3 Beowulf of Skåne: Skjǫldr and the skalds

Winchester, capital of Wessex, is where Cnut could most plausibly have seen a copy of Beowulf . Having been crowned king of England in 1017, he visited the town a few times in the following two or three years, and then more often towards the end of his reign. His marriage to Emma, King Æthelred's widow, in 1017 was a stabilising measure that speaks for his interest in preserving some continuity with the old regime, whereby an ideology of common ancestry would also have been welcome. The genealogy in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the annal 855 tells us that King Æthelwulf was descended from Scealdwa (‘Scyld’). As we have seen, the earliest version of this entry survives through Æthelweard's Latin translation of an Old English text which pre-dates the version of 891 which gave rise to the Chronicle in versions A–F. This version says that Scyld's father ‘Scef’ came from ‘Scani’ (‘Skåne’). It seems likely that the same information in vernacular form encouraged Cnut to adopt Scealdwa as his ancestor in common with King Æthelred. As we shall see, the (proper) noun Skjǫldr , a Norse cognate, begins to appear in conjunction with the more common epithet Skjǫldungar in eulogies composed by Cnut's skalds in the late 1020s. A sizeable body of poetry was created by these men in this period of Danish acclimatisation to England. If it is thought that only the genealogies in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were needed for this influence to be made, it is worth recalling that Scyldingas , the word for ‘Danes’ which marked the meaning of Skjǫldungar , is found only in Beowulf .