Eric the Victorious

• 1. Introduction

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  Eric the Victorious is the subject of two irreconcilable historical traditions. One modern historian, Peter Sawyer, has called the older written account of his life a gross distortion of what actually happened. Eric ruled Sweden starting around 970. Almost everything we know about his reign comes from Norse sagas told generations after his death. It also comes from a single Latin chronicle written by a German clergyman, and from a handful of carved runestones. These sources disagree about who Eric fought, which country he ruled, and how many wives he actually took. Was he truly king of Denmark, and which of his marriages, if any, really happened?

• 2. A Kingdom Around Lake Mälaren

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  Sweden's list of rulers usually begins with Eric, since he is the first Swedish king in a consecutive succession attested by sources independent of each other. His son, Olof Skötkonung, is considered the first ruler definitely accepted both by the Swedes around Lake Mälaren and by the Geats around Lake Vättern. Adam of Bremen names an earlier king, Emund Eriksson, though no source clarifies whether he was Eric's father. Norse saga claims about a king named Björn Eriksson are generally considered unreliable. In Old Norse, Eric was known as Eiríkr inn sigrsæli, and in modern Swedish as Erik Segersäll.

  Uppland and the provinces around it formed the base of Eric's original territory. No text specifies exactly how far his authority reached beyond that core. It may have stretched south along the Baltic coast as far as Blekinge. Founding the town of Sigtuna is credited to Eric, in all probability, and the settlement still exists today. Within the provinces surrounding Lake Mälaren, Eric probably introduced ledung, a system of universal conscription. According to the Flateyjarbok, his success rested largely on an alliance with free farmers set against an earl-class nobility. Archaeological findings support part of that picture. The influence of that noble class seems to have diminished during the final decades of the tenth century. Whether Eric's authority truly extended into Denmark is a separate question, and the sagas answer it very differently from the German sources that survive.

• 3. The Battle That Made Him

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  Eric earned the epithet Segersäll, meaning Victorious or blessed with victory, after defeating an invasion force at the Battle of Fýrisvellir near Uppsala. His main opponent in that battle was his nephew Styrbjörn the Strong, said in tradition to be the son of Eric's brother Olof. After Olof died, the Swedes refused to accept the rowdy Styrbjörn as a new co-ruler alongside Eric. Eric granted him sixty longships instead, and Styrbjörn sailed off to a seafaring life as a Viking. He became ruler of Jomsborg and allied himself with the Danish king Harold Bluetooth, whose daughter Tyra he married. When Styrbjörn returned to Sweden with an army, Harold and his Danish troops apparently turned back before the fighting began. According to the tale Styrbjarnar þáttr Svíakappa, Eric won the battle only after sacrificing to the god Odin. He is said to have promised that, if granted victory, he would give himself to Odin within ten years.

  Two skaldic verses by the poet Thorvaldr Hjaltason describe the fighting. The first states plainly that an Eric utterly defeated an enemy host gathered at a fortification at Fýrisvellir. The second claims the Vikings outnumbered the Swedes but were handily captured once they attacked, and only those who fled survived. The runestones of Hällestad and Sjörup were raised in Scania, then a part of Denmark. They mention a battle at Uppsala marked by the enemy's defeat and flight. Tradition has long linked these stones to Fýrisvellir, though their inscriptions raise chronological problems and may actually date from the following century.

  Saxo Grammaticus adds that Eric ruled over Denmark for seven years after an invasion, and he never questions that the Swedish conquest happened. Saxo claims the invasion was retaliation for Harold Bluetooth's support of Styrbjörn. Unlike Adam of Bremen, Saxo states that Eric decisively defeated Swein Forkbeard's army in a battle fought in Scania for the Danish throne. Snorri Sturlasson likewise credits Eric with defending the realm from invaders and expanding Swedish territory. A very different, and much older, written account of Eric survives from Germany, telling an entirely different story about his wars.

