Were the Danes the first to coin the name England for the southern part of today’s England in 897? I had always assumed that the Angles had called their land “Angel land(?) or Engla land(?)(not sure of the spelling! )”" I’ve seen only a 2 references to the Danes coining the name online, making me a little suspicious.
The Danish King Cnut was the first to use the title King Of England, but I believe the name had existed some time before the Danes used it as an official title.
from Wikipedia’s List of English Monarchs
This list of kings and queens of the Kingdom of England begins with Alfred the Great, who initially ruled Wessex, one of the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which later made up modern England. Alfred styled himself King of the Anglo-Saxons from about 886, and while he was not the first king to claim to rule all of the English, his rule represents the start of the first unbroken line of kings to rule the whole of England, the House of Wessex.[1]
Arguments are made for a few different kings thought to control enough Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to be deemed the first king of England. For example, Offa of Mercia and Egbert of Wessex are sometimes described as kings of England by popular writers, but it is no longer the majority view of historians that their wide dominions are part of a process leading to a unified England. Historian Simon Keynes states, for example, that “Offa was driven by a lust for power, not a vision of English unity; and what he left was a reputation, not a legacy.”[2] This refers to a period in the late 8th century when Offa achieved a dominance over many of the kingdoms of southern England, but this did not survive his death in 796.[3][4]
In 829 Egbert of Wessex conquered Mercia, but he soon lost control of it. It was not until the late 9th century that one kingdom, Wessex, had become the dominant Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Its king, Alfred the Great, was overlord of western Mercia and used the title King of the Angles and Saxons , but he never ruled eastern and northern England, which was then known as the Danelaw, having earlier been conquered by the Danes from Scandinavia. His son Edward the Elder conquered the eastern Danelaw, but Edward’s son Æthelstan became the first king to rule the whole of England when he conquered Northumbria in 927, and he is regarded by some modern historians as the first true king of England.[3][4] The title “King of the English” or Rex Anglorum in Latin, was first used to describe Æthelstan in one of his charters in 928.
I would have guessed it was coined by non-German/Norse unaware that the “home of the Angels” (Anglia) was actually in the Baltic.
According to the wiki:
The earliest recorded use of the term, as “Engla londe”, is in the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The term was then used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning “the land inhabited by the English”, and it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was then part of the English kingdom of Northumbria.
So not the Danes.
New word for today: toponymy 
Nifty typo. 
Basically this. The simple answer to the OP’s question is “No”. The Danes, as far as can be told, did not coin “England”, but the name only gained currency during the reign of Cnut, who was Danish.
Okaaaay…that bald statement aside…
I will give a detailed, holistic answer to the question. When different countries arose, and how they got their names, has interested me for years. But when dealing with countries as old as England, it is hard to find a precise answer because ancient records were often not kept in the vernacular but in Latin, vernacular records were in an older version of a language, and we often don’t have the original record but a scribe’s transcription, which could have been edited, plus the reliability of various documents is considered questionable. But let’s first set some groundwork:
-Before there was an “England”, there were the “English”, a people whose name derives from the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples from Northern Europe who settled and partly conquered Great Britain during the first millenium AD. A good article about the history of the Angles can be found here.
-The term “Englisc” (pronounced in the Anglo-Saxon about the same as “English” today) is very old, older than the state that was formed from the different Anglo-Saxon kingdoms under the Wessex dynasty. The term “Engliscmon” = Englishman - first occurs in Wessex’ “Ines’ law code” that should date to before 726.
-Before we talk about the name “England”, it would be pertinent to point out when and how the country actually came about. This is for a much longer discussion, but as per the quote mbh provided from Wikipedia, it is somewhat contentious who the first “King of England” was. England wasn’t founded on one particular day; it evolved over time from a collection of kingdoms over which various kings claimed hegemony at various times. Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, was one of the most successful in this regard, styling himself “King of the Anglo-Saxons” and he was apparently behind the creation of an “English” identity that would apply across his realm. However, historians tend to treat Aethelstan as the best candidate for the “first King of England”, as he is recorded as having conquered the entired territory, including Northumbria. On the other hand, not all his conquests were necessarily stable and his hold on Northumbria was not necessarily absolute, but more of an overlordship, according to some. In any event, it took until King Edward (reigned 959-975) as far as I know, for royal power to be consolidated to the extent that the kingdom was in no real danger of being split up again from within.
So the kingdom consolidated during the 10th century. The interesting thing, however, is that for a long time, it didn’t have a real toponym. The story of how the name of England developed is told in great detail in this article. It is the best, most thorough study I know of on the subject, and I recommend it as an interesting read. Here are some of the most relevant points:
-During the 9th century and the beginning of the 10th century, where a name is recorded, the country is simply referred to as “Angelcynnes lond”, I.E. the land of the English race, or some variation on this. At times in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “Angelcynn”, I.E. the English race, is apparently used as a synecdoche for the whole country.
