Cnut The Great - King of Norway and Part of Sweden

King of Norway and Part of Sweden

In the 1027 letter, Cnut considers himself King of all England and Denmark, and the Norwegians, and of some of the Swedes – victory over Swedes suggests Helgea to be the river in Uppland and not the one in eastern Scania, while Sweden's king appears to have been made a renegade. He also stated his intention of proceeding to Denmark, for the securing of a peace between the kingdoms of Scandinavia, which fits John of Worcester's writing that in 1027 Cnut heard some Norwegians were discontented and sent them sums of gold and silver to gain their support in his claim on the throne.

In 1028, after his return from Rome, through Denmark, Cnut set off from England with a fleet of fifty ships, to Norway, and the city of Trondheim. Olaf Haraldsson stood down, unable to put up any fight, as his nobles were against him for a tendency to flay their wives for sorcery. Cnut was crowned king, now of England and Denmark, and Norway (he was not King of Sweden, only some of the Swedes). He entrusted the Earldom of Lade to the former line of earls, in Håkon Eiriksson, with Earl Eiríkr Hákonarson probably dead at this date. Hakon was possibly the Earl of Northumbria after Erik too.

Hakon, a member of a family with a long tradition of hostility towards the independent Norwegian kings, and a relative of Cnut's, was already in lordship over the Isles, with the earldom of Worcester, possibly from 1016–17. The sea-lanes through the Irish Sea and Hebrides, led to Orkney and Norway, and were central to Cnut's ambitions for dominance of Scandinavia, as well as the British Isles. Hakon was meant to be Cnut's lieutenant of this strategic chain. And the final component was his installation as the king's deputy in Norway, after the expulsion of Olaf Haraldsson in 1028. Hakon, though, died in a shipwreck in the Pentland Firth, between the Orkneys and the Scottish mainland, either late 1029 or early 1030.

Upon the death of Hakon, Olaf Haraldsson was to return to Norway, with Swedes in his army. He, though, was to meet his death at the hands of his own people, at the Battle of Stiklestad, in 1030. Cnut's subsequent attempt to rule Norway without the key support of the Trondejarls, through Ælfgifu of Northampton, and his eldest son by her, Sweyn Knutsson, was not a success. It is known as Aelfgifu's Time in Norway, with heavy taxation, a rebellion, and the restoration of the former Norwegian dynasty under Saint Olaf's illegitimate son Magnus the Good.