Talk:North Sea Empire

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: page moved. Vegaswikian (talk) 00:12, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Scandinavian Empire → North Sea Empire — Cnut's empire is known in English by this name, which is currently a redirect to Cnut the Great. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:11, 15 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Comment there's no content. Why should this article exist at all, instead of just being a redirect? 70.29.210.242 (talk) 03:42, 18 March 2010 (UTC)


 * There's a map, and the people who've worked on this are right, it's a former geographic entity worth an article. I'm unwilling to add to it at this title, though. I'd have simply moved it, but North Sea Empire is a redirect.Yngvadottir (talk) 04:16, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The maps do not correspond
Hello. Interesting article. But I have noted that the two maps shown does not correspond. On the tri-colour map, a larger area of Cornwall is under the empire, Öland in Sweden, a larger part of Northern Germany, a small area of Northeastern Germany (Rügen?) and the island of Bornholm is also under the Empire. Which map is correct?

Besides these small errors, what about Iceland, the Faroese Islands and Greenland?

RhinoMind (talk) 20:10, 13 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Regarding the discrepancies between the maps, probably different scholarly interpretations are partly to blame. How much of Sweden he claimed and how seriously to take his claim are both debated, for instance. But the second map also includes - in different colours - vassal states and allied states, so that answers the question about Norse settlements in Ireland, for example. Regarding Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland, they were all independent at the time. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:04, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Note that there are also explanations in the article for at least some of this: for example, scholars arguing that he was reasserting control over the Celtic kingdoms, and a trip he took to reassert control over coastal areas the Kings of Denmark had controlled from the Jomsborg (that's your northeastern German area). Yngvadottir (talk) 21:15, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

"North Sea Empire" is a historiographical term
Some elements in this article give the (inaccurate) impression that "North Sea Empire" was an actual term used by the contemporary Anglo-Scandinavians to refer to the holdings of Cnut the Great. The translations of the phrase atop the infobox in particular strike me as anachronisms. Norþ Sæ Rīce? Really? That would be like putting Imperium Byzantium (or the Greek equivalent) in the infobox of the Byzantine Empire, implying it was a native term, even though we know they called themselves Romans. While Cnut did claim the titles "King of Swedes", "King of Danes", etc., there was no contemporary usage of the term "North Sea Empire"; it was an invention of later historians. Translating the phrase into Old English is therefore misleading. Astoundingly, when I tried to correct this, my edits were reverted for "unsourced"! Well, where is your source for Norþ Sæ Rīce, then? —General534 (talk) 03:49, 13 January 2023 (UTC)


 * You are not providing any source of your own to support your edit that this is strictly a historiographical term. TylerBurden (talk) 00:37, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
 * You ask for me to disprove something which was never proven in the first place? Very well.
 * Let's begin with Norþ Sæ Rīce. The Old English translation was added – without source – on April 23, 2020, by User:2604:6000:1513:8235:C1E9:5835:C229:DC66. This user's other contributions include similar dubious edits such as adding "Old English: Seofon Cyningdōmas" to the lead section of Heptarchy. While perhaps a technically correct Old English rendering of "seven kingdoms", the inclusion of that phrase is once again misleading because it implies that the Anglo-Saxons actually referred to the sum of their domains as the Seofon Cyningdōmas, when the very idea of there having been seven kingdoms dates to the 12th century (in reality, the number of kingdoms fluctuated; twenty-four are known to have existed in total), and the use of "Heptarchy" as a proper noun to the 16th. That is why the article was amended by later editors to remove the erroneous insert and reaffirm the historiographical nature of the term. Likewise, the addition of Norþ Sæ Rīce rests completely on conjecture by the aforementioned user: A simple internet search for Norþ Sæ Rīce returns only its use in this very English Wikipedia article, along with two mirrors and 14 translations of the same. Thus we can conclude that the term is an invention of the aforementioned user based on original research.
 * Moving on to "North Sea Empire". A glance at the Google Books Ngram Viewer reveals absolutely no mention of the term prior to the 20th century. The earliest use of the term comes from 1925, in A History of England by Hilaire Belloc: "... and of them, Canute, coming of stock evangelized by England, and with his ultimate North Sea Empire of Britain, Denmark, and Norway and the Swedish belt, was the greatest." Prior to this, more roundabout phrases were used, such as "the great empire of Canute on the coasts of the North Sea" (Powell, 1876), "the Anglo-Scandinavian Empire of the Great Cnut" (Freeman, 1873), and "the empire of Canute the Great" (Koeppen, 1854). Prior to the Victorian era, most sources refer to Cnut's domains as a collection of kingdoms, with the notable exception of The Histoire of Great Britaine (Speed, 1623), which briefly offers, "Canutus' next care for the maintenance of his own safety, and the continuance of his new got empire, was the establishment of good laws". Here "empire" seems only to refer to the isle of Britain – quite a far cry from the modern phrase.
 * The final and most damning piece of evidence, however, is the etymology of "North Sea" itself. Take a look at North Sea, and you will understand that this body of water would have been called the Frisian Sea in the time of Cnut. —General534 (talk) 09:28, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
 * So the term North Sea Empire is indeed used by reliable sources to describe what the article is about, we don't live in the time of Cnut, so we don't need to name it what he or others of his time called it, we use the common name used today per WP:COMMONNAME. As for translations, those can obviously be removed if they lack citations. TylerBurden (talk) 00:56, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Nowhere did I argue we need to stop using the term altogether; merely that it should be made clear that it is a neologism coined by historians, as has been done for Angevin Empire, Byzantine Empire, Carolingian Empire, Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, Habsburg monarchy, Heptarchy, Kievan Rus, Kingdom of Naples, New Kingdom of Egypt, and countless other articles. —General534 (talk) 02:59, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
 * So then it should be added to an appropriate section with sources supporting it, not to the immediate lead, which is what you did. TylerBurden (talk) 01:41, 19 January 2023 (UTC)