Ragnar Lodbrok
Ragnar Lodbrok, the Viking hero and legendary king of Sweden and Denmark, may once have been imagined as a woman. In the early 12th century, someone carved a runic inscription into the ancient tumulus of Maeshowe on Orkney. It reads: "This howe was built a long time before Lodbrok's. Her sons, they were bold; scarcely ever were there such tall men of their hands." The two words "her sons" have led some readers to suspect that Lodbrok began as a mother of famous warriors, and only later became their father.
That odd detail points at a larger puzzle. Ragnar appears in Old Norse poetry, Icelandic sagas, Danish histories, Frankish annals and Irish chronicles. Yet no single source gives the same man. Was he a king, a raider, a composite of several men, or a story that grew with every retelling? The answers run through giant serpents, a shield-maiden, a banner said to foretell victory, and a pit of snakes.
The Sögubrot describes Ragnar as "the biggest and fairest of men that human eyes have seen, and he was like his mother in appearance and took after her kin." Icelandic sources agree that his father was Sigurd Ring, a king of Sweden. Sigurd and his kinsman Harald Wartooth fought the Battle of Brávellir on the plains of Östergötland, where Harald and many of his men died. Sigurd then ruled Sweden and Denmark, and his son by the princess Alfhild of Álfheimr was Ragnar.
The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok gives its hero a plain character. He was generous to his followers and cruel to his enemies. His first great deed was the killing of a dragon in Götaland, and the Sögubrot adds a second serpent. A giant snake guarded the home of Thora Borgarhjort, daughter of the Geatish jarl Herrauð. Ragnar killed it and won her as his wife. The odd protective clothing he wore for the fight earned him the nickname Lodbrok. Thora bore him two sons, Erik and Agnar.
After Thora died, Ragnar found a woman of striking beauty and wisdom named Kráka. She lived in Norway with a poor peasant couple. He married her, and their sons were Ivar the Boneless, Björn Ironside, Hvitserk, Ragnvald and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye. Kráka was then revealed as Aslaug, a secret daughter of the hero Sigurd Fafnesbane. The saga also traces Ragnar's line back to Odin, giving him the wisdom, courage and poetic speech of the Allfather.
Ragnar's own end comes from pride. As his sons grew into famous warriors, he did not want to be outdone and set out to conquer England with only two ships. Northumbrian forces defeated him. The saga reports that he was lowered into a serpent pit, where "he sat there a long time while none of the snakes would bite him." Some onlookers said: "This is a great man; no weapons would bite him today, and now the serpents will not bite him."
The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, the Tale of Ragnar's Sons and Heimskringla all say that King Ælla of Northumbria had captured and executed him. They also say that the Great Heathen Army, which invaded England around 866, was led by Ragnar's sons to make Ælla pay.
Around 1138, the Chronicon Roskildense named a Lodbrok, written Lothpardus, as father of the "utterly cruel" Norse king Ywar. Ywar's brothers were Inguar, Ubbi, Byorn and Ulf, and together they called on Danish petty kings to help ruin the Frankish realm. In this telling, Ywar attacked Britain, but not as revenge for any father. Around 1190, the chronicle of Sven Aggesen gave the first full Danish form of the name, Regnerus Lothbrogh. Neither text calls him a Danish ruler.
The first to do so was Saxo Grammaticus, in his Gesta Danorum of about 1200. Saxo makes Ragnar's father a Norwegian prince, also named Sigurd Ring, who is not the victor of Brávellir. When this Sigurd and his rival cousin Ring die in battle, Ragnar takes the Danish throne. Saxo identifies him with the historical Ragnfred, who died in 814.
Saxo's Ragnar wins his first wife in a trial of strength. The shield-maiden Ladgerda, called Lagertha elsewhere, fights beside him against the Swedish king Frö. Ragnar then kills a bear and a great hound to win her hand, though he later repudiates the marriage. He next marries Thora Borgarhjort, after killing two venomous giant snakes that guarded her home. Ragnar has many sons across these unions, and a final wife named Svanlaug, possibly another name for Aslaug, bears three more.
The result is less a saga than a map of conquest. Ragnar installs his sons as sub-kings in England, Scotland, Norway, Orkney and Sweden. In the Arctic, the Bjarmians use magic spells to raise foul weather, and Finnish archers on skis prove a formidable foe. His son Ubbe revolts and is only subdued with great effort. Another son, Hvitserk, is treacherously captured and burnt alive by the Hellespontian prince Daxon. Ragnar then leads a campaign to Kievan Rus' and captures Daxon, who is spared and exiled.
