There is a moment in Egils saga — one of the great Icelandic sagas, written in the 13th century but drawing on older material — where the saga's author describes Gunnhild with a phrase that has stuck in Norse scholarship ever since: she is the most capable of women and the most vicious. The original Old Norse is even more compressed: kvenna vísust ok illgernust. Wisest of women, most evil of women. Both at once, without contradiction.
That paradox — the power and the suspicion of it — runs through every account of Gunnhild that the sources give us. She is brilliant and she is dangerous, and the saga authors cannot quite decide whether those are two different things or the same thing described twice. It tells you a great deal about both the woman and the world she lived in.
Who She Was
Gunnhild Gormsdóttir — also known by her later title, konungamóðir, Mother of Kings — was born around 910 AD. Her parentage is debated in the sources: the most common identification makes her the daughter of Gorm the Old, King of Denmark, which would make her the sister of Harald Bluetooth and connect her directly to the Danish royal house at its most powerful. Some scholars dispute this identification, arguing that it appears in later sources and may be a retrospective attempt to give her a more prestigious lineage. What nobody disputes is that she was the wife of Erik Bloodaxe, King of Norway and twice King of Northumbria, and that she outlasted him by roughly twenty-five years, during which time she continued to be one of the most consequential political operators in the Norse world.
She is believed to have died around 980 AD. She was probably in her seventies. She had survived her husband's violent death, exile across three kingdoms, the deaths of several of her sons, and the sustained hostility of saga authors writing in a Christian tradition that did not look kindly on powerful women who practised pagan magic.
The Sámi Sorcerers and What She Learned
Before she met Erik Bloodaxe, Gunnhild spent time in Finnmark — the far north of what is now Norway, above the Arctic Circle, in territory inhabited by the Sámi people. The Heimskringla tells the story: she lived in a hut with two Sámi sorcerers, learning from them the practice of seiðr — the Norse magical tradition associated with the Vanir gods, and particularly with Freyja, who is said in the Ynglinga saga to have taught seiðr to Odin himself.
What was seiðr? The surviving descriptions suggest a trance-based practice — the practitioner entered an altered state, typically with the help of a specific ritual setup (a high seat, a staff, assistants who sang particular songs) and in that state could perceive things hidden in the normal world: the fates of individuals, the outcomes of plans, the location of what had been lost. The seiðr practitioner was a seer as much as a magical worker. The Old Norse word völva — a seeress, a staff-carrier — names the role more precisely than the word witch, which carries quite different connotations.
The Sámi connection in Gunnhild's story is not incidental. The Sámi were regarded by the Norse as particularly powerful practitioners of noaiddi — their own shamanistic tradition — and learning from Sámi teachers was presented in the sagas as accessing the deepest possible level of this kind of knowledge. Whether the story of Gunnhild's time in Finnmark is literally true, embellished, or entirely invented by saga authors to explain her reputation is unknowable at this distance. What it tells us is that she was understood to be someone who had gone to the edge of the known world and come back with something.
The two sorcerers, according to the Heimskringla, each wanted to marry her. Erik killed both of them — at her request — before taking her south as his wife. The story reads like the opening scene of a saga rather than a historical account, and it probably is. But sagas encode cultural truth even when they embroider biographical fact, and the cultural truth here is that Gunnhild was not a passive figure who acquired her reputation by accident. She was, from the beginning of her recorded story, someone who understood power and was prepared to use it.
Queen of Norway, Exile, Queen of Northumbria
As queen during Erik's reign over Norway (roughly 930 to 934), Gunnhild was deeply unpopular with the Norwegian nobility — and the feeling appears to have been mutual. The sagas present her as politically aggressive, interfering in disputes, using her perceived magical ability to influence outcomes in ways that made her enemies among the powerful men whose support Erik needed. When Haakon the Good challenged Erik for the Norwegian throne and Erik's support collapsed, Gunnhild's reputation was part of the reason. Nobody wants to be governed by someone who is thought to be placing curses on their political rivals.
In exile — first in Orkney, then moving between the Norse-controlled territories of the British Isles — Gunnhild kept the family together and kept the political project alive. When Erik established himself as King of Northumbria, she was at court in Jorvik, the Norse city of York, managing a household in a city that owed Erik uncertain loyalty while he tried to build a power base that could eventually support a return to Norway.
That return never came. Erik died at the Battle of Stainmore in 954, killed in an ambush on a moorland pass in the Pennines. He was perhaps fifty-nine years old. Gunnhild was around forty-four, with multiple children and no throne.
What she did next is the most remarkable part of her story.
The Mother of Kings
After Stainmore, Gunnhild took her sons to Denmark — to the court of Harald Bluetooth, probably her brother, certainly a man whose support she needed and obtained. From there she operated as the political manager of the next generation: the Gunnhildrsynir, the sons of Gunnhild, who fought for the Norwegian throne against Haakon the Good and each other for the better part of two decades.
Her son Harald Greycloak succeeded in deposing Haakon the Good and ruled Norway from around 961 to 970. He was killed — probably with his mother's knowledge, possibly with her complicity — by his cousin Hákon Sigurdsson, who had made an alliance with Harald Bluetooth. The family politics of 10th-century Scandinavia were not for the sentimental.
