It is worth noting that some modern historians call into question the identification of the Erik who ruled over Jorvik with Erik Bloodaxe. None of the English sources for Erik's reign in Northumbria identify him as Norwegian or as the son of Harald Fairhair. A thirteenth-century letter from Edward I to Pope Boniface VIII identifies Erik as Scottish in origin. Lappenberg, Plummer and Todd, writing in the late nineteenth century, identified Erik as a son of Harald Bluetooth, a claim Downham discounts as untenable. Downham, however, regards Erik the king of Jorvik as a distinct individual from Erik Bloodaxe, and thus views Gunnhild's sojourn in Orkney and Jorvik as the construct of later saga-writers who conflated different characters between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.