Characters

"It has always seemed to me that the glory of a man's deeds is measured by the boldness of his telling."

Ragnar Lothbrok occupies the uncertain borderland between history and legend — a figure so thoroughly mythologized by the Norse sagas that separating the man from the story has defeated historians for centuries. What seems historically probable: there was a Norse chieftain of exceptional ability who raided England and Francia in the mid-ninth century, whose sons led the Great Heathen Army invasion of England in 865 apparently in revenge for his death, and whose name or title was recorded in Frankish chronicles as 'Reginheri.' Whether this was one man or a composite of several leaders whose deeds accreted into a single legendary figure remains genuinely unknown. The saga accounts describe him as a farmer's son who killed a great serpent to win the hand of a shieldmaiden, a man who wore magical trousers (the 'Lothbrok' — 'hairy breeches') as armor, a Viking who sailed up the Seine in 845 and extorted 7,000 pounds of silver from the Frankish emperor, and who eventually met his end in a snake pit ordered by King Ælla of Northumbria. His sons — Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan, Bjorn Ironside, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, and Ubbe — were all documented historical figures who shaped the Scandinavian world from England to the Mediterranean. Historical or legendary, Ragnar became the defining figure of the Viking Age in popular imagination — the archetype of the Norse raider whose terrifying competence and contempt for settled Christian civilization gave the era its character. The snake pit death story is almost certainly invented, but its invention tells us something real: contemporaries understood that the men who came after Ragnar — his sons, his successors — were avenging something personal, something that could only be answered by the conquest of kingdoms.

"It has very often come into my mind what men of learning there were formerly throughout England, both of sacred and secular orders; and how happy times there were then throughout England."

Alfred was the youngest of five sons of the King of Wessex and never expected to inherit the throne — but plague, battle casualties, and the political chaos of the Danish invasions eliminated his brothers, leaving him king at 22 in the worst possible circumstances. The Great Heathen Army had already destroyed Northumbria and East Anglia; Mercia had been partitioned; Wessex was surrounded on three sides by Danish territory. In January 878, a surprise Danish winter raid destroyed Alfred's household and sent him fleeing into the Somerset marshes with a handful of men. He spent months as a fugitive in his own kingdom. What he built from that low point was remarkable. The militia he assembled from the Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire levies defeated Guthrum at Edington and established the Danelaw treaty that saved Wessex. But Alfred's genius was strategic rather than simply military: he built a network of fortified towns (burhs) across Wessex, positioned no more than 20 miles apart so no point in the kingdom was more than a day's march from safety. He created a standing navy — effectively inventing the Royal Navy — to intercept Norse ships before they could raid inland. He divided the fyrd into rotation so farming and defense could continue simultaneously. He reformed legal codes, promoted literacy among the nobility, and personally translated Latin texts into Old English. He is the only English monarch ever to be called 'the Great,' and the title is deserved. His successors reconquered the Danelaw and created the unified Kingdom of England. Without his survival in 878, England as a political concept might not exist.

"I did not come from the ends of the earth to kneel to any man."

Rollo — called 'Gangrolf' (Going-Rolf) in the Norse sagas because he was reportedly too large for any horse to carry — was the Norse chieftain who received Normandy from the Frankish king Charles the Simple in 911, converted to Christianity, and became the ancestor of William the Conqueror and (through William's descendants) most of the royal families of Europe. He was either Norwegian or Danish depending on which source you believe — the question has been contested between Norway and Denmark for centuries and remains unresolved. Before Normandy, Rollo was a professional Viking in the classic mold: he raided Scotland and England, wintered in the Danelaw, and led or participated in at least one of the great Seine campaigns against Francia. He likely appears in the Norse sagas' accounts of the 885-886 Siege of Paris, though this identification is uncertain. By the first decade of the tenth century, he commanded a powerful force in the lower Seine valley — powerful enough that Charles the Simple chose to negotiate rather than fight. The Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte (911) gave Rollo and his followers the lower Seine lands as a fief in exchange for conversion to Christianity, intermarriage with Frankish women, and the defense of the Seine against other Norse raiders. It was an extraordinary bargain: the Franks neutralized a dangerous enemy by making him responsible for preventing more enemies from following the same route. Rollo's successors Latinized their Norse names, spoke French, adopted Frankish institutions, and became the most militarily formidable ruling class in Europe — the Normans who conquered England, Sicily, and the Holy Land.

