Life
Canute was born c. 1042, one of the many illegitimate sons of Sweyn II Estridsson. He is first noted as a member of Sweyn's 1069 raid of England, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that Canute was one of the leaders of another raid against England in 1075. When returning from England in 1075, the Danish fleet stopped in the County of Flanders. Because of its hostility towards William I of England, Flanders was a natural ally for the Danes. He also led successful campaigns to Sember and Ester, according to skald Kálfr Mánason.
When Sweyn died, Canute's brother Harald III was elected King, and as Canute went into exile in Sweden, he was possibly involved in the active opposition to Harald. In 1080, Canute succeeded Harald to the throne of Denmark. On his accession, he married Adela, daughter of Count Robert I of Flanders. She bore him one son, Karl (a name uncommon in Denmark) in 1084, and twin daughters Cæcilia (who married Erik Jarl) and Ingerid (who married Folke the Fat), born shortly before his death (ca. 1085/86). Ingerid's descendants, the House of Bjelbo, would ascend to the throne of Sweden and Norway and Canute IV's blood returned to the Danish throne in the person of first Olaf II of Denmark.
Read more about this topic: Canute IV Of Denmark
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for—business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You want to prepare your child to think as he gets older. You want him to be critical in his judgments. Teaching a child, by your example, that there’s never any room for negotiating or making choices in life may suggest that you expect blind obedience—but it won’t help him in the long run to be discriminating in choices and thinking.”
—Lawrence Balter (20th century)