Was Ragnar Lothbrok a real person?

The one Ragnar we can date

In March 845 a fleet of about 120 Danish ships sailed up the Seine, scattered the army of the Frankish king Charles the Bald, hanged 111 prisoners and took Paris on Easter Sunday. Charles paid 7,000 pounds of silver to make them leave. Two writers of the time name the leader. The Annals of Xanten, written in the Rhineland, call him Reginheri, the “chief sinner” among the raiders, and say he was struck down by a plague on the way home. A monk of the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, writing a few years later, calls him Ragenarius and describes how he boasted of his victory to the Danish king Horik, collapsed and died of a horrible swelling disease.

That is all the evidence of the time says about him. He commanded a large fleet, he served or answered to King Horik, and he died in 845 or soon after. Nobody calls him Lothbrok, names his father or his sons, or says where he came from. Ragnar, Old Norse Ragnarr, was a common name. Whether this Ragnar has anything to do with the later Ragnar Lothbrok is exactly the question. The full story of the raid is told in chapter 3, Ragnar at Paris.

The sons who came first

Twenty years later, in the autumn of 865, a large Viking army landed in East Anglia and stayed in England for more than a decade. The English called it the micel here, the great army. It took York in 866, killed King Edmund of East Anglia in 869, fought nine battles against Wessex in 871 and in 876 began to settle. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, compiled at King Alfred’s court around 890, names two of its leaders, Halfdan, a king from 871, and Ivar. Its entry for 878 links them: that winter “the brother of Ingwar and Healfden” landed in Devon with twenty-three ships and was killed. So Ivar and Halfdan were brothers, and they had at least one more brother. Their father is not mentioned, in England or anywhere else, for two hundred years.

The father arrives in the late 11th century, and from the sons’ side. About 1075 the German chronicler Adam of Bremen calls the most cruel of the Northmen “Inguar, filius Lodparchi”, Ivar, son of Lodparchus, that is Loðbrók. Around 1125 Ari Þorgilsson, the first historian of Iceland, dates the settlement of his island to the year when “Ívarr, son of Ragnarr loðbrók, had St Edmund, king of the Angles, killed”. Ari’s is the first text that gives the full name Ragnar Lothbrok, and Ari himself, like other Icelandic families, claimed descent from Ragnar’s sons.

How the legend grew

Once the father had a name, the stories multiplied, and they did not agree. In England, a 12th-century set of annals kept at Bury St Edmunds, the Annals of St Neots, said that the Raven banner the English captured in 878 had been woven in a single day by “the three sisters of Hingwar and Hubba, daughters of Lodebroch”. In Orkney, in the middle of the 12th century, Norse visitors carved runes inside the prehistoric tomb of Maeshowe, among them a line saying the mound was built before Loðbrók’s, and that “her sons, they were bold”. That “her” has led some scholars to wonder whether Loðbrók was first remembered as a woman.

Around 1200 the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus wrote the first full life. His Ragnar is a Danish king who wins his first wife by killing two giant snakes while wearing hairy breeches (hence the nickname, “hairy breeches” or “shaggy trousers”), defeats a Frankish emperor “Karl” at the mouth of the Seine, conquers half of Europe, and fathers eleven sons, among them Ivar, Björn, Siward (Sigurd), Ubbe and Hwitserk. In the end King Ella of England has him thrown into a pit of snakes, and his sons avenge him. About thirty years later, the English monk Roger of Wendover told a completely different story: a Danish nobleman called Lothbroc was blown to Norfolk in a small boat while hawking and murdered there by the jealous huntsman of King Edmund, and his sons Hinguar and Hubba invaded East Anglia to avenge him. Two late legends, one Danish and one English, explained the same invasion in ways that cannot both be true.

The Icelandic Ragnars saga, written in the 13th century, gave Ragnar the form he has today: the dragon, the clever peasant girl Kráka who turns out to be Aslaug, daughter of the dragon-slayer Sigurd, the last expedition to England with only two ships, the snake pit, and his sons’ revenge on Ælla. The Tale of Ragnar’s Sons, from around 1300, adds the blood eagle, carved on Ælla’s back by Ivar. None of this can be checked against any source of the 9th century, and parts of it clash with the dates: Saxo’s Ragnar fights Charlemagne, who died in 814, while his sons are still at war in England in the 870s.

The sons, one by one

The sagas give Ragnar many sons. For each of the six best known, the question is the same: what do sources of the time say, and where does the link to Ragnar come from?

So was he real?

Historians give two kinds of answer. Some think a real Ragnar stands behind the legend: probably the Reginheri of 845, perhaps a man active in Frankia and Ireland in the mid-9th century, who became a hero and an ancestor of kings in later tradition. That was the view of Alfred Smyth in 1977, and the translator of Ari’s Book of the Icelanders, Siân Grønlie, still calls the historical Ragnar “probably identical with the Reginheri who sacked Paris in 845”. Others are more radical. Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, in the fullest modern study of the legend, wrote: “I do not think that there was ever a historical figure known as ‘Ragnarr Loðbrók’.” She suggests that reports of the leader of 845 dying of dysentery may even lie behind the nickname “shaggy breeches”.

Both camps agree on the essentials. There was a real Viking leader called Ragnar who took Paris in 845. There were real brothers called Ivar and Halfdan who led the conquest of northern and eastern England. Nothing written in the 9th or 10th century connects them. The Ragnar Lothbrok of the sagas, with his dragon, his wives, his snake pit and his avenging sons, is a figure of legend, put together between the 11th and the 13th centuries from real names, famous deeds and good stories. The army he is supposed to have inspired is the subject of chapter 5, The army lands, York falls.