In June 2026, Amazon Prime Video did something unusual. They renewed Bloodaxe — their upcoming 10th-century Viking drama — for a second season. The show hadn't aired yet. Most productions wait for ratings, reviews, audience data. Amazon didn't wait. They greenlit Season 2 while Season 1 was still in post-production.
That tells you something.
It tells you Amazon has enormous confidence in the material. It tells you the early screenings went well. It tells you — if you read the tea leaves of streaming strategy — that they see Bloodaxe as a franchise, not just a limited series. In an era where Viking content has proven consistently bankable, from the original Vikings to Vikings: Valhalla to The Last Kingdom, that confidence seems well-placed.
But here's what interests me more than the business angle: the history of Erik Bloodaxe's era is genuinely rich enough to sustain multiple seasons. The story doesn't end with Erik. It doesn't even end with Gunnhild. The decade after Erik's death in 954 is one of the most consequential periods in Norse history, and it's almost completely unknown to general audiences.
So what does the actual history say is coming?
Where Season 1 Presumably Leaves Us
Based on everything we know about the show — Michael Hirst and Horatio Hirst writing, Xavier Molyneux as Erik, Jessica Madsen as Gunnhild, Levi Miller as Haakon — Season 1 appears to cover Erik's rise and reign as King of Norway, the political machinations of the Bloodaxe court, and almost certainly the period of Erik's exile when he went west to become King of Jorvik (Viking York).
If the show follows the historical arc faithfully, Season 1 likely ends somewhere around Erik's final years in Northumbria — or possibly with his death at the Battle of Stainmore in 954, surrounded by enemies, ousted from the last kingdom he'd managed to hold.
That's a natural dramatic conclusion. Erik Bloodaxe dead, Gunnhild in exile with her sons, and Norway in the hands of Haakon — the younger half-brother who took everything Erik had expected to inherit.
Which is where it gets interesting for Season 2.
Haakon the Good — The Man Who Took Norway
Levi Miller's character Haakon is listed as a main cast member for the show, which is significant. In history, 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.
A Season 2 centred on Haakon — and on the conflict with Gunnhild's sons, who never stopped trying to reclaim Norway — would have remarkable dramatic material to work with. The clash between these two visions of Norway, the Christian pragmatist king and the fierce pagan sons of Erik and Gunnhild, runs right through the second half of the 10th century.
Gunnhild's Sons — The Greycloak Generation
This is the part of the story almost nobody knows, and it may be what Season 2 is actually about.
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. If Bloodaxe Season 2 is going to be honest to this period, Gunnhild can't be a footnote. She's one of the story's engines.
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.
A good Season 2 would show this transition not as a clean handover but as the messy, contested, generational process it actually was. 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 who found their political legitimacy tangled up in which gods they honoured.
That's good television. That's also real history.
What We Don't Know — And What The Show Might Invent
One of the challenges — and freedoms — of dramatising 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 most 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. This is true. It's also part of what makes the era so dramatically fertile. When the sources are partial and contested, writers have space to work.
Michael and Horatio Hirst took significant liberties with the historical record in the original Vikings — sometimes to good effect, sometimes to frustrating ones. Bloodaxe will presumably do the same. The question is whether the invented material honours the texture of the period: the violence, yes, but also the poetry, the legal sophistication, the maritime expertise, the religious complexity, the way women like Gunnhild exercised genuine power within a system formally controlled by men.
If they get that right, two seasons won't be enough.
The Real Season 2 Wildcard: Egil Skallagrímsson
I want to float a possibility that the show's writers may or may not have considered, because it would be a remarkable piece of casting.
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.
If Season 2 picks up in the 960s or 970s, an elderly, blind, still-difficult Egil Skallagrímsson would be an extraordinary figure to include. 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 character writes himself.
We'll find out when the show actually airs. Early 2027, if the current timeline holds.