Lagertha

• 1. Introduction

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  Lagertha, a legendary Viking ruler and shieldmaiden from what is now Norway, made her first appearance in recorded history in the twelfth century, written down by a Christian monk who both admired and feared what she represented. Her story survived not because anyone wished to celebrate her, but almost in spite of the chronicler who told it. Saxo Grammaticus, the author who preserved her tale, thought women existed only as sexual beings. Yet here he was, writing in careful Latin about a woman who flew around the rear of an enemy formation, killed her own husband with a spear she had hidden in her gown, and then seized his name and his territory for herself.

  Who was Lagertha? Was she a real person, a figure drawn from Norse religious tradition, or a warrior legend borrowed from somewhere else entirely? The questions run deeper than a single saga. They reach into the nature of how Viking-age stories were constructed, who gets to appear in the historical record, and why a shieldmaiden who may never have existed has proven so durable across eight centuries.

• 2. The Gesta Danorum Account

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  Saxo Grammaticus set Lagertha's story in the ninth book of the Gesta Danorum, a sprawling work of Danish history completed in the twelfth century. The sequence begins with a Swedish king named Fro invading Norway and killing the Norwegian king Siward. Fro forced the women of Siward's family into a brothel as a deliberate humiliation. Ragnar Lodbrok, seeking to avenge his grandfather Siward, arrived with an army, and many of those abused women dressed in men's clothing and fought alongside him.

  Saxo singles out one of them by name. His Latin describes her as "a skilled Amazon" who "had the courage of a man" and fought at the front with her hair loose over her shoulders. The chronicler notes that it was her flying locks, not her fighting, that revealed her sex to the watching soldiers. She was chief among the women fighters and, Saxo writes, key to Ragnar's victory.

  After the battle, Ragnar was impressed enough to seek her hand. He arrived at her home in the Gaular valley, leaving his companions to wait outside. Lagertha had set a bear and a large hound to guard the approach. Ragnar killed the bear with a spear and choked the hound to death, and so won her agreement to marry him. Saxo records that they had a son named Fridleif and two daughters whose names are never given.

  The marriage did not last. Ragnar, still resentful that she had set animals against him, divorced Lagertha when he returned to Denmark, choosing instead Thora, daughter of the jarl Herraudr of Vastergotland. Years later, facing another civil war, Ragnar sent to Norway for help. Lagertha came with a hundred and twenty ships. At a turning point in the battle, when Ragnar's son Siward had been wounded and his soldiers were starting to waver, she led a charge around the back of the enemy line and reversed the panic. Saxo's own words describe her as having "a matchless spirit though a delicate frame."

  Back in Norway after the victory, she quarrelled with her second husband and killed him with a spearhead she had concealed inside her gown. Saxo's conclusion is pointed: she then, in his phrasing, "usurped the whole of his name and sovereignty," preferring, he writes, to rule alone rather than share a throne.

• 3. Saxo's Sources and Misogyny

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  Judith Jesch, a historian who has studied the Gesta extensively, describes the first nine books of Saxo's work as "generally considered to be largely fictional." That framing matters because Lagertha sits squarely within those books. Saxo was drawing on two distinct traditions when he wrote his warrior women. One was the ancient Greek and Roman legend of the Amazons. The other was a body of Old Norse and particularly Icelandic sources that scholars have not been able to clearly identify.

  Saxo's personal views left a mark on how he portrayed these figures. Like most churchmen of his time, he saw women primarily as sexual beings. The shieldmaidens of the old heathen era represented, to his mind, a kind of chaos that the Church and a stable monarchy had since corrected. His admiration for Lagertha's physical courage sits alongside a deep discomfort with what she stands for, and that tension shapes nearly every line he gives her.

  Jesch points to one detail in the battle account as particularly revealing. When Saxo describes Lagertha "flying round" to the rear of the enemy, the Latin verb he chooses is circumvolare, which means to fly. According to Jesch, this associates Lagertha with the valkyries, the Norse figures who moved through battlefields dispensing fate. The comparison is not accidental. Saxo's description notably echoes the tale of Kara, a valkyrie who flew above her warrior lover Helgi Haddingjaskati during battle in the form of a swan, casting spells in his support.

  The historian Hilda Ellis Davidson, writing in her commentary on the Gesta, also noted that the name Lagertha appears in other contexts. A woman named Hladgerd, who rules the Hladeyjar, appears in sagas about the sixth-century Scylding king Halfdan and gives him twenty ships to fight his enemies. Davidson also flagged suggestions in the literature that a version of the name was used among the Franks, pointing to Luitgarde of Vermandois, who lived roughly from 914 to 978.

• 4. The Thorgerd Hypothesis

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  Davidson considered it possible, and the scholar Nora K. Chadwick considered it very probable, that Lagertha is not a historical person at all but a reflection of a Norse goddess named Thorgerd Holgabrud. The convergences between the two figures are specific enough to be hard to dismiss.

  Thorgerd was worshipped by the Norwegian ruler Haakon Sigurdsson, who lived approximately from 937 to 995 and made his seat at Hladir, the place known in modern Norwegian as Lade. She was sometimes described as his wife or consort. Haakon's actual wife was named Thora, and according to Snorri Sturluson, Thora lived in Gaulardal. That is the Gaular valley, the exact location where Saxo places Lagertha's home. The Gaular valley was also the documented center of Thorgerd's cult.

  The name connection reinforces the identification. Lagertha's likely name in her native Old Norse would have been Hladgerd, derived from Lade, the place where Thorgerd was venerated. When Saxo writes of Lagertha flying to the rear of the enemy with her hair streaming, that image finds a parallel in the Flateyjarbók, a medieval Icelandic manuscript, which describes Thorgerd and her sister Irpa assisting Haakon in battle in a strikingly similar way.

  If Chadwick is right, then what Saxo recorded was not a dimly remembered warrior queen but a fictionalized account of a pagan goddess, refracted through his own Christian and misogynistic lens, and set into a narrative alongside Ragnar Lodbrok to make her story legible to a medieval Danish audience.

• 5. Eight Centuries of Portrayals

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  The Danish playwright Christen Pram wrote a historical drama simply titled Lagertha in 1789, working directly from Saxo's account. That play became the source material for the choreographer Vincenzo Galeotti, who adapted it into a ballet also called Lagertha in 1801. Galeotti's production was set to music by Claus Schall and performed at the Royal Theater, where it was a significant success. It carried the distinction of being the first ballet to feature a Nordic theme, and it was conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a unified artwork incorporating song, pantomime, dance, and originally dialogue as well.

  More than two centuries later, Lagertha appeared as a main character in the television series Vikings, which began in 2013. The actress Katheryn Winnick played her across multiple seasons. The series drew broadly on Saxo's account in its portrayal of her as Ragnar's first wife and as a shieldmaiden who eventually rules as a jarl and then as a queen in her own right. The core elements Saxo recorded in the twelfth century, her fighting ability, her marriage to Ragnar, her independent authority, remained the structural pillars of a story told on screen to a global audience more than eight hundred years after Saxo first wrote them down.

  The survival of her story across all those retellings points back to a detail Saxo himself could not resist recording: that at the height of battle, when the soldiers around her were losing their nerve, she was the one who turned it around.