by C. R. May
The hoofbeats rang in the cavern of the gatehouse and the great Minster reared ahead as they turned onto Stonegate. Erik’s mood lifted further as he began to take pleasure in the sullen faces or forced acclamation of the citizens. Men began to point, to call others from their work, and Erik resisted the urge to glance back with difficulty as he witnessed the horror in their expressions. Harald and his men were waiting at the crossroads alongside Oswald Thane, the pride he felt as his father led the victors home shining in his features. Erik acknowledged his son with a nod as they came up. ‘Wulfstan knows?’ Harald confirmed that he did, and Erik turned aside, extending a hand as Morcar led the archbishop’s war party to the head of the column. ‘You are a steadfast and honourable man,’ Erik said as he shook the Northumbrian by the hand, ‘and I like to think a good friend. Harald has given an account of today’s action and your own part in it, and I am sure that your lord will wish to reward you. For now,’ he said, as he slipped a gold ring from his forearm and handed it across, ‘accept this small token of my own regard.’ Morcar slid the band on his arm, and Erik looked away as he saw the man was too choked up to reply. Sturla Godi handed the trophies across, and Erik finally snatched a glimpse as the golden wyvern of the West Saxons joined the white horse of the men of Kent in his safekeeping.
‘I will ride with you lord,’ Regenwold said as the horse came about, ‘and then lead my men home.’ He looked about and shook his head. ‘York has never held much attraction for me, I only come here when I can’t avoid it.’
They turned eastwards onto Fossgate as Harald Eriksson and his men dovetailed with the column, and soon they were through the archway of the king’s garth and down at the dockside. Arinbjorn was there alongside Gunnhild and young Ragnfrod, and a quick look confirmed that the fleet was shipshape and ready to slip its moorings. ‘You will not sail with us?’ Erik said. ‘You will have a tough time of it until we return.’
Regenwold shook his head. ‘I am a Northumbrian, King Erik,’ he replied with a snort. ‘We are used to hard times. You are right to go,’ he added with a look. ‘York is a home to traders not fighters, and the kingdom too lacking in spearmen to withstand the power of the English and their allies alone. But if the dream you shared with me comes to pass, to see the old borders restored, to reunite the lands from the Firth to the Humber, that,’ he said with a look of pride, ‘that, would be worth any hardship.’
Erik dismounted, handing his reins across with a smile. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take care of my horse. He is a good lad and I shall need him when I return.’ It was the signal for the men to follow suit, and the riverside filled with the sounds of an army shouldering their weapons and the plundered spoils of a defeated enemy.
Gunnhild crossed the wharf as the earl led his men away, and Erik gave her a hug and a squeeze. ‘We will be back, and sooner than they think. Men say that king Eadred is a sickly man, unwed and without issue, his nominated successor the child of his dead brother.’
Gunnhild glanced back at the splendour of the city and the king’s garth which stood before it, and an involuntary sigh escaped her lips as the return to Orkney winters loomed large in her thoughts.
Erik barely heard, and as they crossed the planking and trod the gangway together, God’s anointed king and queen, he was already dreaming of more.
Afterword
If the events covered in the first book of this series, Bloodaxe, are ill-served in the historical record, it is only towards the end of this volume that Erik Haraldsson begins to emerge into the light of recorded history.
Although the majority of the much later Scandinavian sagas and histories have Erik sailing west to Orkney after his expulsion from Norway, I preferred Jutland as the immediate destination for the king in exile. The Orkneys were little more than three days’ sailing from the Norwegian coast, and at a time when the first hint of trouble could very well be the sighting of a cloud of enemy sail on the horizon I felt that Erik’s family connections in Denmark would make this a far safer and more likely destination while he licked his wounds and made plans for the future. Ágrip, a history of the kings of Norway backs this up. Written at the turn of the twelfth century, it contradicts the much later sagas by having the exiles sailing to Jutland directly from Norway and I agree that this is most likely. King Gorm was in the process of adding the Danish Islands to his power base on Jutland and Erik would be welcome, not only as the husband of the king’s daughter and father to his grandchildren, but also for the hard-headed reason that his son-in-law would add spears and ships to the offensive.
