Erik Bloodaxe died at Stainmore in 954, and his death didn't end the story — it started one of the most consequential decades in 10th-century Norwegian history, one that's almost completely unknown to general audiences today. A new Amazon Prime Video series adapting Erik and Gunnhild's story, already confirmed for a second season before the first has even aired, has brought fresh attention to this era. So it's worth asking: what does the actual history say happens after Stainmore?
Where the History Picks Up
The series has confirmed its cast and crew — Michael Hirst and Horatio Hirst writing, Xavier Molyneux as Erik, Jessica Madsen as Gunnhild, Levi Miller as Haakon — but however an adaptation chooses to pace its story, the historical record doesn't wait for a second season to tell you what happened next.
Erik died at the Battle of Stainmore in 954, surrounded by enemies, ousted from the last kingdom he'd managed to hold. Gunnhild went into exile with her sons. And Norway passed to Haakon — the younger half-brother who took everything Erik had expected to inherit.
That's where the real story gets interesting.
Haakon the Good — The Man Who Took Norway
Haakon Haraldsson — known as Haakon the Good — is one of the most compelling figures of the 10th century, and his story is in many ways the mirror image of Erik's.
Where Erik was brutal and politically clumsy, Haakon was diplomatic and strategically brilliant. Where Erik forced Christianity on reluctant Norwegians with aggressive impatience, Haakon — who had been raised Christian at the court of King Athelstan in England — took the opposite approach. He brought Christian ideas back to Norway but refused to impose them. He participated in the old pagan rituals to maintain the goodwill of the Norse chieftains. He was what historians sometimes call a pragmatic politician.
He was also, by the standards of the era, an exceptionally good military commander. He kept Norway stable, repelled raids from Denmark, and earned a reputation for fairness that made him genuinely popular — a rarity among Viking-age kings. The nickname the Good wasn't irony. People meant it.
The conflict between Haakon and Gunnhild's sons, who never stopped trying to reclaim Norway, runs right through the second half of the 10th century — the clash between a Christian pragmatist king and the fierce pagan sons of Erik and Gunnhild.
Gunnhild's Sons — The Greycloak Generation
This is the part of the story almost nobody knows.
Gunnhild was not a woman who accepted defeat. After Erik died at Stainmore, she took her sons — she and Erik had many children, including Harald Greycloak, Gamli, Guttorm, Ragnfrød, Erling, and Gudrod — to the Orkney Islands first, and then to Denmark, where she sought the patronage of Harald Bluetooth.
Harald Bluetooth, King of Denmark, was the man who claimed to have made the Danes Christian (it's on the Jelling Stone, his most famous monument). He was also a major political player in the competition for influence over Norway. Supporting Gunnhild's sons against Haakon suited him strategically.
The result was a series of raids and attempted invasions of Norway led by Gunnhild's sons, stretching across the 950s and 960s. They won battles and lost them. Harald Greycloak eventually managed to kill Haakon in battle around 961 — but then Harald himself was killed by agents of Harald Bluetooth in 970, after he'd become inconvenient to his Danish patron.
Through all of it, the sagas suggest, Gunnhild was a constant presence — advising, scheming, keeping her sons focused on the prize their father had lost. She's one of this period's central engines, not a footnote to it.
The Christianisation of Norway — The Deeper Conflict
Running underneath all the political conflict is a religious transformation that changed Scandinavia permanently.
Haakon the Good introduced Christianity to Norway, gently. His successors, particularly Olaf Tryggvason (who would come later, in the 990s) and Olaf Haraldsson (St. Olaf, in the 11th century), pushed it aggressively. The old Norse religion — the worship of Odin, Thor, Freya, and the rest of the Aesir and Vanir — didn't simply disappear overnight. It coexisted, competed, and gradually retreated over generations.
The runes are part of this story. As we've written about in The Runes of the Bloodaxe Era, this is the period when the great runestone tradition was simultaneously at its height and beginning to change character — older pagan monuments giving way to stones with Christian crosses, the same script carrying different gods. The Jelling stones in Denmark are the most famous example: one raised by Gorm the Old in the pagan tradition, one raised by his son Harald Bluetooth to announce the Christianisation of Denmark.
This transition wasn't a clean handover but a messy, contested, generational process. People who worshipped Thor on Tuesday and went to mass on Sunday. Communities that tolerated the new religion while privately maintaining the old practices. Kings whose political legitimacy was tangled up in which gods they honoured.
What the Sources Actually Tell Us — And What They Don't
One of the challenges of understanding this period is that the sources are genuinely sparse. The sagas that describe Erik, Gunnhild, and Haakon were written in Iceland, roughly two to three centuries after the events they describe. They're vivid, detailed, and often contradictory. They reflect the priorities of the people who wrote them as much as the realities of the 10th century.
Scholars at the University of Münster made headlines in 2025 with research arguing that much of what we believe about Vikings is shaped by medieval writers interpreting events through their own lenses — Christian, romantic, nationalistic — rather than by contemporary record. That's true, and it's also part of what makes the era so genuinely fascinating: the violence, yes, but also the poetry, the legal sophistication, the maritime expertise, the religious complexity, and the way women like Gunnhild exercised real power within a system formally controlled by men.
A Real Historical Wildcard: Egil Skallagrímsson
Worth knowing about, whether or not any adaptation ever covers it: Egil Skallagrímsson — Erik Bloodaxe's great enemy, the warrior-poet who cursed him, composed his head-ransom poem in York, and then outlived him by decades — was still alive after Erik's death. He lived into old age, went blind, and by one account tried to scatter his silver hoard on the floor at a public assembly just to watch people scramble for it (this was, apparently, refused). He is one of the great characters of the saga world, and his presence in the post-Erik landscape of Norway is not trivial.
The man who spent his middle years feuding with Erik and Gunnhild, watching from Iceland as their sons tried to reclaim what their father lost — that's a remarkable real historical figure, adaptation or no adaptation.
Whatever any show does with this material, the real history already happened, and it's stranger and richer than most people realise. If Erik and Gunnhild's story has you curious, our Erik Bloodaxe collection draws directly on this history.