-“Englaland”, the original form of the toponym “England” does not occur (with the exception of the example in the Anglo-Saxon translation of Bede that refers only to an area of Northumbria now in Scotland; I suspect that that’s the reference to the year 897 - or thereabouts - quoted by the OP), until Aelfric, a monk who was a prolific writer at the time of king Aethelred (ruled 978-1016 with one break) used it for the whole country in a number of his writings. It does not seem to have had currency among other writers, and it is theorized that Aelfric coined the term, or else was inspired to use it after seeing it in the Old English translation of Bede. Scholars believe Aelfric wrote some of these in the last decade of the 10th century. Also, there are three references to Englaland (with varying spelling) in the treaty referred to as “II Aethelred” between King Aethelred and the Viking army, which is usually equated with the treaty that took place in the year 994 according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. However, as the treaty survives in a 12th-century copy, it is possible that “Englaland” was a later edit to make the terminology more up-to-date. We don’t actually know.
-The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle abruptly switches from “Angelcynn” to “Engla londe” in an entry for 1014 about Aethelred’s reestablishment as king and continues to use it from then on, though “Angelcynn” does reappear. This perfectly alligns with the Danish King Cnut’s coming to the throne in 1016. In his vernacular charters from early in his reign onward, Cnut uses the title “King of All England” (in Old English/Anglo-Saxon: ealles Englalandes cininge).
Pursuant to these and other facts, the author of the article I linked hypothesizes that in the reign of Cnut, a new foreign king who would have wanted to consolidate power over all the land, “Eng[la]land” was chosen as a new name for unifying the hitherto not really named country, likely under the influence of Archbishop Wulfstan another early user of the term, who would likely have gotten it from Aelfric.
So in conclusion, the term wasn’t coined by the Danish but in all likelihood was a native Anglo-Saxon term (though interestingly, medieval Scandinavian and Icelandic sources, some of which may be contemporary with Cnut, do use the modern form of the word, “England” while the English would probably still have been using “Englaland” or some other earlier form of the word). However, a Danish king who got to rule of that country was the first known to style himself king of all England (previous kings had used styles such as “Rex Anglorum”, I.E. King of the English. Aethelstan, who claimed overlordship over all of Britain, [historians disagree on how seriously, though there is something to be said for the claim], styled himself not only king of “the English”, but also king, emperor, or otherwise ruler of “all Britain” - note again that in the case of England he referred at that early date to the people only, but in the case of the whole island he used the toponym, again indicating that England did not yet have a steady name of its own in his time.
This reply is why I subscribe to SD.
Thank you so much themapleeaf. Truly remarkable!
A delight to read. Thank you.
My pleasure.
P.S. Even though, as I said, the exact form “England” seems to have been used in Scandinavia while in England the form was still “Englaland”, I don’t know of any specific evidence that the Scandinavian form influenced the eventual English form. I could be wrong, but I think the “la” sound was dropped from the middle of the word (or absorbed into the rest if it) simply through an evolutionary process of the word or of the language as a whole.
Would that be because a land area that became England was not yet defined? So Britain was an island with a loose collection of tribes or smaller defined areas, rather than bordered countries? (I have no idea, just curious).
Essentially yes. The terrirory we now recognize as England had only recently been (more or less) consolidated and thus likely had yet to acquire a distinct territorial identity. The concept of the English people already had currency but the territory had until recently been several smaller kingdoms (at an earlier date there were some seven of these - we retroactively speak of England as having been a “heptarchy”). People had been migrating to Southern Britain for centuries (a bit more reading on this topic can be found here), and it logically took some time for them to all acquire the identity of one nation (again, Alfred the Great, King of Wessex and eventually the ruler of much of modern England, was, as far as can be told from surviving sources, largely responsible for fostering the idea of a unified English nation among the different kingdoms and peoples/tribes). Plus there was the “Danelaw”, an area of England controlled by Danes/Vikings between 865 and 954. We’re talking about a period in time when nation-building was occurring in Britain and England was consolidating from, like you said, smaller defined areas. But basically the English people were united first, and then they gave their name to the newly-formed country. The concept of a “Britain” already existed, but the concept of a distinct country eventually called “England” was as yet nascent.
You need to understand that at the end of the 1st millenium AD, Europe was much more divided than today and the very concept of statehood was different from today. Few nation-states are clearly recognizeable and we rather have examples of collections of smaller fiefs or petty kingdoms loosely centered around an overlord; plus lands were often divided among sons, conquered, ceded to another, etc. so the actual map of Europe was constantly changing. England was actually a fairly early example of a country that consolidated into what we would call today a nation-state, I.E. a country with one dominant people who identify with it.You also need to take into account that in the past, it was not easy for a king to exercise centralized power over a whole country. The logistics were obviously more difficult than today, and because there were a lot of lower chieftains and eventually feudal lords administering their own parts of the territory, these were applying their own rule over their respective territories, being closer to the action, so to speak, than the king himself. In France. for example, it took much longer to consolidate royal power than in England. It is telling that as late as the 17th century, there was political unrest among different nobles and Louis XIV, in establishing autocratic rule over the whole country, devised the scheme of “inviting” all the nobility to live with him in Versailles, so that he could keep them away from their estates, keep an eye on them, and I imagine keep them occupied with currying favor with him rather than thinking of rising up against him and starting conflicts among themselves.