4 - Ælfgifu/Emma and Cnut

Summary

In 1017 Cnut, king of the English (1016–35), king of Denmark (1019–35), and ruler of parts of Norway and Sweden (1028–35) married Emma/Ælfgifu, the widow of King Æthelred II. The marriage was a blatantly political step which allowed Cnut to gain some control over the fragmented alliances of the English, Scandinavians and Normans, and their various interests in the throne of England. By making Emma/Ælfgifu his queen, Cnut effectively secured her support and defused the potential threat represented by the exiled æthelings Edward and Alfred. Cnut had also taken control of a realm divided by Danish and English ethnic and political identities, and by the shifting and often treacherous allegiances of powerful individuals on both sides; this is no doubt why he worked so hard to establish a realm united by peace, and to establish for himself an English political identity. His choice of Emma/Ælfgifu as his queen placed her in an ambivalent position in terms of both national unification and personal political identity. Emma/Ælfgifu was a foreign born queen whose double name represented her double identity as both Norman (by birth) and English (by marriage). For Cnut in 1017 however – and arguably for William in 1066 – she had come to represent continuity with the English regime, if not Englishness itself. Whatever the reasons for the marriage it seems to have been a success by any standards, and certainly by medieval ones. In public and in private, Cnut and Emma carried out what Simon Keynes has quite accurately described as a ‘brilliantly contrived double act’. Yet for all the evidence that they worked very closely together, one of the most remarkable events of their reign was the emergence of the queen as a major figure in her own right in both the art historical and literary record; indeed, within the art historical record the image of Emma/Ælfgifu is far more innovative and has proven far more important in many ways than that of Cnut. Two portraits of Emma/Ælfgifu survive (one with and one without Cnut), more than survive of any other Anglo-Saxon queen. She was not the only, nor even the earliest queen to be depicted in Anglo-Saxon art.