If you've just started watching Bloodaxe, or you've seen the trailers and you're trying to figure out who Gunnhild actually was before the show fills in its own version: this is the rundown. Real history, real sources, real woman.
Who Was Gunnhild?
Gunnhild was a 10th-century Norse queen, the wife of Erik Bloodaxe and one of the most documented female figures in the Old Norse saga tradition. She is named in Egil's Saga, Heimskringla, Fagrskinna, Laxdaela Saga, and several other sources, always with strong opinions attached.
Her origins are actually disputed, which is one of the more interesting things about her. Heimskringla says she was the daughter of Özur Tóti, a Norse chieftain from Halogaland in northern Norway. But another tradition in the Ágrip and Fagrskinna suggests she may have been the daughter of Harald Gormsson of Denmark — which would make her connected to the Danish royal house. Medieval saga writers had their own agendas and did not always agree on the details.
What is agreed: she was intelligent, politically active, trained in magical practice (seiðr), fiercely loyal to her family, and feared by a remarkable number of powerful men across two kingdoms.
Her Marriage to Erik
Erik Blóðöx — Erik Bloodaxe, which is what his name means — was one of Harald Fairhair's sons, raised in Norway and destined to be its king. The marriage to Gunnhild was a political alliance as all royal marriages were, but the sagas suggest it became something more: a genuine partnership, and a volatile one.
Erik was known for violence. His nickname was not decorative — he killed several of his brothers in his drive to consolidate power. Gunnhild, in the sagas, is often credited with encouraging him. Whether this reflects her actual influence on him or is saga shorthand for “she was implicated in things that went wrong” is difficult to separate. Hostile sources have a tendency to load blame onto women who were present at events men wanted explained.
They had many children together — the sagas name approximately nine sons — and Gunnhild spent much of her adult life invested in their futures, their careers, and the dynasty she was building through them.
The Egil Problem
Almost everything the English-speaking world knows about Gunnhild comes through Egil's Saga, one of the great works of Old Norse literature. The problem: its hero is Egil Skallagrímsson, and Gunnhild is his enemy.
The saga was almost certainly written by people who admired Egil and found Gunnhild's political interference threatening. It depicts her as cruel, scheming, sexually voracious, and a practitioner of dark magic — a roster of medieval female villain traits that should make any historian cautious. She is consistently the obstacle that Egil overcomes. She is never the protagonist of her own story in that text.
Other sagas give a more complicated picture. Heimskringla, which covers her life from a royal-history perspective rather than a hero's-journey perspective, shows her as a serious political figure who outlasted nearly everyone who opposed her. The hostility is still there, but the competence is not in dispute.
After Erik Died
Erik Bloodaxe was killed at the Battle of Stainmore in 954, trying to hold his position as King of Northumbria against an alliance of forces that had finally had enough of him. He died on a moorland in northern England, and the Norse royal dynasty he represented effectively died with him.
Gunnhild survived. She gathered her sons and took them to Orkney, then to Denmark and the court of Harald Bluetooth. Over the next thirty years she worked to place her sons on the Norwegian throne, and she succeeded: her eldest, Harald Greycloak, became King of Norway after defeating Hakon the Good. She was, for a period, back.
Harald Greycloak was eventually betrayed and killed in 970. Gunnhild spent her remaining years in Denmark, still connected to courts and networks but without the leverage to change outcomes the way she had before. The sagas disagree about how she died; some say she was drowned on orders of Hakon Sigurdsson, which may be true or may be wishful thinking on the part of those who found her inconvenient.
What the Show Gets Right (and What It Doesn't)
Bloodaxe the series takes significant creative liberties, as all historical drama does. Gunnhild's character in the show is drawn partly from the saga tradition and partly from contemporary storytelling priorities. The show captures her intelligence and her political ferocity reasonably well. The details — specific events, motivations, chronology — are dramatized.
What the show cannot fully capture, because no drama can, is the texture of what she was navigating: a world where power was personal and relational, where loyalty networks were built over decades and could unravel overnight, where a woman's political influence depended entirely on her ability to work within structures that were not designed for her authority. The historical Gunnhild was doing something genuinely difficult, and she did it for forty years.
That is worth knowing before the show fills in its version.
The Real Sources
If you want to read about Gunnhild yourself, the accessible starting points are: Egil's Saga (translated by Bernard Scudder for Penguin Classics, or by Seamus Heaney collaborator – check translations carefully), Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson (Laing translation is free online; Hollander's is excellent), and for a scholarly overview, Judith Jesch's work on women in the Viking Age is the best English-language starting point.
Just remember: Egil's Saga has an agenda. Read it for the story. Read Heimskringla for the political history. And remember that the most interesting version of Gunnhild might be the one you reconstruct from everything the sources are trying very hard not to admit about her.
The Gunnhild Collection
👉 Gunnhild T-Shirt – Norse Queen, Mother of Kings
👉 Norse Queen Energy Embroidered Crewneck
👉 Eric Bloodaxe T-Shirt – Viking King of Norway & Northumbria
Further reading: Gunnhild: The Most Dangerous Woman in the Viking Age — Erik Bloodaxe: The Real History — Eirksmál: The Poem Written for a Dead King