"I have named it Greenland, for men will desire to go there if it has a good name."

Erik Thorvaldsson — Erik the Red, named for his hair and beard — was twice exiled and twice turned disaster into achievement. His father had been exiled from Norway for manslaughter, bringing the family to Iceland. Erik himself was exiled from Iceland for three years after killing several men in a feud. He used those three years of enforced wandering to explore the large landmass west of Iceland that sailors had glimpsed through fog and rumor, systematically surveying its southern and western coasts and concluding it was habitable. He named it Greenland — a deliberately optimistic name for a place whose habitable coast is a narrow green fringe between the ice cap and the sea. The name was marketing, and it worked: when his exile ended, he returned to Iceland and recruited settlers with enough success to lead 25 ships westward. Fourteen arrived. The Greenland settlements they founded, at Brattahlid in the Eastern Settlement and in the Western Settlement, survived for nearly 500 years. Erik himself never made it to Vinland — he fell off his horse on the way to the ships when his son Leif was departing for the westward voyage, took it as an omen, and stayed behind. He died in Greenland around 1003, likely from an epidemic the returning expedition had brought back from the Americas. He had opened a chain of exploration that touched three continents.

"We have found a land of fine resources, and we shall exploit it."

Leif Eriksson was the son of Erik the Red and the man who reached North America roughly five centuries before Columbus. He grew up in Greenland after his father's settlement there and appears to have spent time at the Norwegian court of Olaf Tryggvason, who converted him to Christianity and sent him back to bring the faith to Greenland. His mother converted; his father did not. Around the year 1000, Leif led an expedition westward from Greenland, following the reports of Bjarni Herjólfsson, who had seen wooded land to the west without stopping. Leif sailed in the opposite direction from Bjarni's original course, made landfall in at least three places — rocky Helluland (probably Baffin Island), forested Markland (probably Labrador), and finally Vinland, where they wintered before returning. The Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland, excavated by Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad beginning in 1960, provides the archaeological confirmation. Leif himself made only one voyage to Vinland. Subsequent expeditions — including a colonization attempt by Thorfinn Karlsefni — followed but eventually failed. The failure was not geographical: the land was genuinely excellent for settlement. It was demographic and tactical: the Norse had too few people in Greenland to support an overseas colony against indigenous resistance. Leif had found a continent and couldn't hold it.

"Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings. For there is none worthy of the name but God."

Cnut conquered England at about twenty years old and spent the rest of his life governing it with a sophistication that surprised everyone who expected a Viking chieftain to behave like one. He issued law codes, built churches, restored monasteries that his own predecessors had raided, made pilgrimage to Rome and distributed silver to the churches and poor he met along the route, and wrote letters home in the voice of a Christian king concerned about the spiritual welfare of his subjects. His reign was by most accounts one of the more stable periods in late Anglo-Saxon history. The story of Cnut commanding the tide to turn back — generally told as a story of royal arrogance — was recorded by a 12th-century source as precisely the opposite: Cnut had the throne carried to the shore to prove to his flattering courtiers that only God commands the tides, and that a king's power is correspondingly limited. Whether the story is true or not, it captures something real about how he chose to present himself. He was King of England, Denmark, Norway, and parts of Sweden simultaneously — the most powerful ruler in northern Europe since Charlemagne — and managed all of it through deputies and periodic personal visits while spending most of his time in England. He died at 40, and his empire dissolved immediately: his sons were incompetent, his English and Danish territories separated, and within seven years the Anglo-Saxon dynasty returned in the person of Edward the Confessor. Cnut had conquered England; England had conquered him.

