Bloodaxe and the Mother of Kings

Erik Bloodaxe, Gunnhild, and the Making of a Viking Legend

von Daxley Morven

172 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Erik Bloodaxe and Gunnhild are among the most memorable figures of the Viking Age. He became the brother-killing king driven from Norway and later associated with the last Scandinavian kingship at York. She became the powerful queen of the sagas: ambitious, politically dangerous, skilled in sorcery, and blamed for poisonings, betrayals, and deaths.But much of what is commonly told about them was written centuries after they lived.This book begins with the evidence closest to the tenth century: English chronicles, coins struck at York, skaldic poetry, royal monuments, and the scattered records of the people around them. From there, it follows the development of the later traditions that transformed a poorly documented king and an elusive queen into some of the best-known characters in medieval Scandinavian history.The story moves from the contested kingship of Northumbria and Erik's uncertain death at Stainmore to Gunnhild's disputed origins, the rise of their sons in Norway, their connections with Denmark and Orkney, and the poems and political struggles that preserved the family's reputation.Along the way, the book examines what can be known, what remains possible, and what appears only in sources written generations later. Rather than treating the sagas as straightforward biography or dismissing them as fiction, it asks how historical memory was created-and why Erik and Gunnhild became the people later writers needed them to be.The result is both a history of a tenth-century royal family and an examination of how Viking legends were made.

• Themen: Biographie, Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft Biografien und Sachliteratur Allgemein
• ISBN: 9798235889989
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 22.09.2026
• Größe: 203 x 127 mm
• Verlag: SD