King of Denmark (1095–1103), a popular and generous son of Sweyn II who won Scandinavia its own archbishopric at Lund and died on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Eric I, called Evergood (Ejegod), was king of Denmark from 1095 to 1103, and one of the most admired of the sons of Sweyn II. Generous, genial, and physically imposing, his reign was remembered as a return of good fortune after the famines of his brother Oluf.
His greatest achievement was diplomatic and ecclesiastical: he persuaded the pope to grant Scandinavia its own archbishopric, established at Lund in 1103–1104, freeing the northern Church from the German see of Hamburg-Bremen. A devout man, he also promoted the canonisation of his martyred brother Canute, and he died in 1103 on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, at Paphos on Cyprus.
Eric was born about 1056, another of the many sons of Sweyn II Estridsson. He came to the throne in 1095 on the death of his brother Oluf, the fourth of the brothers to reign, and brought to it a reputation for generosity, eloquence, and great physical strength that made him widely popular.
His marriage to Bodil produced a son, Canute Lavard, whose murder a generation later would help plunge Denmark into civil war.
Eric's byname "Evergood" reflects the warmth of his memory in the sources: a big, handsome, open-handed king, eloquent and companionable, whose accession felt like sunshine after the dearth of Oluf's years. He is the golden figure among the sons of Sweyn, praised for generosity and good fortune alike.
Beneath the geniality was a genuinely able ruler and a sincere Christian. He worked patiently and successfully at the great diplomatic task of winning a Scandinavian archbishopric, took a personal role in promoting his brother's sainthood, and crowned his devotion with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from which he did not return. Popular, pious, and effective, he embodied for later Danes the ideal of the good king.
Eric's central achievement was to free the Scandinavian Church from foreign control. For generations the north had been subject to the German archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen; Eric travelled and negotiated with Rome, and won the pope's agreement to raise Lund, in his Danish province of Scania, to an archbishopric with authority over all Scandinavia. The see was established in 1103–1104, a landmark in the independence of the northern Church.
He paired this with devotion to his own dynasty's holiness, pressing the cause of his murdered brother Canute, whose canonisation had been secured in 1101.
In his last years Eric set out, in the fervour of the age of the First Crusade, on pilgrimage to the Holy Land — the first Danish king to do so. He got as far as Cyprus, where he fell ill and died at Paphos on 10 July 1103. His queen Bodil went on to Jerusalem and died on the Mount of Olives.
Eric Evergood is remembered as the best-loved of the sons of Sweyn, the generous king of the good years. His winning of the archbishopric of Lund was a decisive step toward an independent Scandinavian Church, and his pilgrimage marked the entry of the Danish monarchy into the wider devotional world of crusading Europe. Through his son Canute Lavard, however, his line also became the seed of the civil wars that would convulse Denmark for a generation before his descendants founded the Valdemar dynasty.