Talk:Cnut

When did Canute become "Great"?
I never saw the phrase "Cnut the Great" until I saw this article a few years ago. I grew up learning that only Alfred had this designation. Indeed Alfred, the savior of his country and his people, seems to merit this epithet better than Cnut.

''Alfred understood that his people needed history to remind them of their loyalties. So he instituted a chronicle, a record of current events, unique in Europe. The saviour of the English language, he was also the founder of English prose. No other English monarch is remembered as "Great". "The Story of English", McNeil, Cran & McCrumb, 1986.''

A separate section on nomenclature is typical in Wikipedia and this change, if it indeed is an accepted change, should be mentioned somewhere in the article.68.196.10.68 (talk) 16:46, 27 December 2021 (UTC)captcrisis


 * That is an interesting question and one I have sometimes wondered about. Among modern historians the term seems to be mainly used by Timothy Bolton - it is the title of his well regarded biography. I have looked to see whether he discusses the term, and presumably he does but I cannot see where without reading the whole book. Dudley Miles (talk) 17:41, 27 December 2021 (UTC)


 * Designations might change over time. Cnut the Great was "Emperor of the North" and founder of the shortlived "Northsea Empire". In Danish he has 'always' been refered to as Knud den Store = Cnut the Great (or Magnus when latin is used). Perhaps it's a characteristic of our time, that we in some connections seek to sort of synchronize the expressions used in various langauges? But to use the designation "the Great" can some times be a fairly modern phenomenon. Take the Danish King Godfred/Gudfred (c. 804-810), until the 1980'ies no one ever called him "den Store" and untill around 2010 this expression was only rarely used, but since then it has become more common to use and perhaps in another decade or two he will predominantly be refered to as "Godfred den Store"? Oleryhlolsson (talk) 18:47, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Just plain (non-great) "Canute" is the almost unanimous verdict on Ngram. ThuDauMot (talk) 01:18, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

Cnut being one of 'the Great's is by merit of being a king of multiple kingdoms. Alfred being the only English monarch called the great is true, because Cnut was Danish not English, whereas all other kings were English/British or the group they were from became English/British, like the normans Kind Regards, NotAnotherNameGuy (talk) 19:53, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

"Cunt the Great" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Cunt the Great and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. &#8209;&#8209;Neveselbert (talk · contribs · email) 01:28, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 1 July 2023

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Not Moved (closed by non-admin page mover) * Pppery * it has begun...  19:28, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Cnut → Canute – A number of moves of this article have been discussed comparatively recently, but this one has not been discussed in the last decade. This remains his WP:COMMONNAME in English, see e.g. King Canute and the tide It is also used by some respectable sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica and the British monarchy website. It is also not what his own people would have called him, which would be "Knut" or "Knutr". PatGallacher (talk) 20:58, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree with this. He is far better known in modern English as Canute, and is still remembered and spoken about under that name, if only for that business with the tide. As for being called "the great", he may well have been known as this in Denmark, but he is not traditionally known as this in English. TharkunColl (talk) 21:18, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. This has been repeatedly raised, most recently in 2015. Cnut is the usual spelling in modern reliable sources, as can be seen in the bibliography, and this should be the basis of our spelling. Britannica is over a century old and the monarchy website is not a reliable source. Dudley Miles (talk) 22:51, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. According to this Ngram, Cnut and Canute are very much on par. I don't believe there is a good reason to change the title. 〜 Festucalex  •  talk  09:35, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * How about King Canute and the tide then? TharkunColl (talk) 11:54, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * What about it? 〜 Festucalex  •  talk  12:29, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Support Though best move would be to Canute the Great. Pronunciation, if nothing else. Anyone adequately familiar with English phonetics can pronounce Canute with ease. I also believe there is practically no history on the term "Cnut the Great" (which we now have in bold type), lots on "Canute the Great". Those who continue to wanna make a nut out of this man (no offence), should stop it. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 13:45, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose per the sources used in the article - every mention of the subject of the article in the titles is "Cnut" (only the ODNB mentions Canute, but that's an alternate name, with the actual title being "Cnut"), and with only the 1911 EB in the further reading using "Canute". Ealdgyth (talk) 13:53, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Reply I have looked through the archives, and I cannot see where this possible move was discussed as recently as 2015. If you look at Canute (given name) you will see that there are several Scandinavian monarchs with names like this who we do anglicise to Canute. PatGallacher (talk) 15:01, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * See Talk:Cnut/Archive 3. Not a formal proposal but comments on change to Canute between 2015 and 2019. Dudley Miles (talk) 16:42, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Point taken, but that was just a brief informal discussion rather than a formal move request, and it didn't seem to come to a clear consensus. PatGallacher (talk) 17:09, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Even the Royal Mint spells his name as Canute on its thousandth anniversary commemorative coin, and if there exists such a thing as an "official" source, that's it. TharkunColl (talk) 18:31, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * It may be official but it is also unreliable. It claims at that it started in the reign of Alfred the Great, which is nonsense. it is just a sales organization which has no regard to historical facts. Dudley Miles (talk) 18:50, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Alfred struck coins, and there has been a continuous royal establishment doing so since his day. While it leaves out quite a lot of history and change, it's not exactly nonsense. TharkunColl (talk) 19:27, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * There was no royal establishment producing coins in Alfred's day. They were struck by many different private moneyers from the 7th century to long after the Norman Conquest. Alfred's reign was not numismatically significant. Dudley Miles (talk) 19:49, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * But a continuous history can be traced, my point being that it's not complete nonsense. But it's also somewhat beside the point. The Royal Mint is simply one example. Canute, for better or worse, is still part of our living tradition, purely because of the sea incident (whether or not it actually happened), and in modern English his name is spelt Canute. Are we to adopt contemporary spellings for all monarchs? TharkunColl (talk) 19:56, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * We go by modern spellings in reliable sources, as shown by the spellings in the bibliography. Dudley Miles (talk) 20:09, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Then perhaps you might like to go and change King Canute and the tide. It's almost as if there are two separate individuals, the "Cnut" who reigned over England, Denmark, etc. and the "legendary" Canute who got his feet wet. This distorts the truth. TharkunColl (talk) 20:14, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Since the story of Cnut and the tides is almost certainly either totally legendary or at best a distortion of a misunderstood episode - it makes sense that we would consider the person of the story of the waves to be unrelated to the powerful king who ruled over what could be termed an empire.. Ealdgyth (talk) 21:59, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * That's like having two separate spellings for Ælfred, King of Wessex and the Anglo-Saxons, and Alfred, some bloke who burnt some cakes. The article title for that particular individual, incidentally, uses the modern spelling. TharkunColl (talk) 08:43, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME, Ngram above in fact shows that Cnut is still the more widely used spelling. --TylerBurden (talk) 00:17, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Comment: If you are going to use WP:COMMONNAME, please make sure that the "Cnut" or "Canute" being used in RS actually refer to the subject in question. Canute the Great was not the only historical person known in English sources as "Cnut" or "Canute". --StellarHalo (talk) 07:18, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. The proposed move has the same rationale as the recent move request to Bonnie Prince Charlie. We whould use the name used by modern scholarship and serious reference works not the one of popular imagination. Celia Homeford (talk) 07:30, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. His common name in reliable sources has been Cnut for decades. I'm not sure I've seen Canute in contemporary sources since I was a kid. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:15, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. WP:COMMONNAME Cnut is effectively the most common scholarly name seen in most sources, as raised by others. Furthermore, Canute already redirects here so I don't think readers will be lost. Chariotsacha (talk) 21:35, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

