Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 by John Haywood Page B

son of the legendary Viking Ragnar Lodbrok (‘hairy breeches’). Whether there is any truth in the tradition is anyone’s guess. Ragnar is one of those legendary characters who, like King Arthur and Robin Hood, may well be based on real historical people but whose actual lives have become buried under such a deep accretion of later legends that separating any facts from the fiction is now completely impossible.
    Ragnar’s career, as told by Saxo Grammaticus, begins in a credible enough fashion, with him fighting off a host of rivals to become king of Denmark. Like real historical Viking kings, Ragnar consolidated his position by leading great plundering raids, but the range of his activities is improbable, he plundered everywhere from Britain and Ireland to the Mediterranean, the Byzantine empire, Russia and the Arctic. Ragnar earned his nickname for the shaggy trousers he wore for protection when he killed two enormous venomous serpents that were ravaging Sweden. Ragnar married three times but to no ordinary women: one of his wives was Lathgertha, a shieldmaiden (a type of Viking Amazon and just as legendary; women did not fight in real Viking armies). Another wife, according to Icelandic traditions, was the daughter of the mythical dragon slayer Sigurd Fafnisbane and his valkyrie wife Brynhild. Ragnar was survived by enough sons to crew a small longship, among them, according to Saxo, Regnald, Fridlef, Rathbarn, Dunvat, Daxon, Björn Ironside, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, Hvitserk, Ubbi, Erik Wind-Hat and Agnar, as well as Ivar the Boneless. Most of these sons probably belong as much to the realm of legend as their father.
    The Danish army wintered at Thetford in East Anglia and in the spring struck a peace deal with the locals. The East Angles would provide the Danes with horses and they would ride off and plunder someone else. This indifference to Viking raiding in the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was typical. On only one occasion did one Anglo-Saxon kingdom ally with another against the Vikings, and it worked greatly to the Vikings’ advantage as they were able to concentrate all their efforts on one kingdom at a time. Acquiring horses gave the Danes much the same mobility on land as they had previously enjoyed on water, with all the tactical advantages that went with it. The Danes used their horses to invade Northumbria, which was wracked by a civil war between rivals for the throne: Vikings always exploited political divisions when they could. Northumbria’s capital city, York, fell to the Danes without a fight on 21 November. Recognising the seriousness of the threat, the two kings, Ælle and Osberht, made common cause and together they attempted to recapture York in March 867. York’s defences were not in good condition and the Northumbrians stormed in, but once inside the city the battle turned against them and both kings were killed along with most of their followers. According to the colourful, but unreliable, medieval Scandinavian traditions, Ælle was responsible for the death of Ragnar Lodbrok. Ælle captured Ragnar after he was shipwrecked and had him thrown into a pit of adders to be bitten to death. Ragnar warned Ælle that ‘the piglets would be grunting if they knew the plight of the boar’, meaning that his sons would avenge him. When they captured Ælle at York, Ragnar’s sons sacrificed him to Odin by making a ‘blood eagle’ of him, that is cutting open his ribcage either side of the spine and pulling out his lungs to create the appearance of bloody wings. Scholars have endlessly debated whether this was a genuine Viking practice or merely the product of a fertile skaldic imagination. The sacrifice seems no more horrific than the old English punishment for traitors of hanging, drawing and quartering, so it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that it was sometimes actually performed: víking was not an activity for the squeamish, after all.
    As well as two kings, much of Northumbria’s