In the year 982 AD, a man called Eirik rauði — Erik the Red — was found guilty of manslaughter at the Icelandic Althing and sentenced to three years of exile from Iceland. He had already been exiled from Norway before that, for a different killing. He was, by this point, a man with a pattern.
He used the three years of his Icelandic exile to explore a landmass that Norse sailors had reported to the west. He found it, surveyed it, named it Greenland — deliberately, the sagas say, because a name suggesting green and habitable land would attract settlers. Then he went back to Iceland, served out his sentence, and returned to Greenland with twenty-five ships of colonists. Fourteen of them made it.
His son, Leif Erikson, would later sail further west and make landfall on the coast of North America — the first confirmed European contact with the continent, five hundred years before Columbus. The chain of causation runs directly from a killing in Norway that got Erik the Red expelled from his home, to a Norse colony in Greenland, to the first European footprint on the soil of North America.
This is the pattern that Erik Bloodaxe lived. Expelled from Norway, he built a second kingdom in England. Expelled from England the first time, he returned and tried again. It is not an unusual pattern in the Norse world. It is almost the defining pattern of Norse expansion.
That restless drive to push toward the horizon and start again is part of what still draws people to Norse symbols today — you'll find pieces inspired by exactly this spirit of exploration in our Viking gifts collection.
What Exile Actually Meant in Norse Law
The Norse had specific legal categories for exile, and the distinctions between them mattered.
Full outlawry — skóggangr, which translates literally as "going to the forest" — was the most severe. A man declared a full outlaw had no legal standing anywhere in Norse society. He could not be sheltered, fed, or assisted. Anyone could kill him without legal consequence. The name tells you what he had become: someone who lives in the forest, outside human community, like a wolf. Several Old Norse words for outlaw — vargr (wolf), úlfheðinn (wolf-skin) — make this equation explicit. The outlaw has been expelled from the human world and become an animal.
Lesser outlawry — fjörbaugsgarðr — was a sentence of exile for three years, after which the convicted person could return. Erik the Red's second exile was of this type. The person remained legally human, retained some rights, could be helped by friends who were willing to risk it, but had to leave the territory and stay gone for the duration.
Political exile — the kind that happened to Erik Bloodaxe — was not a legal sentence but a practical reality. He was not convicted by a Thing assembly. He was simply defeated. His support collapsed, his brother's support was stronger, and remaining in Norway meant death or submission. He left because the alternative was worse. This was a different kind of exile, without a fixed term and without any formal mechanism for return. You came back only when the balance of power shifted in your favour — which, for Erik, it never did.
Iceland: Built by Exile
The Norse settlement of Iceland — which began in earnest in the 870s and was essentially complete by 930 AD — is one of the most remarkable colonisation events in medieval history. Settlers crossed roughly a thousand kilometres of open North Atlantic in longships and clinker-built knarrs (cargo vessels), with livestock, equipment, and family members, to reach an uninhabited volcanic island that offered farmland but no trees large enough for shipbuilding, no friendly neighbouring populations to trade with, and winters that made even Norway look mild in comparison.
Why did they go?
Some went because Iceland offered land — good grazing land in the valleys, fjord coasts full of fish, a genuinely viable agricultural life for people willing to work hard in a challenging environment. The push of population pressure in western Norway was real.
But the Landnámabók — the Book of Settlements, which records the founding families of Iceland and their origins — is explicit about another motivation for many: Harald Fairhair. The consolidation of Norway under Harald's rule changed the legal and political status of previously independent chieftains and landowners. Men who had held territory in their own right now held it under Harald's authority, paying tribute, providing military service, acknowledging a king they had not chosen. Some accepted this. Others did not.
The settlers who refused Harald's new order and sailed west were not defeated people. They were people who chose terms they found acceptable over terms they did not. Iceland was the alternative to submission — a place where you could rebuild the world you had lost, on your own terms, without a king above you.
And they did. The Althing, established at Thingvellir in 930 AD, was a republic in practice if not in name — a legislative assembly of free men, making law collectively, without a monarch. It is still operating today, making it the world's oldest continuously functioning parliament. The people who fled Harald Fairhair's unification built a political institution that has lasted over a thousand years.
Egil Skallagrímsson: The Exile Who Kept Coming Back
If Erik Bloodaxe is the emblematic exiled king in the Norse tradition, Egil Skallagrímsson is his shadow — the emblematic exiled subject, the man who made exile his condition and his art.