Gunnhild's title — konungamóðir, Mother of Kings — is not a flattering nickname invented by later tradition. It is a formal title that appears in the sources in her own lifetime, recognition of the fact that her political influence, exercised primarily through her sons, made her a power in the Norse world for decades after her husband's death. In a world where women did not inherit kingdoms directly, this was the available form of queenship: the mother who shapes the next generation of rulers, who knows where the bodies are buried (sometimes literally), and who is too politically important to ignore.
The Question of the Bog Body
In 1835, a bog body was found at Haraldskær in Denmark — a preserved female body, remarkably complete, dating to the Iron Age. For decades, the body was identified as Gunnhild, on the basis of a 13th-century saga account that described her death and burial. She was given an elaborate state funeral and a memorial.
Then radiocarbon dating arrived, and the body was found to be approximately 2,500 years old — predating Gunnhild by roughly 1,500 years. The Haraldskær Woman, as she is now known, is an extraordinary find in her own right, a sacrificial or ritual burial from the early Iron Age. But she is not Gunnhild.
The misidentification lasted for decades because people wanted it to be true. Gunnhild is the kind of figure onto whom stories attach themselves. The saga accounts are so vivid, so specific, so present in the way they describe her, that the idea of her body preserved in peat — the witch queen, perfectly conserved, found in a Danish marsh — was impossible to resist.
It wasn't her. But the fact that people wanted it to be her, and that the identification seemed plausible for so long, is its own kind of evidence of how deeply she had worked her way into cultural memory.
What to Make of Her
Modern scholars have spent considerable energy asking whether the saga portrayal of Gunnhild is fair. The answer is almost certainly no — or at least, not entirely.
The sagas were written down in the 13th century, in a Christian Iceland that had converted more than two hundred years earlier. The seiðr tradition that Gunnhild was associated with was, by this point, officially condemned as pagan sorcery. Powerful women who operated outside male-controlled structures of authority were already a culturally suspicious category. And the sagas that give us the sharpest Gunnhild — particularly Egils saga — were written by or in the tradition of poets and nobles who had personal reasons to portray her negatively, since Gunnhild was a consistent opponent of the Icelandic independence that the saga tradition values.
None of this means she was a saint. Political ruthlessness in the 10th century was not a gendered quality — it was a survival skill, and both men and women who survived at the level Gunnhild did had to possess it in quantity. What the bias of the sources does mean is that her intelligence, her political skill, and her genuine cultural authority as a practitioner of seiðr have been systematically filtered through a lens designed to make them look sinister.
The rune Algiz — the protection rune, the elk, the outstretched hand — is sometimes associated with female power and the völva tradition. The völur, the seeresses who practised seiðr, were among the most respected figures in Norse society — sought out by kings, consulted before battles, honoured at feasts. Gunnhild was trained in that tradition. The problem was not the power. The problem was that she refused to use it in the service of people who wanted to control her.
That is why she is still remembered, a thousand years later, as the most dangerous woman in the Viking Age. Not because she was evil. Because she was effective.
For more on the Norse world Gunnhild inhabited: Erik Bloodaxe: The Real History, the Complete Elder Futhark guide, and Rune Meanings Reference Guide.
FAQ
Was Gunnhild a real person?
Yes, though with the usual caveats about Norse historical sources. She appears in multiple sagas — Egils saga, Heimskringla, Fagrskinna, and others — as well as in various Eddic and skaldic references. The biographical details differ between sources, and the later sources may have embellished her magical reputation. Her role as wife of Erik Bloodaxe and as political manager of her sons' Norwegian ambitions is generally accepted by historians as historical.
What was seiðr?
Seiðr was a form of Norse magical practice associated primarily with the Vanir gods, particularly Freyja, who is said to have taught it to Odin. It appears to have involved trance states, a specific ritual setup (a high seat, a staff, assistants who sang particular chants), and in that altered state, perception of things hidden in ordinary reality — fates, futures, the location of lost things. Practitioners were called völur (singular: völva) and were respected figures in Norse society, sought by kings and chieftains for consultation before important decisions.
What is the Haraldskær Woman?
The Haraldskær Woman is a well-preserved bog body found in Denmark in 1835, originally and incorrectly identified as Gunnhild. Radiocarbon dating subsequently placed her death at approximately 490 BCE — around 1,500 years before Gunnhild's time. She is now understood as a ritual or sacrificial burial from the early Iron Age, a remarkable archaeological find in her own right but entirely unconnected to Gunnhild.
Is Gunnhild in the Amazon Bloodaxe series?
Yes. Gunnhild is a central character in the Bloodaxe series alongside Erik, and the show was renewed for a second season before its first episode aired. Given that Gunnhild's story extends well beyond Erik's death — outliving him by roughly twenty-five years and continuing to operate as a major political force — a second season has considerable material to draw on.
Who were the sons of Gunnhild?
Gunnhild and Erik had several sons, collectively called the Gunnhildrsynir (Sons of Gunnhild) in the sagas. The most notable is Harald Greycloak, who ruled Norway from around 961 to 970. Others — including Gamli, Guttorm, Ragnfred, Erling, Gudrod, and Sigurd — also appear in the sources at various points in the long struggle for the Norwegian throne. The fact that the sagas refer to this generation of princes collectively by their mother's name rather than their father's is perhaps the most eloquent testament to Gunnhild's actual role in driving their political ambitions.