaros and its immediate region, all of which strongly indicates that he was Norwegian and lived in that urban site.56 Consensus places Ágrip after Theodoricus’s work, as one that was composed in ca. 1190 and most probably before Oddr Snorrason began work on his Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar in ca. 1200, with which it appears to share similar passages.57 Again, the author reveals himself to be Norwegian, but this time through morphological “Norwegianisms,” through nicknames not otherwise found in Icelandic writing, and through the fact that the action and local knowledge is firmly based in Nidaros (often referred to as kaupangr, “the town,” implying familiarity).58 Both of these short synoptic histories were clearly produced by a historical school there. Theodoricus’s Historia makes its debt to skaldic verse explicit in its prologue, stating that it sets down these few details concerning the ancient history of the Norwegian kings, “et prout sagaciter perquirere potuimus ab eis, penes quos horum memoria praecipue vigere creditor, quos nos Islendinga vocamus, qui haec in suis antiquis carminibus percelebrata recolunt” (as I have been able to learn by assiduous inquiry from the people among whom in particular the remembrance of these matters is believed to thrive – Icelanders, who preserve them as much celebrated themes in their ancient poems).59 Ágrip acts out this statement, enclosing seven complete stanzas and two half-stanzas within the body of its narrative, as well as including references to the late-tenth-century poet Eyvindr skáldaspillir and his poem Háleygjatal.60
Nor do these authors’ internal references to their sources stop there. Theodoricus’s prologue, when listing its sources, goes on to state that “[v]eritatis vero sinceritas in hac nostra narratione ad illos omnimodo referenda est, quorum relatione haec annotavimus, quia nos non visa sed audita conscripsimus” (the degree of pure truth in my narrative must be placed entirely at the door of those by whose report I have written these things down, because I have recorded things not seen but heard).61 The interpretation of this phrase “audita non visa” (here “not seen but heard”) has caused its share of trouble. A superficial interpretation might take these things to be the spoken accounts of eyewitnesses, rather than written sources. Jens Hanssen, however, pointed out as long ago as 1945 that this common Latin phrase does not preclude the use of written sources, and that it should be read as an opposition between chronicling the events of one’s own time against those of the past compiled from other sources, either written or oral; David and Ian McDougall returned to this argument in 1998.62 The McDougalls observe that this interpretation was in keeping with the author’s citation of at least one now-lost written text of great relevance for our purpose here: a catalogus of Norwegian kings, cited in reference to Cnut the Great and to those who ruled Norway in his stead.63 It is also of relevance that Theodoricus declines to describe the accounts of the miracles of St. Óláfr and Bishop Grímkell’s exhumation of his body, with the words “quia haec omnia a nonnullis memoriae tradita sunt, nos notis immorari superfluum duximus” (because all these things have been recorded by several, I regard it as unnecessary to dwell on matters which are already known).64 The McDougalls note that the Latin idiom chosen by Theodoricus, a variant of memoriae tradere, normally means “to record in writing.”65 Thus it seems clear that the writers of the last decades of the twelfth century did not work exclusively from skaldic verse and oral accounts, but also had access to some written material. I have suggested before that at least the material relating to the details of St. Óláfr’s martyrdom and beatification may have been hagiographic in content, but this is where we hit a wall, for the composition of the Passio Olavi in the mid-twelfth century appears to have swept away almost all earlier material.66 A few extant scraps suggest that such material did exist then, and perhaps was of some age already in the mid-twelfth century. A single leaf from an Old Norse hagiographical collection, one which dates to ca. 1155×1165 and includes material on St. Óláfr’s miracles, survives now in Copenhagen, A.M. MS. 325 v α 4to. Furthermore, knowledge of organized votive masses for St. Óláfr are witnessed in Exeter by the Leofric Collectar (British Library, Harley MS. 2961) in the 1050s, and in Sherborne by the Red Book of Darley (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 422) in or after the early 1060s, while John of Worcester knew of some form of hagiographic tradition surrounding him in the 1130s.67 These last three references to hagiographic materials for St. Óláfr predate the foundation of Norwegian monasteries, which are the most likely candidates for a storehouse of historical writing. In Norway the earliest monasteries were Lyse (1146), Hovedøya (1147), Munkeby (1150–1180), Halsnøy (1163), and Tønsberg in the second half of the twelfth century. It seems inconceivable that liturgical and hagiographic materials should be developed in England for a Norwegian saint such as Óláfr. The skaldic poem Glælognskviða, by Þórarinn Loftunga, makes it clear that some part of his worship was promulgated from within the Norwegian royal court,68 while such bishops as existed in Norway at that time were missionaries looking to the king as their immediate patron. In this context, we should probably locate the origin of these materials and their now-lost written records in this court.