Egil's family were among the Icelandic settlers who had left Norway because of Harald Fairhair. His grandfather was expelled; his father Skallagrím was among the first settlers of Iceland. Egil himself — brilliant, violent, prone to killing people who insulted or cheated him, and one of the greatest skaldic poets in Norse history — spent his life in a complicated relationship with exile.
He was Erik Bloodaxe's enemy. Gunnhild hated him, tried to have him killed, and succeeded in having him outlawed from Norway. Egil landed in England during Erik's reign, was captured, and saved his own life by composing — overnight, under threat of execution in the morning — the poem Höfuðlausn (Head-Ransom), a praise poem for Erik so skillfully made that Erik released him rather than be known as the king who killed a man for poetry.
The story may be embellished. But the dynamic it captures is real: in the Norse world, a great poem could be a weapon, a shield, and a currency all at once. Egil used his art to navigate exile in a way that most people simply could not.
Normandy: What Happens When Exiles Win
In 911 AD, a Norse chieftain called Hrólf — known in French sources as Rollo — negotiated the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte with King Charles the Simple of West Francia. Rollo had been raiding the Seine valley, had besieged Paris, and had become enough of a military problem that the Frankish king preferred to give him territory and legitimacy rather than continue fighting him.
Hrólf became the first Duke of Normandy. His descendants adopted the French language, the Christian faith, and the customs of Frankish nobility — and then, in 1066, one of them crossed the Channel and conquered England. William the Conqueror, the man who ended the Anglo-Saxon period and reshaped the English language, law, and culture, was the great-great-great-grandson of a Norse exile who had decided to raid rather than submit to whatever political pressure had pushed him from his original territory.
The Norse pattern of exile and reinvention — pushed out, going somewhere else, building something new — did not always produce small colonies. Sometimes it produced the Norman Conquest.
What Erik's Exile Was Part Of
Erik Bloodaxe's expulsion from Norway and his reconstitution as King of Northumbria fits perfectly within this larger pattern. He did not accept defeat as final. He went to a part of the world where Norse culture was already established, where his name and reputation had value, and where the political conditions made a new beginning possible.
He ruled Jorvik twice. He built a court, maintained a household, kept the political project alive for over a decade after his expulsion from Norway. The ending at Stainmore was violent and definitive, but the story between the expulsion and the death was not the story of a broken man going quietly into the dark. It was the story of a man working the available conditions with the tools he had — which is, at bottom, exactly what every Norse exile in history tried to do.
Some of them reached Greenland. Some of them reached America. Some of them founded Normandy. Some of them died on moorland in the north of England.
But they all went somewhere.
For the full Erik Bloodaxe story: Erik Bloodaxe: The Real History Behind Amazon's New Viking Series. And for the city he built his second kingdom in: Jorvik: What It Was Actually Like to Live in Viking York.
FAQ
What was Viking outlawry?
Viking Age Norse law had specific categories of outlawry. Full outlawry (skóggangr) removed all legal protections — the outlaw could be killed without consequence and could not be helped by anyone. Lesser outlawry (fjörbaugsgarðr) was exile for three years, after which the person could return. The term skóggangr — going to the forest — reflects the idea that the outlaw had been expelled from human society and become like a wolf.
Why did so many Norse people settle Iceland?
Multiple factors drove the Norse settlement of Iceland (c. 870–930 AD): available farmland, fishing resources, and the opportunity to establish independent communities. A significant motivation documented in the Landnámabók (Book of Settlements) was opposition to Harald Fairhair's consolidation of Norway — many settlers preferred emigration to submitting to Harald's authority over their lands.
Who was Erik the Red and what does he have to do with Bloodaxe?
Erik the Red (Eirik rauði) was a different person from Erik Bloodaxe — a later figure (c. 950–1003 AD) who was twice exiled (from Norway and then from Iceland) and used his exile to found the Norse colony in Greenland. His son Leif Erikson later reached North America. Erik the Red is an example of the same broader pattern of Norse exile and reinvention that Erik Bloodaxe exemplifies, but the two men were unrelated.
What was the Althing?
The Althing (Alþingi) was the legislative assembly of Iceland, established at Thingvellir in 930 AD. It was a gathering of free Icelandic landowners who made law collectively and resolved disputes. It is the world's oldest continuously functioning parliament and is still operational today. It was founded by the descendants of people who had left Norway specifically to escape Harald Fairhair's rule — exile, in this case, producing one of the most enduring political institutions in history.