Ragnar Lodbrok and his Sons

Ragnar Lodbrok enters legend as a young king of Denmark hungry for a deed to make his name. He hears of Þóra, daughter of an earl, the fairest of women — and of the guardian that keeps her: a creature that began as a little worm laid on her gold as a pet, and grew, coiling about her bower, devouring an ox a day, until no man dared approach.^[1]

Ragnar had breeches and a cape made of shaggy hide and boiled them in pitch and tar against the venom; then he rolled in sand, took his spear, and waded in alone to kill the serpent and claim Þóra.^[2] The grotesque armoured trousers won him both a wife and the by-name that would outlast everything else about him: loðbrók — Hairy-Breeches. It is a fairy-tale opening, and a deliberate one: this is a fornaldarsaga, a saga of the old legendary age, where the laws are those of myth, not the careful feud-law of Iceland.

Here the saga reaches back and joins hands with the greatest legend of the North. Long before, in Hlymdale, the foster-father Heimir heard of the deaths of Sigurð the Dragon-Slayer and Brynhildr — and to save their infant daughter from their enemies, he hid the child, with gold and treasure, inside a great hollow harp, and carried her away into the world.^[1]

At a poor steading called Spangarheath in Norway, a greedy old couple murdered the harper for his supposed wealth — and found instead a beautiful child. They raised her as their own drudge, a cowherd-girl, blackening her with tar to hide her beauty, and called her Kráka, 'Crow.' So Sigurð and Brynhildr's daughter grew up in rags, her royal blood unknown even to herself: the living thread that ties this saga to the Völsung tragedy that runs before it.

Years later Ragnar's men, putting in near Spangarheath, glimpsed the cowherd-girl and were struck dumb by her beauty under the grime. Ragnar, his first wife now dead, resolved to test whether she was as wise as she was fair. He sent word that she must come to him in a way that was a riddle in itself: neither clothed nor unclothed, neither fasting nor fed, neither alone nor in company.

Kráka solved it perfectly — she came wrapped in a fish-net with her hair down (clothed, yet not), having bitten a leek (fed, yet not), with only a hound at her side (in company, yet not).^[1] Ragnar married her. Only afterward did she reveal her true name and lineage: she was Áslaug, daughter of Sigurð and Brynhildr — and she proved it by bearing a son with the image of a serpent in his eye, the mark of the dragon-slayer's blood.^[2] The cowherd was a Völsung; the legend had folded into the saga.

Ragnar and Áslaug's sons became the most famous brood in the legendary North — and the eldest, Ívarr, was the strangest and the greatest. He was born boneless, with gristle where bone should be, so that he had to be carried; yet he was the wisest and most far-seeing of all of them, the strategist of the family.^[1]

Around the sons the saga widens into war: against King Eysteinn of Sweden and his uncanny sacrificial cow Síbilja, in raids across the world, in feats that rival their father's. The sons grow so renowned that Ragnar, aging, frets that their fame is eclipsing his own — and that jealousy, the proud king's refusal to be outshone even by his own children, is what drives him to the reckless deed that kills him. In the sagas, a great man's undoing usually grows from his greatest quality; Ragnar's is pride.

To outdo his sons, Ragnar made a boast and kept it: he would conquer England with only two ships. Áslaug, wiser, begged him not to go so thinly manned, and warned him by her foresight that it would end in disaster.^[1] He went anyway. His ships were wrecked on the English coast, his small force overwhelmed, and Ragnar himself taken alive by King Ella of Northumbria.

Ella had him thrown into a pit of serpents to die.^[2] Ragnar met it with the defiance that defines him: as the snakes killed him he sang of his battles and laughed at death, and spoke the line the whole saga has been driving toward — that the young pigs would grumble if they knew how the old boar suffered.^[3] It was at once a boast and a summons: he was telling Ella, with his last breath, that his sons were coming.

When word reached the sons that Ella had killed their father, the saga reaches its famous climax. Ívarr the Boneless, coldest and cleverest, mastered his grief while his brothers raged, and bent the whole family's strength to one end: a great host crossed to England to make Ella pay.^[1]

The vengeance, when it came, was monstrous and total — the old boar's grumbling young pigs proving every bit the equal of his threat. With that act of hefnd the saga closes the circle Ragnar opened with his dying boast, and the line that began with Sigurð the Dragon-Slayer and his hidden daughter Áslaug runs on, through Ragnar and his sons, into the edge of recorded history — the legendary kings shading into the viking age proper. This is where the mythic Völsung blood empties out into the world of real raids and real kingdoms: the bridge, in the old manuscripts and in this atlas, between Sigurd's legend and the historical sagas that follow.