In this way, we can only perceive this potential “chain of evidence” imperfectly. On the other hand, it is clear that there was not a two-century-wide gap in the sources between the composition of terse skaldic verse in the eleventh century and the flowing prose of the fully-fledged Icelandic sagas in the thirteenth, which had to be filled by fertile imaginations. There are solid stepping-stones in the middle to late twelfth century, and suggestions of other written sources even earlier. Even if we ignore the flimsier of these suggestions, we come to within decades of living memory of the events of the 1030s, and within the period in which someone who had met and discussed such events with an eyewitness might have lived. It remains true that a person aged twenty years in 1030, who might have lived to be eighty in 1090, could comfortably have met and discussed events of the past with someone still alive in 1150.
A Potential Alternative Approach to These Sources
This shift of perception of the “chain of evidence” allows us not only to see our sources in a slightly different light, but also to entertain and test the notion that there may be some veracity in them that we might be able to detect. I shall now turn to describing how I have approached these late Scandinavian narratives, and how occasionally I have attempted to employ them in my own work. I don’t think I have ever advocated, nor do I here, treating such a shift in perceptions as the license to take any report in these sources at face value. When dealing with such material, I think we must presume all such sources guilty until proven to be reasonably innocent. My approach differs greatly from the modern Norwegian model, in that I would prefer to focus on hard-fought-for details, rather than make general thumbnail sketches in a longue durée tradition. The scholar who attempts to use these must strive to gather as many Scandinavian sources as can be found; I hope to show below how greatly sources such as lists of poets and their patrons and amendments to medieval law codes can add to our trust in parts of the late Scandinavian narratives. Just as importantly, the same scholar must try to understand such sources within their individual and generic contexts, in order to identify their potential weaknesses and strengths. The rewards may be numerically small, but each point in which it is reasonable to root the given details more plausibly in an eleventh-century reality than in some later literary invention, shines new light into a very dark period of history, and every secure foothold established there potentially changes our understanding of the entire period.
Let me offer two short examples, which are already laid out in my 2009 and 2017 books on Cnut and will suffice to show how this methodology works, perhaps inspiring some confidence in its results.
Firstly, since Ann Williams has called the links between Thorkell the Tall and the dynasty of the earls of Skåne into question in the paper discussed above, we might first turn our attention to these. The assertion of Williams that is relevant here is that the slightness of Thorkell’s part in the saga narratives gives such reason to doubt the historicity of his part there that we may sweep it away as potentially a later invention.69 One sizeable problem with Williams’s assessment lies in her choice of saga material to illustrate her arguments. This choice reveals either her lack of familiarity with these sources, or her debt to Campbell’s appendices – documents nearly seventy years old when she turned to the subject. The main Scandinavian source that she names is the literary and late Jómsvíkinga saga. Indeed, while she does not directly charge any modern scholar with the errors she outlines, Williams’s choice of this saga suggests that she was thinking of Campbell (who is cited elsewhere) or perhaps of Keynes (who utilized much of the material in Campbell’s appendix for the Scandinavian figures in his essay on “Cnut’s Earls”) as she wrote.70 Williams is quite right to point out the problems of Jómsvíkinga saga that should eliminate it from use as a historical witness; I think that no one would now claim that this saga is free of erroneous accretions, and elsewhere I have set it aside. However, both she and Campbell miss a number of sources which identify Thorkell (or to play devil’s advocate, at least someone of his name who was understood by writers in the thirteenth century to be Thorkell the Tall) as a member of a dynasty who ruled Skåne in the late tenth and eleventh centuries. A list of these sources, even after noting their potential links to each other, argues against such a presumption of later invention.
Both Williams and Campbell also acknowledge the so-called “Supplement” to Jómsvíkinga saga, albeit Williams does so very briefly. To this source we might add Heimskringla, which includes some brief comments on this ruling dynasty, including Thorkell’s part in it.71 It must be admitted, however, that Heimskringla might be taken to depend on the traditions set out in Jómsvíkinga saga and so cannot be held independent of that work. There again, we should also note that there is information in Heimskringla, not found in any other extant source, about the career of the skaldic poet Þórðr Sigvaldaskáld, which claims that Þórðr served the Skåne dynasty and Thorkell in particular.72 There Þórðr is identified as the permanent court-poet of Earl Sigvaldi, while it is stated that he was later in the train of Thorkell the Tall, Sigvaldi’s brother, and “eptir fall jarls þá var Þórðr kaupmaðr” (after the fall of the