Sri Aurobindo began work on this play in 1910, shortly after his arrival in Pondicherry, and continued intermittently over a period of several years. No complete fair copy of the play survives. The fullest manuscript, a typed copy that contains the last version of Act II, breaks off in the middle of Act IV, Scene 2. Handwritten versions subsequent to the typed copy exist for Acts I and III and part of Act IV. There is only a single draft of Act V. Its interlinear and marginal revisions present unusual textual difficulties.
Eric was first published in 1960 in Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual and as a separate book. The present text is thoroughly re-edited. As a rule, the last version of each act has been transcribed as far as it goes; where the last version is incomplete, the previous version is used for the remainder of the act. The order in which the last two manuscripts of Acts I and III were written and revised is not entirely clear. The unused versions of these two acts are reproduced in the reference volume (volume 35), along with two partial rewritings of Act IV, Scene 1, which could not be worked into the text of the play. No specific source of the plot of Eric is known. Sri Aurobindo seems to have made free use of names and events from the history of Norway in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, a period that was the subject of much mediaeval Scandinavian literature.