Although modern archeology has confirmed it to have originated several hundred years earlier, Thyra, the wife of Gorm the Languid and mother to both Harald Bluetooth and Erik’s own wife Gunnhild, has a long association in Denmark with the building of the great earthwork defence commonly known as the Danevirke, and it seems clear that she was instrumental in its rebuilding during the period of Gorm’s rule. If her daughter Gunnhild was in the kingdom at the time, it seems highly likely that this energetic woman would have been involved too.
If Erik Haraldsson’s whereabouts are a mystery to us during the decade between his exile from Norway and his reappearance in the late 940s there were many battles and campaigns during that time which were natural places for him to be. All of the kings and warlords mentioned within this volume existed at the time and the events described are historical fact. Olaf the Brash and his son Gnupa were ejected from the Danish Islands and the trading town of Hedeby in 937 by Gorm the Languid. Otto, the future Otto the Great, was fighting his brother Henry and others for the right to rule over the Franks, a fight he won and which ultimately led to his creation of the Königreich, the first German Reich, and Mistevoy was the child king of the Slavic Obotrites at that time. The betrayal and murder of the Slavic delegation by count Geri of Merseburg really occurred as did the subsequent invasion of Slavic lands beyond the Limes. The Germans had always considered the Eastern lands their own, and the crusading element only served to add an extra layer of hostility between the people. In his book Germania the first century Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus placed the Germanic tribe of the Langobards in this area, before they migrated south to settle the part of Italy which still bears the name Lombardy. Unfortunately the wars of the twentieth century seem to indicate that this age-old process has yet to resolve itself.
In Britain the English king Edmund led an army north to waste the British kingdom of Strathclyde before living up to one of his epithets ‘the Just,’ by paying with his life for coming to the defence of a servant who was being attacked by an illegally returned exile.
In Ireland the participants and events of the sack of Dublin and the later battle at Slane are historical fact and a slave trader, the Radhanite Joseph ben Hakohen and his son Yehuda were active at this date in Lisbon. There is a garbled reference to Erik trading and raiding around the Moorish controlled Iberian peninsula at some time during his later years, and this seemed a good place to insert such an adventure into his story and link it to the Dublin raid.
Now that our tale has moved to the British Isles a further complication arrives due to the disparate nature of the inhabitants of the islands and the number of languages spoken there. Erik’s main rival for the throne of Northumbria is an excellent example of this. One of the Dublin Norse, he is known in Irish records as Amlaíb Cuarán, a Cuarán being a distinctive type of sandal worn by men in Ireland at that time. This is sometimes anglicised to Anlaf Sandal in contemporary English records, but just to add to the confusion the same man is also referred to in Norse as Óláfr Sigtryggsson which became Olaf Sihtricson in other English accounts. I chose to use Olaf Cuaran for this major character, dropping the accent for a modern readership, because it identified the man as a Norseman, linked him to Ireland and removed the need for yet another -sson surname from a story which already contained its fair share.
Even the various nations of the British Isles are not easily named during this period. Scotland was known as the Kingdo
m of Alba, but what do we call the inhabitants? The Gaelic name of the kingdom, Rìoghachd na h-Alba, actually translates as Kingdom of Scotland in English, so it made sense to keep the name Alba but call the inhabitants Scots as the contemporary English did.
