King Canute and the tide

The episode is frequently alluded to in contexts where the futility of "trying to stop the tide" of an inexorable event is pointed out, but usually misrepresenting Canute as believing he had supernatural powers, when Huntingdon's story in fact relates the opposite.

Henry of Huntingdon tells the story as one of three examples of Canute's "graceful and magnificent" behaviour (outside of his bravery in warfare),[1] the other two being his arrangement of the marriage of his daughter to the later Holy Roman Emperor and the negotiation of a reduction in tolls on the roads across Gaul to Rome at the imperial coronation of 1027.

[4]It was cited, for example, by Stacy Head as typifying the New Orleans city council's response to Hurricane Katrina (2005), or by Mark Stephens in reference to Ryan Giggs as "the King Canute of football" for his attempts of stopping "the unstoppable tide of information" on the internet in the 2011 British privacy injunctions controversy.

[5] Theodore Dalrymple refers to the story, without misattributing motives of arrogance to Canute, in the context of British reactions to the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014, saying Political power or office often gives those who possess it the illusion that they control events.

[8] The monarch's inability to control the tides is ironically juxtaposed to the fact he otherwise "ruled the waves" through naval might, as recently (in the story) demonstrated by the British victory at the Battle of Trafalgar.

The contemporary Encomium Emmae Reginae has no mention of the episode, which has been taken as indicating its ahistoricity, as it would seem that so pious a dedication might have been recorded there since the same source gives an "eye-witness account of his lavish gifts to the monasteries and poor of St Omer when on the way to Rome, and of the tears and breast-beating which accompanied them".