This is a work of historical fiction. A lot of effort has been made to stick to the facts as we know them, but those facts are few. So I have endeavored to construct a plausible story based on the rough information we possess. I freely admit that in some cases, I have manufactured characters and plotlines, but the overall story sticks pretty close to the little we know.
Let us look first at the battles. We know that Erik"s sons came back to claim the High Seat their father had once occupied, and that they fought Hakon for it. Heimskringla by the Icelandic writer, Snorre Sturlason, reports that there were three such battles, though his story recounts events that happened roughly three hundred years before his time. Gwyn Jones in A History of the Vikings follows a similar train of events. V
