Eiríkr Blóðøx (Bloodaxe)

Eric Bloodaxe earned his name — Harald Fairhair's favourite son, who secured his path to the throne by killing most of his own brothers, and ruled Norway briefly and brutally before being driven out. He ended as a viking king of York in England, restless and violent to the last. In the sagas he is above all Egil Skallagrímsson's great royal enemy: their feud runs for years, and its famous climax comes when Egil, shipwrecked in Eric's England and condemned to death, composes overnight a praise-poem so masterful — the Höfuðlausn, the 'Head-Ransom' — that Eric cannot bring himself to kill him, and lets him go. Eric is the type of the hard viking king the saga age was already passing beyond: ruling by the axe, outmatched by law and by the word, and remembered as much for the poet who out-talked his death-sentence as for his own bloody reign.