earl, Þórðr became a merchant).73 Þórðr was the father of perhaps the most celebrated and prolific skald of the whole period, Sigvatr Þórðarson, who served both St. Óláfr and Cnut. Consequently, he is an improbable (but not impossible) candidate to choose if one wished to fabricate parts of his life a century after his death. Finally, another often overlooked source, the Skáldatal, also indirectly links Thorkell to this dynasty.74 This list of Scandinavian rulers and the poets who served them was compiled in the early thirteenth century, most probably as part of the research materials which stood behind the composition of Heimskringla.75 The so-called Kringla manuscript (of ca. 1260), which included Skáldatal, was destroyed in the Copenhagen fire of 1728 (with the exception of a single leaf not relevant to our purposes here). However, early modern manuscript witnesses that descend from Kringla put a patron, Haraldr Þórkelsson, who is presumably the son of Thorkell the Tall, and his poet Þjóðólfr Arnórsson immediately after Sigvaldi at the end of the list of the earls of Skåne.76 Heimskringla claims that this Haraldr was the son of Thorkell, who was taken under Cnut’s wing, and that he was the earl named in the skaldic poem Glælognskiða as part of the Danish government sent by Cnut to Norway in the last years of the 1020s.77 This does not amount to an enormity of extra material, and its component parts are all loosely related to each other, but does it reduce the efficacy of Williams’s suggestion that a later writer invented Thorkell’s link to the Skåne dynasty. Crucially, the link between them is not founded simply on the note in Jómsvíkinga saga that Thorkell and Sigvaldi were brothers, on which Williams focuses as a potential later invention. That such an invention could have been made becomes increasingly far-fetched the more we fit each piece of evidence into the puzzle. If we play devil’s advocate and date the potential invention of the fraternal bond between Sigvaldi and Thorkell to the very late twelfth century, when Jómsvíkinga saga probably was composed, we must also presume that, by the time Snorri Sturluson began to research Heimskringla a few decades later, the forger(s) had gone to the trouble of creating a back story for Þórðr Sigvaldaskáld that linked him to Thorkell; as well as to the trouble of composing a poem on Thorkell’s son Haraldr that could be represented as a still-remembered legacy in the early thirteenth century. Forgers might invent direct individual links, but creating whole new chapters in the lives of the courtiers of those nobles they are concerned with, and making up formal laudatory poems for the nobles’ children, seems a step too far.
Also worth noting, slight though it may seem, is the plausibility of the chronologies of the poets named for Thorkell and his son Haraldr, which further suggests that here we are not dealing with outright invention. The chronology of the poet Þjóðólfr Arnórsson, who is also recorded as composing for Magnús Óláfsson (king of Norway in ca. 1035–1047), suggests that his composition in this period for this dynasty is possible; just as Þórðr Sigvaldaskáld’s for Thorkell would be, if we give it credence.78
One potential solution, that would allow Williams’s arguments to stand, although she does not advance it, would be to suggest that there was another Thorkell in the dynasty of the Skåne earls who had a son named Haraldr, and that these two separate Thorkells were mistakenly conflated by later saga-writers. However, there are a few snippets of evidence which support the idea that the Haraldr concerned here had a career in England as well as in Scandinavia. Williams takes exception to the apparent link between two records: one is John of Worcester’s record of a noble lady Gunnhild, the sister of King Cnut, who married Earl Hákon and then Earl Haraldr and had children named Hemming and Thorkell; the other is the record in the late “Supplement” to Jómsvíkinga saga that these same names were employed by members of Thorkell the Tall’s proposed dynasty in Scandinavia.79 Yet as Keynes notes, an Earl Harold also appears in the English charter evidence in a spurious charter for Folkestone purportedly of Cnut’s reign, which has a witness list that does seem to have been composed from other contemporary documents.80 The same earl perhaps appears with the title minister immediately after the earls in another charter of 1032, and certainly in a lease dated 1042, but then disappears from the English diplomatic material.81 These findings support an identification of him with the Haraldr who was identified by Adam of Bremen as a Danish prince murdered in Germany while on his way back to Denmark after a visit to Rome, in a series of events dateable to the period immediately after 1042.82 Adam notes that this murder was politically motivated and directed by King Magnús of Norway, for the victim Harald was “de regali stirpe Danorum genitus propior sceptro videbatur quam Magnus” (of the royal Danish stock … [and] appeared to stand nearer the scepter than did Magnus).83
John of Worcester’s note about the exile of Earl Haraldr’s wife and sons is dated to 1044, and implies that Haraldr was already dead. There is no definitive statement here that this Haraldr was a son of Thorkell the Tall. On the other hand, the surviving scraps of evidence hold together quite well, and they fit in with what the saga material states of Haraldr’s career after the death of Thorkell. The scraps of evidence we have suggest that we are dealing with a single Haraldr (and thus also a single Thorkell).