• 4. A German Chronicler's Denmark

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  Adam of Bremen, a German ecclesiastic chronicler writing around 1075, provides by far the oldest surviving narrative about Eric. Adam's source was King Sweyn II of Denmark, whom he interviewed directly for his chronicle. Adam uses an epithet close to the sagas' own, calling Eric potentissimus in Latin, meaning the Powerful or the Great. Unlike the sagas, Adam never mentions the Battle of Fýrisvellir. Instead, he writes that Eric gathered a large army and invaded Denmark against King Swein Forkbeard. Adam does not give a direct reason for the attack. It seems tied to an alliance with Bolesław, king of the Polans, who ruled from 992 to 1025. Bolesław gave Eric his sister or daughter in marriage. That princess has been identified as Gunhild of Wenden, daughter of a king called Burislev in some Nordic sources. Other interpretations identify her instead as Sigrid the Haughty, whose name may be a misreading of the Old Polish name Świętosława. Eric's invasion succeeded. Several sea battles followed, and the Danish forces, struck from the east by Slavs, were annihilated. Eric held Denmark for a time afterward. Swein fled first to Norway, then to England, and finally to Scotland, where the king received him kindly.

  A fleet of Swedish and Danish ships sailed up the Elbe River during Eric's rule over Denmark and landed at Stade in Saxony. A Saxon army confronted the invaders and was badly defeated. Several prominent Saxons were captured and taken to the ships while the Vikings ravaged the province unopposed. One prisoner, a margrave named Siegfried, escaped at night with a fisherman's help. The furious Vikings maimed their remaining captives and threw them ashore. Siegfried and Duke Benno then raised a new army and struck the Viking camp at Stade. A separate Viking detachment was lured into the marsh of Glindesmoor by a captured Saxon knight and wiped out by the pursuing Germans. Whatever drove Eric across the sea, the encounter with Denmark's Christian world would not leave him unchanged.

• 5. Faith, Death, and Disagreement

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  Adam of Bremen describes Eric as a heathen who was, at first, deeply hostile to the Christian religion. Even so, missionaries worked throughout his reign, some foreign-born and others from recently converted Nordic families. Among them was Odinkar the Elder, who preached in Funen, Zealand, Scania, and Sweden itself. Eric eventually agreed to baptism, apparently while he was staying in Denmark. If that account is accurate, he was the first Swedish king to convert. Afterward, missionaries were allowed to sail from Denmark into Sweden, where they worked, in Adam's words, valiantly in the name of the Lord. After some time, though, Eric is said to have forgotten the Christian faith and reverted to the religion of his ancestors. When Eric died, Swein Forkbeard returned from exile and regained Denmark. Swein is also said to have married Eric's widow, whoever she was, and she was the mother of Eric's successor, Olof. That marriage created an alliance between the Swedish and Danish royal houses.

  Adam's account places Eric's death between 992 and 995, bounded by two other events. It came after 992, when his ally Bolesław the first took power in Poland, and before 995, when Olof's coinage began at Sigtuna. According to Snorri Sturlasson, however, Eric died at Uppsala.

  Historian Sture Bolin considers the Danish conquest likely. Two partly independent sources, Saxo Grammaticus and Adam of Bremen, support it, and Adam's information traces back to King Sweyn II himself. Bolin also argues that Eric's invasion of the Holy Roman Empire, described by Adam, effectively requires that Eric had already become king of Denmark. Adam names several informants directly. Sweyn II, he writes, said that Eric gained the rulership over two kingdoms, those of the Danes and the Swedes. Adam adds that he heard from a very wise king of the Danes that Eric reverted to paganism after accepting Christianity. He heard from others still that Eric fought Otto III and was defeated. A recent evaluation by the historian Harrison calls the conquest not unlikely, at least as a loose suzerainty over powerful Danish lords. The Stone of Eric, believed to have been raised around 995, bears an inscription that the scholar Ludvig Wimmer read as describing an attack on Hedeby. In Wimmer's reading, King Swen attacked Swedish defenders who had occupied the settlement after Eric's own conquest. The historian Peter Sawyer offers a starkly different account, stating that Svein defeated Eric in 992 or 993. In Sawyer's version, Eric died during that war or soon afterward. Svein then married Eric's unnamed Polish widow, while Olof, Eric's son and successor, accepted Svein's overlordship. None of these chroniclers say much about Eric's daughter, whose story survives only in a separate saga about a man named Åke.

