Eric Bloodaxe
The king thrown out of Norway who took York twice and died on a moor. Eirik Haraldsson, called Bloodaxe, was a son of Harald Fairhair and succeeded him around 931. He lasted perhaps two years. The sagas say his half-brother Haakon returned from England with support and Eirik left rather than fight, which is a polite way of saying he was driven out. The byname is not explained by any contemporary source. Later Icelandic tradition attaches it to the killing of his brothers; other readings make it a viking's name earned raiding, and both may be later invention. What happened next is the interesting part and the disputed part. An Eirik appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as king in Northumbria, taken by the Northumbrians in 947, expelled, restored in 952 and expelled again in 954, dying that year at Stainmore. Whether the Norwegian and the Northumbrian Eirik are one man is a genuine scholarly argument: the English sources never call him Harald's son, the Norse ones never mention York, and the identification comes from later saga writers with an interest in a good story. York under him was the last independent Scandinavian kingdom in England, and its fall in 954 ended three-quarters of a century of Norse rule there. His wife Gunnhild is remembered in the sagas as Mother of Kings, a sorceress and the villain of Egil's Saga, which is a hostile portrait written by people who had reason for one. Their sons returned to Norway and one of them, Harald Greycloak, ruled it. Almost everything above rests on documents composed two or three centuries after the events, which is the ordinary condition of tenth century Scandinavian history rather than a special weakness of this case.
- Lived: 885 CE – 954 CE
- Nationality: Norwegian
- Roles: ruler, monarch