My second example involves the record of Cnut’s legal exactions from the Norwegian population, which are found variously in an episode in Ágrip, the Legendary Saga, and Heimskringla.84 Each of these sources sets out a series of exactions and royal rights, and details an agricultural tax that was to be systematically rendered from all households at Christmas.85 We might set these accounts aside, if it were not for some short legal amendments added to the earliest Norwegian regional law codes of the Gulathing region and the Frostathing region, with content and specific legal terminology that indicates that successive kings in Norway after Cnut repealed such exactions. The Gulathing amendments fall in the reign of Magnús Óláfsson, in 1034–1047, and in that of his kinsman Hákon, in 1093–1094; the Frostathing amendments, in the joint reign of Sigurðr Jórsalafari with his two brothers Eysteinn and Óláfr in 1125–1130.86 The oldest manuscript of either of these two regional codes dates to significantly later, to the last decade of the twelfth century, but there are grounds for identifying the late eleventh century or the opening years of the twelfth as the point in which these Gulathing and Frostathing laws were codified in writing. Most of the legal clauses in the law codes state that St. Óláfr began the formulation and codification of written law, presumably before his expulsion in 1028. However, this is most probably in error, and while they may have been codified in an oral form earlier, the most likely period for a written codification of these Norwegian law codes is the last few decades of the eleventh century. The presence of St. Hallvard at the head of the saints listed in the Christian section of the Gulathing law indicates a date after 1050, before which time he seems not to have held such prominence.87 In addition, details of ecclesiastical organization, such as the requirement of the bishop to have a fixed seat from which he dispensed justice, suggest that the earliest written form of the law predates the reorganization of the Norwegian church in 1111.88
Returning to the legal amendments fossilized within these law codes, we note that textual comparison of the clauses, in the narratives and in the legal amendments, reveals a markedly close relationship between them. Most importantly, such legal terminology as we find here is novel and found nowhere else in the conservative and highly repetitive corpus of Norwegian medieval law. The first statement of the Gulathing amendments, that the “Iola giaver” (Christmas tax) shall cease to be collected, gives a term reminiscent of Ágrip’s statement that Cnut’s tax should be collected “at Jólum” (at Christmas). These are the only occurrences of Christmas as a tax-collection point in extant Norwegian legal sources. The Frostathing amendments supply us with more details of this tax, again in legal terminology similar to that used by Ágrip. Where Ágrip specifies the payment of “vinar toddi” (translated as “a piece of the meadow”), we find in the amendment the repealing of the king’s demands for “viniar sponn” (meaning “a measure of the meadow”).89 Furthermore, a match for the term “rykkjarto” (translated as “a lady’s tow”) from Ágrip, may be found in the amendments to the Frostathing law as “rygiar tó.”90 Additionally, the term “spann smjörs” (a “measure of butter”) found in Ágrip, may lie behind an error in some manuscripts of the Frostathing law, where “viniar spönn” may represent both “viniar toddi” and “spann smjörs,” whereby the scribe has accidentally removed two words.91 As the Frostathing amendments fail to specify the specific weights and measures behind these terms, we are unable to know if the amounts specified in Ágrip are accurate renditions of “vinar toddi” or “rykkjarto,” but they do seem to bear witness to the existence of taxes with these names. Again, these terms appear nowhere else in Norwegian legal sources, and they appear in the narrative sources only in the context of Cnut’s legislation. The remaining clauses in this law code relate to royal rights, and again, they appear to be directly repealed by the legal amendments. The legal amendment detailing that a man in peacetime may travel where and when he wishes, may be a response to the ban we find in Ágrip’s statement that no one could leave the country without the king’s permission at risk of forfeiture of his estates.92 Ágrip details that the farmers were collectively responsible for the construction of royal buildings and work on royal estates, whereas an amendment in the Frostathing-law states emphatically that only the royal official (the “ármaðr”), and not the landowners, were obliged to erect buildings for the king. Finally, the clause in Ágrip which states that the land and chattels of outlaws were to pass to the king, and not to the heirs of an outlaw, is repealed in the amendments to both the Gulathing and Frostathing laws, stating in the latter that “scal hinn nánasti niðr sá er í erfðum er taldr taca arf þann. en eigi konungr” (the nearest relative in hereditary count from the outlaw shall take the inheritance, but not the king).93 In all, there is a plausibility to these clauses being the innovations of a foreign invader. In Norway in the early medieval period there was comparatively little royal power, and the laws there are more concerned with social regulation at the regional level. In essence, the Norwegian king endorsed and enforced the law, but he was not in a position to make many demands for payment through it, or to milk it for profits in same way that some of the rulers in more highly organized neighboring states could. Thus, royal demands such as those specified by Ágrip are virtually unprecedented in the extant Norwegian legal collections.
It is extremely unlikely that these amendments in the law codes do not refer to the same exactions set out in the late narrative sources. However, whereas such sources are connected to Cnut’s reign in the narratives, the amendments are not connected to him in the law codes and are introduced as the repealing acts of Norwegian kings who followed him in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. For this reason, the two groups of sources most probably share a common ancestor without having a direct textual relationship. On this basis, it is reasonable to suppose that the story of these exactions by Cnut in the late narrative sources is more likely to have a basis in fact than to be an invention of one or more saga-authors.
Conclusions
The source-critical approaches that attacked the use of these late narrative sources in the last decades of the nineteenth century and opening decades of the twentieth century were much needed and rightly swept away the naive scholarship that came before. However, this approach to the these sources has created a climate of fear around them which still to this day not only keeps scholars from looking at them, but also ensures that few with any historical background even know the rudiments of such texts and their nuances. Thus, the common options open to the modern historian when faced with having to use such material appear to have been: (1) avoidance, leaving such texts alone unless they receive confirmation from more reliable sources, and consigning the period they purport to discuss to a historical vacuum; (2) using them in a reduced capacity, with as many potential later accretions as possible removed; or (3) a confused (and confusing) approach in which these sources are included and assessed, but without substantial attempts to discuss their potential veracity, consigning them to the status of, at best, suggestions.