Northumbria itself posed a very similar problem. In reality reverting back into its founding kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira after the Danish invasions of the ninth century, all the descendants of the original inhabitants were clearly Northumbrian in the same way that the people of North and South Korea today are all Koreans. Still under the control of the lord in Bamburgh, the northern peoples were variously described as English or north Saxons in contemporary accounts. The southern kings based in Wessex were already styling themselves as ‘King of all the English’ so a distinction had to be made between them. Deira was now the kingdom of York but again, what do we call the inhabitants? Yorkist is too obviously anachronistic, so I settled on Northumbrian for the inhabitants of the old Deiran lands and reverted to Bernician for the remainder. Although not so important in this book, the area will become the main focus of events in the following volume so it was important that a clear distinction between the people and their respective rulers was made here. In York itself many believe that the old Roman gatehouse remained in use as the king’s garth at this time. The modern name for the location, King’s Square, would seem to support this; the tablet referring to its construction by the 9th Legion Hispana was unearthed nearby in 1970 and can be seen at the Yorkshire Museum in the city.
Archbishop Wulfstan is a major figure, if not the major figure in Northumbrian history during this period. Consecrated in 931 he was one of the great Northumbrian separatists during a time when it was becoming increasing likely that the kingdom would be subsumed into one of the rapidly growing nations of England or Alba which bordered it. With extensive contacts within both the wider church in Britain, the Dublin Norse and the kings in Wessex, Wulfstan appears to have been a kingmaker for the majority of his time as archbishop. Before Erik Haraldsson’s time in the country Wulfstan accompanied Olaf Guthfrithson, another of the Dublin Norse, on his invasion of Mercia. Tamworth, the ancient capital of the kingdom was sacked and burned, and the power of the church at this time was made plain when in 940 Wulfstan and Archbishop Wulfhelm of Canterbury arranged a treaty which ceded the area between Watling Street and the border of Northumbria to Olaf, in effect restoring the old boundary of the Dane Law which had been agreed as far back as Alfred the Great’s time. It was he who must have been behind the offer of the Northumbrian crown to Erik in 947, despite his submission that same year to King Eadred at Tanshelf. Enraged at what he saw as a betrayal, the southern king invaded as we have seen and burned the ancient church at Ripon to the ground, carrying away the bones of Saint Wilfrid who had become a symbol of Northumbrian separatism. That the rearguard was massacred on the way home is a matter of contemporary record; again whether the Northumbrian army was led by Erik Haraldsson we can only assume unless we take the much later note by John of Wallingford that- “the author of this ambush is said to have been Eric the son of Harald,” at face value.
When Eadred learned of the attack he became: “so enraged that he wished to march back into the land and destroy it utterly.” John of Wallingford writes that the Northumbrian witan met and dispatched representatives bearing gifts and: “by their entreaties and many rich presents, and by their entire and final submission they mitigated his anger.”
Whether the Northumbrians abandoned Erik or he realised both the strength of the southern kingdom and the relative weakness and disunity of his own and retreated to rebuild his strength is unknowable. But if nothing else he appears to have been a pragmatic man, a born survivor in an age when one slip could cost you not only your own life but topple a dynasty.
In the concluding volume Erik fights to make the dream of a reunified Northumbrian kingdom a reality, and the Norns reveal the identity of his fifth and final crown.
Cliff May
East Anglia
November 2018.
Characters
Anlaf Crow - Erik’s huskarl and banner man.
Arinbjorn Thorirsson - Son of Thorir hersir and Bergthora. Erik’s foster-brother.
Arnkel Torf-Einarsson - Brother of the Orkney Jarl.
Babushka - The Slavic go-between in the ranks of Erik’s army during the campaign in Saxony.
Blacaire Gudrodsson - Cousin of Olaf Cuaran, sometime ruler in Dublin.
Boleslav - Leader of the Obotrite army in Saxony.
Conalach Cnogba of North Brega. High king at Tara.
Eadred - King of the English. Inherits the crown on the death of his half brother Edmund. Leads the invasion of Northumbria.
Edmund the Magnificent - King of the English. Lays waste the British kingdom of Strathclyde. Stabbed to death by a wolf head.
Erik Haraldsson - Bloodaxe - Favoured son of Harald Fairhair.