A shield described in the Ragnarsdrápa gives the oldest poetic glimpse of a Ragnar. The poem is attributed to the 9th-century poet Bragi Boddason, and it thanks a Ragnar, son of Sigurd, for a richly decorated gift. The shield shows four scenes: the assault on Jörmunrek, the Hjaðningavíg tale, the ploughing of Gefjon, and Thor's struggle with the Midgard Serpent. Recent scholarship suggests the poem actually dates to about 1000 and celebrates the Norse reconquest of England. On that reading, the four scenes stand for four parts of the Lodbrok story: the sons' first defeat through recklessness, Ivar's deceitful approach to Ælla, his cunning seizure of land, and Ragnar's fight against the giant serpent.
Around 1038, Sigvat Thordarson's Knutsdrapa says that Ivar carved the eagle on Ælla's back at York. That line suggests the tale of the sons' grim revenge was already circulating. Modern scholars have debated the "blood eagle" punishment it seems to describe.
The Krákumál, or Kráka's lay, is Ragnar's death-song. It is spoken by the dying hero in the snake pit and recounts battles across a wide area, several of them in the British Isles. The poem's title nods to his wife Kráka. Modern philologists commonly date its present form to the 12th century. In its stanzas, Ragnar speaks of Valhalla, Odin and the Valkyries, which ties him closely to Norse mythology. Skaldic and eddic poetry often links heroes to divine ancestry in this way, raising their standing.
Such poems come from a world of oral tradition, so their dates are hard to settle. A man named Ragnar clearly stood in the memory of skalds long before the sagas were written down in the 12th and 13th centuries.
In 845, a Viking fleet sailed up the Seine and raided Rouen on its way toward Paris. The Siege of Paris and the Sack of Paris that year were the high point of a Viking invasion of the West Frankish kingdom. The fleet's leader was a Norse chieftain called Reginherus, or Ragnar. Historians dispute whether this man is the saga hero, although the identification is often tentatively made.
King Charles the Bald was determined to save the royal Abbey of Saint-Denis, near Paris. He divided his smaller army into two parts, one for each bank of the river. Ragnar attacked and defeated one of those divisions. He took 111 Frankish prisoners and hanged them on an island in the Seine. The act honoured the god Odin and was meant to terrify the remaining Frankish troops.
The fleet then returned to its overlord, the Danish king Horik I. Ragnar soon died from a violent illness that also spread through Denmark. It is a very different death from the snake pit.
Some have also linked Lodbrok to a Ragnar who received land at Torhout in Flanders from Charles the Bald in about 841. That Ragnar eventually lost both the land and the king's favour.
Around 1070, William of Jumièges wrote a Norman history with one of the oldest mentions of the name Lodbrok. He claims that the old Danish kings had a custom of expelling younger sons to keep them out of the way. King Lodbrok followed the custom and ordered his junior son Björn Ironside to leave. Björn sailed off with a large fleet and ravaged West Francia and later the Mediterranean.
Roughly in the same period, Adam of Bremen listed the Danish or Norse pirates Horich, Orwig, Gotafrid, Rudolf and Inguar. He singled out Inguar, or Ivar, as a cruel persecutor of Christians, and called him a son of Lodbrok.
The strongest English clue comes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser's Life of Alfred. In 878, a "brother of Hingwar and Healfden" invaded Devon with a fleet. The Vikings lost the Battle of Cynwit, their king was slain, and the Saxons took the banner called "Raven" among their plunder. The Annals of St Neots, from the early 12th century, add that three daughters of Lodebroch wove the banner in one day. If a live crow appeared on the banner's middle in battle, the Vikings would win. If it hung motionless, they were doomed.
Irish sources point the same way. The Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib, from the 12th century, calls King Halfdan, who died in 877, "mac Ragnaill". That name could mean the son of a Ragnvald or of a Ragnar. It is a strong hint that the father of Ivar and Halfdan really bore a name like Ragnar. The early 11th century Three Fragments tells of a Ragnall who sailed to Orkney with three sons. Two of them later raided the English and Franks and plundered in the Mediterranean. Some have proposed that this is an Irish version of the Ragnar story, with the Mediterranean raid being a real expedition of 859-61.
From 865 to 870, Ivar the Boneless led the Great Heathen Army in England. After 870 he vanishes from English accounts, and the Anglo-Saxon chronicler Æthelweard records his death in that year. Among the brothers who organized the army were Ubba, Halfdan, Björn Ironside, Hvitserk and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye. All are known as historical figures, except Hvitserk, who is slightly more doubtful.
About 870, Halfdan Ragnarsson took command and invaded Wessex. A Great Summer Army of warriors from Scandinavia, led by King Bagsecg of Denmark, swelled his forces. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Danes fought the West Saxons nine times. At the Battle of Ashdown on the 8th of January 871, Bagsecg was killed. Halfdan then accepted a truce from the future Alfred the Great, newly crowned king of Wessex.