"I vow not to cut or comb my hair until I am king of all Norway."

Harald Fairhair — Harald Hárfagri in Old Norse — made a vow not to cut or comb his hair until he had conquered all of Norway, and ruled a unified Norway for over forty years after Hafrsfjord made that vow possible. The saga account says the vow was made for the love of a woman who refused to become the concubine of a mere petty king; whether or not that story is true, the political project was real and consequential. Harald inherited the small kingdom of Vestfold from his father and spent roughly fifteen years systematically expanding it, defeating other petty kings in succession until the decisive naval battle at Hafrsfjord around 872 gave him control of the entire Norwegian coast. His subsequent reign lasted until his death around 932 — roughly sixty years — making him one of the longest-reigning monarchs of the Viking Age. His political impact extended far beyond Norway. The jarls and petty kings who refused his overlordship emigrated rather than submit, and their emigration populated Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Norse settlements across the British Isles. Harald thus inadvertently created the conditions for the Norse discovery of Greenland and America: the independent Icelandic commonwealth, founded by men fleeing his authority, produced Erik the Red and Leif Eriksson. The longship that reached North America was, in a sense, sailing away from Harald.

"Paris will not yield. Not while one stone stands on another and one man stands to hold it."

Odo — son of Robert the Strong, Margrave of Neustria, who had died fighting the Vikings in 866 — was Count of Paris in 885 when the largest Norse fleet in history arrived to besiege the city. He was 25 years old. He held Paris for a year. The defense of the 885-886 siege is one of the great defensive achievements of the Viking Age. Odo coordinated the military and ecclesiastical resources of the city under repeated Norse assaults, holding the two bridges — the bridges were the key, since they blocked the Seine to Norse passage upstream — against fire ships, siege towers, diversionary flooding attempts, and direct infantry assault. Bishop Gozlin organized the civilian population; Odo organized the soldiers. When Gozlin died of illness in April 886, Odo took sole command. In the autumn of 886, Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fat arrived with a relief army — and paid the Vikings to leave, allowing them to sail upriver to raid Burgundy rather than attacking them. Odo was furious. The betrayal of his defense by the emperor who should have relieved him discredited the Carolingian dynasty so thoroughly that when Charles died in 888, the West Frankish nobility elected Odo king rather than another Carolingian. He was the first non-Carolingian king of France, and his family — the Robertines — eventually became the Capetian dynasty that ruled France for 800 years.

"I have fought seventeen pitched battles and cannot recall one that went against me."

Harald Sigurdsson — Harald Hardrada, 'Harald the Hard Ruler' — was the last and arguably the greatest Viking warrior-king, a man who had spent decades fighting across Russia, the Byzantine Empire, the Mediterranean, and northern Europe before attempting to conquer England at the age of fifty-one. He was half-brother to Saint Olaf, fought at Stiklestad as a fifteen-year-old, went into exile after the battle, spent nearly fifteen years in the Byzantine Varangian Guard fighting in Bulgaria, Sicily, and Palestine, returned to Scandinavia, and seized the Norwegian throne in 1046. His Byzantine service made him one of the most widely traveled and experienced warriors in Europe. The Varangian Guard — the Norse mercenary regiment that served the Byzantine emperors as an elite bodyguard — had fought across three continents, and Harald commanded it. He came home rich, famous, and with a military education that encompassed everything from Byzantine siege warfare to naval combat in the Mediterranean. His claim to England came through a complicated argument about a succession agreement between earlier Norse and English kings. He allied with Harold Godwinson's traitorous brother Tostig and landed in Yorkshire in September 1066 with the largest Norse invasion force since the Great Heathen Army. He destroyed the northern English earls at Gate Fulford. Then Harold Godwinson appeared at Stamford Bridge, and Harald Hardrada — the last great Viking — was killed by an arrow in the throat. He had fought seventeen battles and won them all. The eighteenth killed him.