Erland Torf-Einarsson - Brother of the Orkney Jarl.
Gauti Thorodsson - Styrisman on the Bison.
Gamli Eriksson - Erik and Gunnhild’s eldest son.
Gorm the Languid - King of Danes, later called Gorm the Old. Father of Gunnhild.
Gunnhild Gormsdottir - Erik’s wife. Daughter of King Gorm the Languid and sister to Harald Bluetooth.
Guttorm Eriksson - Erik’s third son.
Gytha Thorirsdottir - Sister of Arinbjorn.
Hakon Haraldsson - King of Norway. Erik’s half brother.
Hauk - A member of Erik’s hird.
Helgrim Smiter - Erik’s huskarl.
Harald Eriksson - Erik and Gunnhild’s second son.
Harald Bluetooth - Son of Gorm the Languid and brother to Gunnhild.
Helgi - Arinbjorn hersir’s huskarl.
Horse Hair Gisli - Arinbjorn hersir’s huskarl.
Hoskuld - Gamli Eriksson’s huskarl.
Joseph ben Hakohen - Radhanite slave trader in Lishbunah.
Kolbein Herjolfsson - Erik’s huskarl and styrisman.
Mistevoy - young King of the Obotrites.
Morcar - Archbishop Wulfstan’s thane.
Mord - A member of Erik’s hird.
Olaf Cuaran - Also known as Amlaíb Cuarán/Óláfr Sigtryggsson/Olaf Sandal. Erik’s rival for the crown of Northumbria. His opponent at the battles of Slane and the ridge fight outside Sheptun.
Olvir - One of Erik’s hirdmen. A native of Vestfold.
Oswulf Ealdulfing - Earl of Bernicia.
Oswy - Archbishop Wulfstan’s gesith.
Orm- Norse earl in Northumberland.
Oswald Thane - Archbishop Wulfstan’s go-between.
Regenwold - A Northumbrian earl. Fights at Ceasterford.
Ragnfrod Eriksson - Erik’s youngest son.
Ruaidri ua Canannáin- A king of the Northern Uí Néill clan in Ireland. Victor of the battle at Slane.
Sigurd Eriksson - Erik’s fourth son.
Skuli - A wealthy trader. Owner of the knarrs at the sack of Dublin.
Sturla Godi - A Romsdaler. A member of Erik’s hird who becomes banner man on the death of Anlaf Crow.
Svan - Gamli Eriksson’s huskarl.
Thorfin Ketilsson - Styrisman on the Reindyr.
Thorfinn Torf-Einarsson (Skull-Splitter) - Jarl of Orkney.
Thorstein Egilsson - Erik’s huskarl and prow man.
Thyra - Queen of Danes. Mother of Erik’s wife Gunnhild.
Ulfar Whistle Tooth - Styrisman on the Okse.
Wulfstan - Archbishop of York.
Wystan - Archbishop Wulfstan’s gesith.
Places/Locations
Byrgisey - Brough of Birsay, Mainland, Orkney.
Caerdyf - Cardiff, Wales.
Ceasterford - Castleford, West Yorkshire, England.
Dinas Powys - Vale of Glamorgan, Wales.
Dublin - Dublin, Eire.
Ezehoe - Itzehoe, Steinburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
Hedeby - Haithabu, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
Hrypum - Ripon, North Yorkshire, England.
Jelling - Vejle, Syddanmark, Denmark.
Lishbunah - Lisbon, Portugal.
Liubice - Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
Lundy - Lundy Island, the Bristol Channel, Devon , England.
Miydilsburh - Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, England.
Plune - Plön, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
Sheptun - Skipton-in-Craven, North Yorkshire, England.
Sí an Bhrú - Newgrange prehistoric monument, County Meath, Eire.
Slane - Slane, County Meath, Eire.
Starigard - Oldenburg in Holstein, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
Sventanapolje - Schwentinefeld, near Bornhöved, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.