Eric Bloodaxe coinage
While a wildly colorful historical figure, there is little that is definitely known about Eric Haraldsson, later given the epithet “Bloodaxe". What we have as evidence are passages in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Life of St Cathróe and possibly skaldic poetry, and Eric's coinage. Eddas recreating Eric’s exploits may be exaggerations due to skalds wishing to curry favor with him or simple embroidery on the legends over the years to come.
We do know that he was a mid-tenth century King of Northumbria, a part of England that remained under Danish rule after much of the rest were solidly Anglo Saxons. Most scholars say he was also King of Norway and was the son of Harald Fairhair and the brother of Haakon the Good. His nickname, “Bloodaxe” may refer to his ruthless murder of his brothers or simply point to his history as a violent Viking raider, but in fact it is not known that the appellation was applied to him in his own lifetime.
Young Eric grew up with a foster family, the custom for noble sons in that time, but the sagas say that at the tender age of twelve he was already out a-viking, raiding ports in Northern Europe from Ireland to Russia.
Harald Fairhair, King of Norway, may have been polygamous, and Eric’s mother is said to have been a Danish princess named Ragnhildr. This means he had half-brothers who may have had claims on their father’s throne in competition with him. Sometime in the 930s, he fought and killed all but one of them, Haakon, later called “the Good” who was in fosterage with King Athelstan of Wessex, and succeeded his father as King of Norway. He was a brutal tyrant, however, and when Haakon returned to Norway Eric was ousted and Haakon made king buy the nobles.
Eric’s father Harald Fairhair had consolidated his rule over the Orkney earldom, so Erik went there after he was forced out of Norway. He married at daughter to the heir to that earldom, and therefore may have been the grandfather of MacBeth, made legendary by William Shakespeare in his play of that name.
How Eric became King of Northumbria is fuzzy, but we do know he did from more reliable chronicles and the existence of his coinage. Northumbria and its main city, Jorvik, later York, had been in dispute for decades between West-Saxon kings and the Hiberno-Norse. Athelstan’s son, Eadred, tried to bring Northumbria under Saxon rule after his father’s death, but by this time, 948, Eric was on that throne. When he rebelled, Eadred successfully convinced his supporters to desert him on pain of brutal punishment. In 949 the Saxon King Eadred appears to have turned a blind eye to the actions of Alaf, who seized the throne of Northumbria. Erik Bloodaxe seized back the throne in 952.
Eric was not king for very long, and was killed during an expedition into the Pennines in 954.
There are numerous other stories of dubious authenticity about how he went to Spain and was killed there, a sojourn in the Hebrides, and more viable stories of his on again, off again alliance with the politically scheming Archbishop Wulfstan, who reportedly supported Eric as king in exchange for the latter’s conversion to Christianity.
Eric Bloodaxe’s death is dramatized in Cecelia Holland’s The Soul Thief
, with an alternate explanation of how he came to die. He is also a character in Philip José Farmer’s science fiction trilogy Riverworld
and in a novel about his wife, Gunhild, in Poul Anderson’s Mother of Kings
.