The waves
I've readded a line about the story of canute and the tide to the lede - a section has been added to the main body since this seems to have been deleted and it's almost certainly the sole thing anyone not versed in Anglosaxon history will know about him so it's weird not having it in the lead.. 37.245.43.126 (talk) 12:21, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Also known as Canute the Great
I do not believe this reversal was helpful or constructive, especially when source citations were left (disrupted now) for the name form "Canute the Great" as his a.k.a.. I will restore that name form and correct the citations unless someone can come up with a good reason not to. Several more reliable sources available through Google show us that "Canute the Great" is at least as well known as "Cnut the Great". SergeWoodzing (talk) 09:17, 10 October 2023 (UTC)


 * But you removed Cnut the Great, of which there are more instances on google and it's equally reliably sourced. I don't see any reason to not also include Canute the Great, apart from inelegance in an endless list of minor variations on his name - there seems to be extensive discussion of this on talk that comes down on the side of using Cnut rather than Canute in general, so Cnut the GReat seems like the better one to list if we have to choose. 37.245.43.126 (talk) 11:44, 10 October 2023 (UTC) 37.245.43.126 (talk) 11:44, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * "Canute", being the only academically established English exonym used for centuries for Danish Knud and Swedish Knut, can hardly be called a minor variation. I would like to see 3 or more reliable sources for "Cnut the Great". When "Canute the Great" is reinstated, there will be at least that many sources cited for that name form. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 13:20, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't think we need to ref bomb the article but as you've asked:
 * The British Library - https://www.bl.uk/people/cnut
 * The British Museum - https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG105835
 * The National Portrait Gallery - https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp14455/canute-or-cnut-the-great
 * Yale University Press - https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300243185/cnut-the-great/
 * BBC World Service - https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/proginfo/2019/24/the-forum
 * English Historical Review - https://www.jstor.org/stable/575068
 * The Empire of Cnut the Great - https://brill.com/display/title/15086?language=en
 * etc etc
 * There's consensus above (and in the archives) that this article should use Cnut rather than Canute as the primary name. It makes sense that the coverage of this epithet should reflect that when it's use is well sourced, unless we end up with "Cnut, also known as Cnut the Great or Canute or  Canute the Great". I think that's getting silly.
 * Canute is clearly not the only academically established exonym, and modern scholarship uses Cnut, which was the conclusion of the earlier discussions. 37.245.43.126 (talk) 13:58, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
 * We are discussing an a.k.a. here, not the article name.
 * It seems necessary to repeat and clarify: "Canute", being the only academically established English exonym used for centuries for Danish Knud and Swedish Knut, can hardly be called a minor variation. It is not a minor variation.
 * The term "Canute the Great" should not be quashed in the lead. It's too well known and well referenced for that. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 11:41, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
 * But it all flows on from the article name.
 * It is not necessary to repeat, especially when its not the case that it's the "only academically established exonym". it's clear from the sources above, and previous discussion that Cnut is well established and in modern writing at least, more common.
 * When I say minor variation what I mean is that the degree of difference between Cnut the Great and Canute the Great is small and that I don't really see the need to list "the Great" twice in the AKA. If the argument is whether it should follow just one of Cnut or Canute then we should go with the consensus for the article.
 * alternatively we could go with something like "Cnut, also known as Canute, sometimes given the epithet the Great, was King of...." 37.245.43.126 (talk) 12:38, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
 * OK by me.
 * I would however like not to be misinterpreted on the same detail twice in one discussion. "Canute" is the only academically established English exonym  to have been used for centuries, which was used for centuries, always in use for centuries for Danish Knud and Swedish Knut. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 08:15, 14 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Your view is clear. 37.245.43.126 (talk) 04:54, 16 October 2023 (UTC)