• 6. A Daughter, a Feud

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  According to Yngvars saga víðförla, Eric had a daughter said to be beautiful, and a Swedish chief named Åke wanted to marry her. Eric refused the proposal, since he already had a king in Russia in mind for her, and considered Åke unworthy of his daughter. The saga calls that Russian ruler a fylkeskonung. The Ynglinga saga applies the same term to client kings who paid tribute to the king at Uppsala. It can simply mean a petty king. Eric married his daughter off to the Russian king as planned. Åke grew jealous and furious that the Russian king had taken the woman he loved. He traveled to Russia, killed the king, and took Eric's daughter back for himself. To avoid Eric's retaliation, Åke allied himself with eight powerful Swedish jarls. Eric chose not to risk a confrontation that could have led to widespread bloodshed or civil war. Years passed without incident. Åke fathered a son named Emund, who later became the father of Ingvar the Far-Travelled, leader of a Rus expedition to the Caspian Sea. Eventually, Eric and Åke rebuilt their relationship and became friends again.

  Later, the Norwegian regent Haakon Jarl agreed to give his daughter Aud to Eric as a wife. Wedding festivities were prepared at Uppsala, and grandees arrived from across Eric's realm to attend. Haakon Jarl had no interest in an enforced in-law sitting as high as himself. He pushed Eric to punish Åke for what he had done to the Russian king. While the wedding festivities unfolded, Eric secretly prepared his revenge. Åke stayed on guard at first, but grew careless as the feasting wore on. On the night after the feast, Eric and Haakon attacked Åke and his men, killing them along with the eight chiefs who had supported him. Their property was confiscated, though Eric spared his own daughter and Åke's young child, Emund, and brought them home with him. He raised Emund as his grandson, and the boy later inherited the properties once held by Åke and the eight chiefs. Eric's attention would soon turn eastward, to a struggle for power unfolding far beyond Sweden's borders.

• 7. An Eastern Campaign

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  The eighteenth-century historian Olof von Dalin lived from 1708 to 1763. According to Dalin, Eric aided Vladimir the Great in a civil war against his brother, Yaropolk the First of Kiev. Vladimir ruled from 978 to 1015, and Yaropolk from 972 to 978. Dalin claims that without Eric's help, Vladimir would have lost that war entirely. In exchange, Vladimir reportedly made territorial concessions and accepted Eric as his overlord. After the campaign, Sweden supposedly regained partial control over territories in the east. Meanwhile, back home, Olof's son, known as Björn or Styrbjörn, conspired with the Jomsvikings to seize power for himself. While Eric remained in the eastern tributary lands with Vladimir, Styrbjörn built up his forces together with the Wends, the Danes, and the Jomsvikings. Dalin also claims that Sigrid the Haughty grew jealous of Olga in Kievan Rus, resentful that Olga seemed more famous. That resentment, he says, turned into anger at her husband, Eric.

  Russian chronicles confirm one piece of this: Vladimir fled overseas to the land of the Varangians. None of the rest of Dalin's reconstruction is verified by the original sources. Vladimir returned in 978 with an army of Varangian auxiliaries and seized power for himself. Any involvement by Eric in the brothers' war remains possible, but it has never been proven. What is certain is that Eric's own family tree, back in Sweden, is tangled enough to have puzzled historians for centuries.

• 8. Wives and Heirs

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  Sources and sagas name four women as King Eric's wives: Sigrid, Świętosława, Gunhild, and Aud. Two or three of these names may actually refer to the same woman, described differently under different labels. Historians credit Eric with four known children. Olof Skötkonung, who died in 1022, is Eric's only child confirmed by historical record rather than saga alone. Emund allegedly ruled part of the realm under his brother Olof. Holmfrid is sometimes named as Olof's daughter rather than his sister, and she married a man named Sweyn Haakonsson. A fourth child, an unnamed daughter, married Åke and became the grandmother of Ingvar the Far-Travelled. Eric's nephew Styrbjörn and his niece Gyrid were allegedly the children of his brother and co-ruler Olof. Two generations later, it would be Olof's line, not Styrbjörn's, that carried the Swedish crown forward.