Ragnar Lothbrok

Biography

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.

Key Battles