With Bagsecg dead, Halfdan was the last king of the invading host. He may also have ruled part of Denmark, possibly Jutland, since Frankish sources mention a co-ruler Halfdan in 873.
Other brothers left traces in the north. Late sagas make Björn Ironside king of Sweden and Uppsala, though the chronology does not fit. Björn had sons named Erik and Refil, and Refil's son Erik Refilsson followed in line. Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye may be the Sigfred who was king in Denmark with Halfdan in 873. The sagas say he ruled Zealand, Skåne and the lesser Danish isles. He may have succeeded Halfdan as king of all Denmark around 877, and may be the Viking king Sigfred who was killed in West Francia in 887.
In 1979, the scholar Hilda Ellis Davidson observed that "certain scholars in recent years have come to accept at least part of Ragnar's story as based on historical fact." Even so, contemporary academia regards most of the stories about him as fiction. Davidson also suggested why Saxo's account is so tangled. In book IX of the Gesta Danorum, he appears to have gathered many confusing and contradictory tales into the reign of a single king. Many deeds given to Ragnar can therefore be linked, through other sources, to other figures.
Several of those figures are candidates for the historical Ragnar. Horik I of Denmark died in 854. King Reginfrid, who died in 814, ruled part of Denmark with his brother Harald Klak. Horik I and his brothers expelled him, and he later fell in battle against them. The Ragnall of the Irish Annals is another possibility. Every attempt to tie the legend to one or more of these men has failed, because the accounts and their timelines cannot be reconciled. Yet the tradition of a Viking hero named Ragnar, who ravaged mid-9th-century Europe and fathered famous sons, remains remarkably persistent.
Fiction has kept him alive. Edwin Atherstone's 1830 novel Sea-Kings in England and Edison Marshall's 1951 novel The Viking both feature him. A comic feature drawn by Eduardo Teixeira Coelho ran in the French magazine Vaillant from 1955 until 1969. Richard Parker's 1957 novel The Sword of Ganelon explores Ragnar, his sons and Viking raiding culture.
In the 1958 film The Vikings, based on Marshall's novel, Ernest Borgnine plays Ragnar. King Ælla captures him and casts him into a pit of wolves. Kirk Douglas plays a son named Einar, who vows revenge with the help of his half-brother and sworn enemy Eric, played by Tony Curtis. Harry Harrison's 1993 alternative history novel The Hammer and the Cross has Ragnar shipwrecked, captured and executed, followed by his sons' revenge. In the 2013 History series Vikings, Travis Fimmel plays the title role. The 2020 game Assassin's Creed Valhalla shows Ragnar's children plundering and settling eastern England, and Ragnar himself appears only in a brief flashback of his execution.
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Common questions
Who was Ragnar Lodbrok?
Ragnar Lodbrok was a legendary Viking hero and king of Sweden and Denmark, known from Old Norse poetry, Icelandic sagas and medieval chronicles. Most scholars regard the majority of the stories about him as fiction, although his sons are historical figures.
Was Ragnar Lodbrok a real person?
Opinion about Ragnar Lodbrok is divided. His sons Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan Ragnarsson, Björn Ironside, Ubba and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye are historical, but contemporary academia regards most stories about their father as fiction.
How did Ragnar Lodbrok die?
In the sagas, Ragnar Lodbrok died after King Ælla of Northumbria had him thrown into a pit of venomous snakes. Frankish accounts of a Ragnar at Paris in 845 instead say he died soon after of a violent illness.
Who were the sons of Ragnar Lodbrok?
The sagas name Ivar the Boneless, Björn Ironside, Hvitserk, Ragnvald and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, among others, as sons of Ragnar Lodbrok. Ivar led the Great Heathen Army from 865 to 870, and Halfdan Ragnarsson took command about 870.
How did Ragnar Lodbrok get his nickname?
According to the Sögubrot, Ragnar earned the nickname Lodbrok from the unusual protective clothes he wore when he killed a giant snake guarding Thora Borgarhjort. By killing the snake he won her as his wife.
What happened in the Siege of Paris in 845 involving Ragnar Lodbrok?
A Viking fleet led by a chieftain named Reginherus, or Ragnar, raided Rouen and attacked Paris in 845. Historians dispute whether he was the saga hero, and he hanged 111 Frankish prisoners on an island in the Seine to honour Odin.
Which medieval sources mention Ragnar Lodbrok?
The main sources include Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, the Tale of Ragnar's Sons, the Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, the Ragnarsdrápa and the Krákumál. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Irish annals also give indirect support.
All sources
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