Eric Bloodaxe was a tenth-century Norwegian king and the last independent ruler of Viking York, whose career is known mostly through Icelandic sagas written three centuries after his death.
Eric Bloodaxe was a son of Harald Fairhair, the king credited with unifying Norway, and he is one of those figures whose fame rests almost entirely on how good the stories about him are.
The verifiable outline is short: he ruled part or all of Norway for a few years around 930, was displaced by his half-brother Håkon the Good, appears in England in the 940s, held the kingdom of York twice in the late 940s and early 950s, and was killed at Stainmore in 954.
Everything vivid — the byname, the fratricides, the sorceress queen, the poem that saved a man's life — comes from Icelandic sagas written between two and three hundred years afterwards, and the article separates the two as it goes.
He was born early in the tenth century, a son of Harald Fairhair, and the sagas make him the favourite among a large number of sons — Harald is said to have had many, by several women, which is itself part of the problem the succession created.
The saga tradition has him raised as a warrior and sent raiding young, to the Baltic, to Frisia, to Scotland and Ireland, before his father made him overking above his brothers.
He married Gunnhild, who in the sagas is a figure of enormous and sinister power — a queen with a reputation for sorcery, blamed for much of what he did and outliving him by decades. How much of her is a real political actor and how much is a literary type is unrecoverable, and the sagas are hostile to her in ways that say more about their authors than about her.
The sagas give him a consistent character — violent, effective, badly advised — and it is worth being clear that this is a literary portrait built by Icelanders writing under Norwegian kings descended from his rivals.
The byname itself is the clearest case. Blóðøx, "bloody axe", is explained in the sagas as earned by killing several of his own brothers to secure the succession, and it may equally have been earned as a raider, or applied long after his death by people who knew the stories rather than the man. It does not appear in any contemporary source.
The one scene everyone remembers is from Egil's saga: Egil Skallagrímsson, Eirik's enemy, is captured at York and composes a praise-poem for him overnight — the Höfuðlausn, the "head-ransom" — and is released for it. It is a wonderful story about the power of poetry, told by poets, about a king who was safely dead.
Harald Fairhair set him over his brothers as overking, probably around 930, and he did not hold it. The sagas say he killed several brothers; what is clear is that his rule was resented and his support narrow.
His half-brother Håkon, who had been fostered at the English court of Æthelstan, returned to Norway with English backing and took the country with the support of the magnates. Eirik left, apparently without a serious fight.
This is the pattern of Norwegian politics in the century after Harald: a kingdom that could be taken by whoever the regional aristocracy preferred, and lost the same way. It is the same dynamic that killed Olaf II at Stiklestad a century later.
He appears in England in the 940s, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the Northumbrians accepting a king called Eric — twice, in 947–948 and again in 952–954, with the West Saxon king Eadred expelling him in between.
York in this period was the last independent Scandinavian kingdom in England, ruled alternately by Norse kings from Dublin and by adventurers like Eirik, and its acceptance of him was a political calculation by the Northumbrian magnates and the archbishop of York rather than an act of conquest.
The coins are the hard evidence. Pennies struck at York read ERIC REX around a sword, which tells us he ruled there, that he minted in his own name, and — since the coin carries no portrait — nothing whatever about him as a person.
In 954 the Northumbrians expelled him for the second time, and he was killed at Stainmore, on the pass over the Pennines between Yorkshire and Cumbria, in circumstances the sources do not agree on.
The fullest account is late and describes a betrayal by a man named Maccus and an ambush, with Eirik dying alongside his son and several other kings. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle simply says he was killed.
What is not in doubt is the consequence: Northumbria was absorbed into the kingdom of England and never again had a king of its own. The Rey Cross on Stainmore, a Norse-style stone traditionally associated with the site, is the only physical marker of any of it.