Erik Bloodaxe – from king's son to the last Viking king of York

Few names of the Viking age ring with blood and iron like "Bloodaxe". Yet behind Eiríkr blóðøx lies no mere invention: he was a historical king with coins of his own, a man between Norway and England, whose life the sagas later painted in strong colours.

A king's son with a bloody by-name

Erik was a son of Harald Fairhair (Haraldr hárfagri), the king who, by tradition, first united Norway. Harald had many sons, and that was the problem: when the old king granted his favourite Erik the over-lordship, too many brothers stood in the way. According to the Icelandic tradition, Erik had several of them killed – hence, on one reading, the by-name "Bloodaxe". Others read it simply as a warrior's name, "the axe that drinks blood". Which reading is right remains open to this day; the by-name appears only in later sources.

King of Norway – brief and contested

Erik's rule over Norway was short and unloved. He was seen as a harsh ruler under the influence of his wife Gunnhild; Gunnhild, "mother of kings", becomes in the sagas a powerful, feared figure credited with witchcraft. When Erik's youngest brother Hákon – raised as a Christian at the court of the English king Æthelstan – returned to Norway, the great men went over to him. Erik had to give way. With Gunnhild and their sons he left the land, to the isles in the west and finally to England.

King of York

There his second life began. In Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, around the old Viking town of Jórvík (York), Erik was raised to kingship – by the sources even twice, broken by expulsion and return. This is the historically best-secured part of his story: from York we know silver coins with the legend ERIC REX, "King Erik". He was thus one of the last independent Viking kings on English soil, at a time when the Anglo-Saxon kings were forcing the Danelaw piece by piece under their crown.

Egill and the head-ransom

The most famous scene around Erik is told by Egils saga. The Icelandic skald and hard man Egill Skallagrímsson, an old enemy of Erik and Gunnhild, is shipwrecked of all places within Erik's reach near York and falls into his power. His life is forfeit. In a single night Egill composes a great praise-poem for the king, the Höfuðlausn, the "head-ransom" – an end-rhymed song of praise for the man who means to kill him. Erik lets him go: his head is worth the poem. Whether it happened exactly so is saga-stuff; but that a skald could ransom his life with a poem fits precisely a world in which the right word was worth gold.

The fall at Stainmore – and Odin's hall

Erik's end came in 954: driven out and in flight, he fell, by tradition, in an ambush at Stainmore in the Pennines. With him ended the independent Viking kingship of York. Yet poetry gave him a shining afterlife: the public-domain memorial poem Eiríksmál, likely commissioned by Gunnhild, has Odin himself open the gates of Valhöll and receive the fallen king with his warriors – a place of honour for the man life had treated harshly. So the exiled king becomes, in the end, a hero whom the Allfather calls to him.

Cattle die, / kinsmen die,
and so one dies oneself;
but one thing I know / that never dies:
the fame of a dead man's deeds.Hávamál 77, translation after Henry Adams Bellows 1923 (public domain)

That is exactly what mattered to men like Erik: not the long life, but the name that lasts. And it has lasted – to this day.

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Sources & literature

• Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla (Haralds saga hárfagra, Hákonar saga góða), c. 1230.
• Egils saga Skallagrímssonar (Höfuðlausn), 13th century.
• Eiríksmál (anonymous memorial poem, 10th century); Hávamál 76–77, translation Henry Adams Bellows 1923 (public domain).
• Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on Northumbria; York coins "ERIC REX" (British Museum / Yorkshire Museum).

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