As a scholar with a literary as well as historical background (like Campbell and Moberg before me), I have tried to find another path through the problems here, and have focused on individual facets in the narratives where these can be shown to have a substantial probability of reflecting an eleventh-century reality. The light shone by such studies is a tightly focused beam in a sea of darkness. However, in such a void as we have for eleventh-century Scandinavia, any points in which we can place some trust add greatly to our knowledge and often completely change our understanding of the period. Such studies may come littered with the words “perhaps” and “probably,” but the benefits they promise will be significant. I remain convinced that Cnut the Great, spanning two distinct English and Scandinavian worlds, each with vastly different types of evidence in various states of survival to bear him witness, demands more of us than an approach that restricts itself to some disciplines or sources while shutting out others. Just as numismatics, archaeology, and skaldic literary studies now hold a firm place in the picture of the man we construct, careful and painstaking work will ensure that parts of the Scandinavian narrative sources may be added to this pantheon. These need to be carefully sifted and assessed to see what else remains to be discovered.
Notes
1
Much of this discussion can be found in practical examples in Bolton, Empire of Cnut the Great, see esp. 251–59 and 275–87, and explained more fully in Bolton, Cnut the Great, 22–26. The present paper as presented at the conference formed the basis of what was written in the latter book.
2
An excellent survey can be found in Lindqvist, “Early Political Organisation,” 161–63.
3
These are “Dråpen i Roskilde i Knut den stores och Sven Estridsens tid” (The Murders in Roskilde in the Time of Cnut the Great and Sven Estrithsson) and “Knut den stores skånska krig” (Cnut the Great’s Scanian War), published together in Historisk tidskrift för Skåneland, 4 (1910–1913). I owe this reference to Søren Balle, “Ulf Jarl og drabet i Roskilde” (Earl Úlfr and the Murder in Roskilde), 35–36.
4
Lauritz Weibull’s study stops just short of Cnut’s reign, whereas Curt Weibull’s is on Saxo Grammaticus, an author of the twelfth century. Much of Halvdan Koht’s concern is focused on St. Óláfr as a central figure of Norwegian history, and in “Sagaernes Opfatning,” 391, he notes that ruler was as important to the Norwegians as “Karl den Store var for de tyske og de franske” (Charlemagne was for the Germans and the French). Thus, Cnut, the great enemy of St. Óláfr, is mentioned briefly at 392.
5
For an excellent survey of the problems associated with such texts see Sawyer and Sawyer, “Adam and Eve of Scandinavian History.”
6
Koht himself asks openly, in “Sagaernes Opfatning,” 391: “hvorledes er denne historien-opfatning opstaat? Er den fri speculation, eller har den røtter i almene historiske vilkaar?” (How did this perception of history come about? Is it free speculation, or does it have roots in general historical conditions?).
7
See his “Studier til Dronning Margrethes Historie” (“Studies for the History of Queen Margrethe”), for the earliest version of these ideas.
8
Erslev, “Erik Plovpennings Strid med Abel.”
9
Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, I, 452.
10
Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, I, 452–54, as well as his notes ZZ, BBB, EEE, GGG, MMM and QQQ at the end of the volume, for examples of such use.
11
Larson, Canute the Great, 323 and ix–x.
12
Larson, Canute the Great, 206 and 122. In fact, the only editions of such material available were those fossilized within the individual editions of the larger saga narratives and the material in Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale. In this early extensive use of this material he mirrors Lauritz Weibull’s “Knut den stores skånska krig” of 1910.
13
As an aside intended only to amuse, Larson is also badly served by the passage of time in his insistence on translating Scandinavian bynames into modern English. Due to this, the Norwegian magnate Einarr Þambarskelfir becomes “Einar Thongshaker,” shifting the meaning of his byname from a martial one involving trembling bowstrings (or paunches) to something far more in the lingerie line.
14
Larson, Canute the Great, 31.
15
Larson, Canute the Great, 72.
16
Larson, Canute the Great, 204–6 and 98–99 and 336.
17
Larson, Canute the Great, 226.
18
See Larson, Canute the Great, 156–57 for one example among many.
19
This is not to diminish, however, the excellent archaeological and numismatic scholarship produced in Denmark in this period, or to ignore the historical research on individual aspects of eleventh-century Danish history and military organization.
20
Balle, “Ulf Jarl og drabet i Roskilde,” 31–39.
21
Lund, “Cnut’s Danish Kingdom,” 38–39.
22
For an example of this approach, see the collection of essays in Harald Hardråde, edited by Arno Berg in 1966. Much of the book is occupied by numismatic and archaeological studies, with historical contributions on Harald and Byzantium, Harald’s queen, and Norwegian relations with Denmark and England. In these, where late Scandinavian narrative material might have been used in studies before Koht’s work, we find in general that these are cited only when they have the support of a non-Scandinavian primary source.
23
Sveaas Andersen, Samlingen av Norge, 25, citing Holtsmark, “Sankt Olavs liv og mirakler.”
