The reign of Æthelred the Unready is one of exceptional interest: it boasts a dramatic narrative, from Æthelred's ascent to the throne following the assassination of his brother, King Edward, to the invasion and the conquest of his country by the Danish rulers Swein Forkbeard and Cnut and the king's demise in 1016. The reign is distinguished too by its relatively plentiful textual sources in a variety of genres, such as the unusually informative but opinionated account of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the wealth of the diplomatic record, with many charters surviving from the reign, as well as lawcodes, homilies and political tracts. These various sources not only provide different windows onto the period but are also remarkable for the inclusion, in some, of criticism of the king, a very rare occurrence among Anglo- Saxon sources. It is not surprising therefore that Æthelred has been well served by scholars of Anglo-Saxon England, with the publication of three full-length biographies in the past decade and a half by Ryan Lavelle, Ann Williams and Levi Roach, building in important ways upon the seminal work of Simon Keynes published in 1980, whose analysis of the charter evidence transformed scholarship on the reign.

Hayden White famously argued that historians shape their accounts of historical events according to certain narrative forms embedded in our own social consciousness.

From an eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon perspective, it is hard to write Æthelred's reign as anything other than a tragedy.