The reign of King Cnut the Great (1016-1035) marks a pivotal point in the history of both England and Scandinavia, yet his conquests and his consolidation of power remain under-appreciated and rarely studied. Almost all existing scholarship has been geographically centred on either England or Scandinavia. However, this study, through a series of studies of individual aspects of his rise to power in those regions, seeks to encompass his entire dominion, and cast new light on our understanding of the nature of this political unit and contemporary figures' conceptions of it. The result is a...

This volume contains the proceedings of a conference held in Oslo in late 2005, which brought together scholars working in a wide variety of disciplines from Scandinavia, Great Britain and Ireland. The papers here began as those read at the conference, augmented by two written immediately after by attendees, but have been updated in light of the discussions in Oslo and more recent scholarship. They offer historical, archaeological, art-historical, religious-historical and philological views of the interaction and interdependence of Celtic and Norse populations in the Irish Sea region in the...