24
Sveaas Andersen, Samlingen av Norge, 109–11 and 115, citing Sigurður Nordal, Om Olaf den helliges saga, O. A. Johnsen, Olavsagaens genesis, Johan Schreiner, Tradisjon og saga, Jón Helgason, Den store saga om Olav den hellige, and Holtsmark’s study, which is cited above. His suggested reading adds the further literary study of Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, Om de norske kongers sagaer.
25
Sveaas Andersen, Samlingen av Norge, 115–39.
26
Krag, Norges historie, 65.
27
Krag, Norges historie, 218–27 and 279–80.
28
It bears stating here that I would not advocate the use of such material further back than the last decade or so of the tenth century. Before this the deviation of such material from the few other sources we have, and the potential level of invention, is sufficiently high to prevent such use.
29
Here again, for fuller discussion of this serious concern with such sources, I direct the reader to Sawyer and Sawyer, “Adam and Eve of Scandinavian History.”
30
Edited in Encomium, ed. Campbell, 92–93.
31
Moberg, Olav Haraldsson, Knut den Store och Sverige (Olaf Haraldsson, Cnut the Great and Sweden), 148–78 (chap. 4); see also Campbell’s critical assessment of Moberg’s work as a postscript to his Encomium Emmae. Moberg returned to this subject in “Knut den stores motståndare i slaget vid Helgeå” (Cnut the Great’s Opponents in the Battle of Helgeå), and again in “Slaget vid Helgeå och dess följder” (The Battle of Helgeå and its consequences). He then reargued it in English in his “The Battle of Helgeå.” Bo Gräslund’s response to Moberg appeared in 1986 as “Knut den store och sveariket. Slaget vid Helgeå i ny belysing” (Cnut the Great and Sweden: the Battle of Helgeå in a new light).
32
For these relationships, see the introduction to his Olav Haraldsson.
33
Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 404–5.
34
Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 700–701.
35
Sawyer, “Cnut’s Scandinavian Empire,” 20–22.
36
See Sawyer and Sawyer, “Adam and Eve of Scandinavian History.”
37
See Sawyer and Sawyer, “Adam and Eve of Scandinavian History,” 21–22.
38
Indeed, he fails to note or include in his bibliography the work of either the Weibulls or Koht. I assume his direction to that of Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson (see below) is meant to implicitly contain this recommendation.
39
Encomium, ed. Campbell, v and 80–81.
40
Encomium, ed. Campbell, 66–91. Much of what he discusses there had already been discussed in a more naive fashion by A. S. Napier and W. H. Stevenson in their The Crawford Collection of Early Charters and Documents, 139–49. Campbell must owe some debt to this earlier publication; he did know of it, for he cites it at 82 and 86–87 of his Appendix III.
41
Encomium, ed. Campbell, 81, 90–91; with edition in Appendix IV, 92–93.
42
Campbell appears to have taken a similar line with what to do with skaldic verse. His paper, Skaldic Verse and Anglo-Saxon History (1970) is full of suggestions of material to use, but then undermines the potential use of these. See his section on the verse composed for Cnut (13–15), where he takes the differences of detail between such witnesses and the traditional English historical record to indicate that the poets were ill-informed and vague. Compare to this the conclusions reached in Poole, “Skaldic Verse and Anglo-Saxon History,” Bolton, Cnut the Great, and the account of such verse set out in Townend, “Contextualising the Knútsdrápur.”
43
Williams, “Thorkell the Tall.”
44
Williams, “Thorkell the Tall,” 151–52.
45
See Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, I, 655–56; Encomium, ed. Campbell, 84–85, where he concludes “[i]t would be a remarkable coincidence” if these names did not correctly identify this kin relationship, concluding that this was “reasonably certain”; and Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” 62, n. 97, and 66.
46
Williams, “Thorkell the Tall,” 151–52.
47
Campbell, Encomium, 89. See also Bolton, Empire of Cnut the Great, 211–12, esp. n. 28.
48
The most important of these studies are listed above in n. 24.
49
For comment on this and a discussion of the various editions of such material see Bolton, Cnut the Great, 18–21. Ghosh, in King’s Sagas and Norwegian History, has recently raised some doubt about the use of skaldic poems as historical sources. He questions the oft-noted stability of this kind of verse by pointing towards certain conclusions concerning a number of literary and textual studies of various skaldic verses. These studies show verses with variants which were most probably inserted by later poets repeating the material, and perhaps also by scribes copying parts of the works into the extant saga material (see 46–48 and the references therein). The conclusion of Ghosh is that if we can observe changes occurring in such verses, then all skaldic verses must be suspect. Although this subject deserves fuller attention elsewhere, it is enough now not only to agree with Ghosh that there are problems, but also to wish that his study had discussed them in more detail. He does not note Russell Poole’s use of just such variants to deduce probable English loan words behind some of the poems for Cnut, loanwords which argue powerfully for authenticity; see Poole’s “Skaldic Verse and Anglo-Saxon History,” 284–86, and also in this volume, pp. 260–69. Moreover, all the studies cited by Ghosh as underpinning the existence of such variants concern the textual traditions of extremely early verses from the ninth century or from more literary skald’s sagas. Since his foundations thus lie outside the main corpus of material usually employed for historical purposes, we might wish that he had repeated such studies for eleventh-century “historical” verses. Indeed, one of the authors cited by Ghosh (Poole, in “Variants and Variability in Egill’s Hǫfuðlausn,” 101) notes that there is greater and lesser flexibility in different verses, fixed in part by the fact that the flexible poem “tells no real story.” Certainly, we must accept Ghosh’s criticisms and be mindful of them when using such verse as historical evidence in the future. Also note, however, that changes to individual words and in some cases entire lines do not in themselves necessarily give reason to reject this source. Narrative rather than expression is harder to shift in the complex meanings of such verses, and it is narrative that has been principally of interest to the majority of historians. In addition, where such expressions of power, or echoes of such, have been employed by historians such as myself, this is usually within the context of other examples from multiple poems which are evidently unconnected; that argues for, rather than against, veracity.
50
Note, however, that Williams’s endorsement of such verse, in her “Thorkell the Tall,” 144, is lukewarm and rests on Eric Christiansen’s general survey volume, The Norsemen in the Viking Age, rather than on the numerous detailed studies available.
51
See Ghosh, King’s Sagas and Norwegian History, 70–94, and references there.
52
Text edited by Storm, Monumenta historica Norvegiæ, 1–68.
53
Text edited most recently by Driscoll, Ágrip, 2–80.
54
Theodoricus: Historia, ed. McDougall and McDougall, xi–xiii.
55
Theodoricus: Historia, ed. McDougall and McDougall.
56
Theodoricus: Historia, ed. McDougall and McDougall, ix–xi.
57
Ágrip, ed. Driscoll, xii, and references there.
58
Ágrip, ed. Driscoll, x–xi, and references there.
59
Theodoricus’s Historia, ed. Storm, in Monumenta historica Norvegiæ, 3 (Prologue). Translation based on Theodoricus: Historia, ed. McDougall and McDougall, 1.
60
Ágrip, ed. Driscoll, 12 (chap. 6) and 26 (chap. 15). The latter of these refers the reader to the poem, naming both it and its poet, as support for the details in the narrative.
61
Theodoricus’s Historia, ed., Storm, in Monumenta historica Norvegiæ, 4 (Prologue). Translation based on Theodoricus: Historia, ed. McDougall and McDougall, 2.
62
Hanssen, “Observations on Theodoricus,” and Theodoricus: Historia, ed. McDougall and McDougall, xiv and 56–57, n. 11.
63
Theodoricus’s Historia, ed., Storm, in Monumenta historica Norvegiæ, 44 (chap. 20). See also Theodoricus: Historia, ed. McDougall and McDougall, xiv and 92–93, n. 214.
64
Theodoricus’s Historia, ed., Storm, in Monumenta historica Norvegiæ, 44 (chap. 20). Translation based on Theodoricus: Historia, ed. McDougall and McDougall, 33; see also xiv and 92, n. 213.
65
Theodoricus: Historia, ed. McDougall and McDougall, 92.
66
Bolton, Empire of Cnut the Great, 254–55.
67
Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. Darlington and McGurk, 510 (s.a. 1027) and 543 (s.a. 1046).
68
Townend, “Knútr and the Cult of St. Óláfr,” and Bolton, Empire of Cnut the Great, 271–75.
69
I have discussed this briefly in my Cnut the Great, 23 and 59–62.
70
Indeed, one suspects that certain phrases in Campbell’s discussion of Thorkell and his son Haraldr might be the genesis of Williams’s thesis in her “Thorkell the Tall.” This is despite the fact that Campbell (Encomium Emmae, 84) supports the connection between the Thorkell in the English sources and his namesake in the late Scandinavian ones. Note Campbell’s accompanying assertion, with which he resolves which Scandinavian nobles fought at Helgeå and held jarldoms in Scandinavia: “Now in this Snorri is falling into a practice in which he is very apt to indulge. When he has to find a person for some purpose, he seizes upon one who had some reality, however shadowy, rather than invent one.” Campbell directs us to his war-time “The Opponents of Haraldr Hárfagri” for other examples of the same, but does not mention that these are all related to a single battle of the late ninth century, a period so early that it is more likely to contain inventions and legendary accretions than eleventh-century events.
71
Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 272–74 (chap. 34–35). Óláfs saga helga, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 54 (chap. 43).
72
Óláfs saga helga, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 54 (chap. 43). Williams appears not to know of this, given her statement that “no skald seems to have felt moved to compose eulogies for Thorkell,” in “Thorkell the Tall,” 149.
73
Óláfs saga helga, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 54 (chap. 43).
74
The edition of Skáldatal by Finnur Jónsson, in his Snorra Edda (on which see 259, 268, and 284) is now superseded. A facsimile of the Uppsala manuscript (De la Gardie 11) has been published in Snorre Sturlassons Edda, ed. Grape, Kallstenius, and Thorell, and a modern edition and English translation may be found in Snorri Sturluson: The Uppsala Edda, ed. Heimir Pálsson and trans. Faulkes, 100–117, esp. 112, 114.
75
On this see Guðrún Nordal, “Skáldatal and its Manuscript Context” and Tools of Literacy.
76
The relevant parts of the manuscripts are Reykjavík, A.M. MS. 761a 4to, fols. 16v–17r (paper transcript of ca. 1700) and Uppsala, Universitetsbibliothek, MS. R. 685, fol. 25v (early eighteenth-century paper transcript of the Swedish antiquary Peter Salan); I have given their readings in Bolton, Empire of Cnut the Great, 206–7. See Guðrún Nordal, “Skáldatal and its Manuscript Context,” for discussion of this source. On Haraldr Þórkelsson see Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” 66.
77
Óláfs saga helga, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 399 (chap. 239).
78
Óláfs saga helga, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 333 (chap. 183) and 399 (chap. 239).
79
Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. Darlington and McGurk, 540 (s.a. 1044). For previous discussion of this, see Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, I, 655–56, and Encomium Emmae, ed. Campbell, 84, 89–90.
80
S. 981. See Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” 66.
81
S. 1396. See Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” 66. The charter of 1032 is S. 964; although Keynes notes a Harald in S. 968 and in the spurious S. 965, his lowlier position in these charters may indicate that this Harald is another figure.
82
Gesta Hammburgensis, ed. Schmeidler, 75 (II. lxxix). Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” 66. Two identifications of this assassinated Haraldr have been advanced by scholarship. Strangely, both can be traced to a single publication in 1834: Johann Lappenberg’s Geschichte von England, I, 451, 473, 498 and genealogical table ‘H’. On the first of these occasions Haraldr’s father is stated to have been one “Thurkill,” who is not identified further. However, Thorgils Sprakalegg, who was the father of Jarl Úlfr, does appear in the other references in the two forms of “Thorgils Sprakaleg” and “Thurchill Sprakalaeg,” despite the fact that the two first names are quite distinct from each other. These small errors come together in Lappenberg’s edition of Adam of Bremen’s text (printed in G. H. Pertz, MGH, Scriptores in Folio VII, in 1846), specifically where he states (333, n. 57), that the Haraldr assassinated in 1042 was the “filius Thurkilli Sprakaloeg.” These errors are repeated in Schmeidler’s edition of Adam’s text in 1917 (Gesta Hammburgensis, 137, n. 1), and enhanced when Schmeidler directs readers to the Encomium Emmae to read more on the exploits of this “Thorkell.” Although Thorgils Sprakalegg is not mentioned in the Encomium Emmae, Thorkell the Tall features heavily in that narrative, and it is apparent that they have been conflated here, creating dynastic confusion. This error reappears in Tschan’s translation of Adam’s Gesta, History of the Archbishops, 109, n. 274, and most recently in Williams, “Thorkell the Tall,” 157, n. 82: “this was Harold, son of King Cnut’s brother in law, Jarl Ulfr.” The first full discussion of the other identification is in Encomium, ed. Campbell, 85, with a later discussion in Stenton, Anglo Saxon England, 423–24 and Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” 66: it has the support of the English charter evidence and the implication of John of Worcester’s note for the year 1044. Lasse C. A. Sonne, in his “Svend Estridsens politiske liv” [“Svend Estrithsson’s Political Life”], 20–21, takes a more cautious line and suggests that this Haraldr might be a child or a grandchild of Cnut’s elder brother, on the evidence of the similarity of their names. The present author and C. Sagemoen have a forthcoming article on these various identifications and the assassinated Haraldr.
83
Translation after Tschan, History of the Archbishops, 109.
84
See Bolton, Empire of Cnut the Great, 275–87, and Cnut the Great, 187–88.
85
Ágrip, ed. Driscoll, 40–42 (chap. 29); Legendary Saga of St. Óláfr, ed. Heinrichs, Janshen, Radicke, and Röhn, 172–74 (chap. 71); and Óláfs saga helga, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 399–401 (chap. 239).
86
These amendments are edited separately from the main law codes in Norske middelalderdokumenter, ed. Bagge, Holstad Smedsdal, and Helle, 18–23; with modern Norwegian translation. Some brief scholarly comment can be found in Indrebø, “Aagrip,” 43–45.
87
Hertzberg, “Vore Ældste Lovtexters,” 112.
88
Hertzberg, “Vore Ældste Lovtexters,” 107–8; endorsed and discussed further in Den eldre Gulatingslova, ed. Eithun, Rindal, and Ulset, 10–12.
89
See Ágrip, ed. Driscoll, 99, n. 90, for translation.
90
See Ágrip, ed. Driscoll, 99, n. 91, for translation.
91
This is certainly the conclusion in Norges Gamle Love, ed. Keyser and Munch, I, 124 (Frostathing Law, 16:2).
92
Ágrip, ed. Driscoll, 40.
93
Norske middelalderdokumenter, ed. Bagge, Holstad Smedsdal, and Helle, 21.