Dan Snow's History Hit - Viking Legend: Ragnar Lothbrok

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

Ragnor Lothbrook is a legendary Viking figure who straddled the line between myth and reality. His adventures and deeds appear in the Viking sagas, but there is little hard evidence for his existence and according to the different sagas he dies on multiple different occasions and in a variety of grisly ways. His sons including Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan Ragnarsson, Björn Ironside, Ubbe and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye are undoubtedly real historical figures and themselves lived extraordinary lives. Was Ragnar really their father though or were these men trying to harness the power of legend by claiming descent from this great figure? To help explore that question Dan is joined by historian and author Justin Pollard. Amongst many other exciting projects, Justin was the historical advisor on the hit show Vikings which brought the story of Ragnar Lothbrok into the popular consciousness. Just and Dan discuss what evidence there is for the existence of Ragnar Lothbrok, the lives of his sons and how he goes about creating historical drama.

Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We're talking today about a legendary Viking. The most legendary Viking, really. Ragnar lothbrok a man now immortalized in the vikings tv show that's been watched by tens of millions of people worldwide but a man who those of us who are viking connoisseurs have always been into he sits at

the very cusp of legend and history his children or people said to be his children are identifiable they are attested to in the sources but r Ragnar Lothbrok, their father, is, well, he's semi-mythical. For this episode of history, I thought I'd get to the bottom of Ragnar Lothbrok, who is this man who seems to, well, personify the explosion of Viking seafarers out of the Baltic world, and whose sons roamed as far as the Mediterranean, really marking the dawn of this era of Norse expansion. Of course, the only person I could ask on to podcast through this is the very brilliant Justin Pollard. He's got the most extraordinary CV. He worked as an archaeologist. He's one of the geniuses behind the QI show and Channel 4's time team. He does script consultancy for mega historical films and

dramas like Elizabeth, like Atonement, like Les Mis, and also History Channel series The Vikings. He's found time during all that to write books himself and to found the crowdsourcing publisher Unbound, which is a big success here in the UK. So great fun to have Justin Pohl on the podcast. I'm sad I haven't had him on until now, but we've got him on the big subject. Ragnar Lothbrok, the ultimate Viking warrior. If you wish to see the show that's getting record numbers of views on History Hit TV, which is my digital history channel like Netflix for history, if you wish to watch that, you just go to historyhit.tv. You go and check out The Great Heathen Army, in which me and Dr. Kat Jarman went on a mission across England looking for the Great Heathen Army, which eventually faced Alfred the Great

in battle, somewhere, we think, on the Salisbury Plain, on what was Wessex. It's a TV show that I'm very, very proud of, and it goes perfectly. It's the perfect accompaniment, you'll be glad to hear, to this podcast. So head over to historyhit.tv. You get 30 days free if you sign up today. It's like the Netflix for history. Watch all the Viking documentaries on there. You're going to love it. If you love history, you love Vikings, historyhit.tv is the place for you.

But in the meantime, here's Justin Pollock talking about the Lothbrok. you. But in the meantime, here's Justin Pollock talking about the Lothbrok. Justin, it's great to have you on the podcast. Oh, it's lovely to be here. I've worked with you many times over the years, and I'm a huge fan of all of your work. But we got to talk a little bit about Vikings. I was a big fan. And of course, Ragnar Lothbrok. Ah, yes, the great legendary Viking himself. Well, you say legendary. Let's deal with Ragnar Lothbrok. Ah, yes, the great legendary Viking himself. Well, you say legendary, let's deal with Ragnar first. Let's deal with the historicity of Ragnar before we talk about some of your more contemporary adventures in the Viking world. We think his sons exist, like we think Ivar the Boneless was a real thing, don't we? Oh yeah, the great thing about Ragnar is it's one of those rare

moments where you catch someone absolutely on the edge of myth, on the edge of legend. We know that his sons, Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan, Sigurd Snake and I, Uba, these people all existed. We have some historical record of them. And they and other people claim to be sons of Ragnar. But of Ragnar himself, as you know, in the 9th century century you literally get chronicles that say and then a man called ragnar turned up and that's all you get so he lives between this place where everything is myth and where we're just getting into the historical record and to make up for that i mean they obviously you know ivar the boneless must have had a father but to make up for it what we then get in the 12th and 13th century are the sagas. And the sagas then give us this great story about Ragnar Lothbrok, Ragnar Hairytrousers, to explain really how the whole of the Viking expansion happened and to create this mythical figure who will then become the founder of the Viking Age. So actually, we're almost doing

literary criticism on the sagas here, but what do they say about him? Even in the sagas, there's not that much material. There is a saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, and there's the tale of Ragnar's sons. And slightly earlier, there's a skaldic poem and a few other sort of fragments. And they basically link Ragnar to the Age of Heroes. They basically link him to the gods and to myth. So in the sagas, he is a great hero who initially is looking to marry a woman called Thora, but her father has protected her with a lindworm, a serpent, so he can't get near. So he dons these hairy trousers

and they protect him from the bite of the serpent. And he gets Thora and he gets married and he breeds this generation of heroes. And when Thora dies, he then marries another woman called Aslaug, who is even more famous and really links Ivar into Germanic mythology. Because she is allegedly the daughter of Siegfried and Brunhilde. She's the daughter of the man who killed the dragon Fafnir. So it just takes us from complete realm of legend, just to the very edge of history. And what about other sources? I mean, the English or the French writing things at this time about these Norse folk they were coming into contact with? They are. And of course, they have a very different view.

The sagas are written in the Christian period, 12th, 13th century. The contemporary chronicles were written by Christians, mainly monks. And of course, their view of Vikings is a little more earthy, shall we say, because at the time the Vikings started appearing in the late 8th century, beginning of the 9th century, there's a very millennial feeling in Christian Europe. They believe that the end of the world is coming. Particularly, they believe in the prophecy of Jeremiah, you know, the weeping prophet who said, behold, the people shall come from the north. They shall hold the bow and the lance. They are cruel and will show no mercy. Their voice shall roar like the sea and

obviously reading that in the book of jeremiah you think oh yes i've met them they're the vikings and so where they start talking about these raiders they give them a name and one of the early names they give for one of these raiders is ragnall who appears in 845 besieging paris and then apparently according to that chron, he then catches dysentery and dies. But then the problem with Ragnar is he's very difficult to kill because although he dies in that chronicle, he then pops up in an Irish chronicle off the coast of Scotland in the Western Isles. He then settles in Dublin. There he dies again about 852, either at the hands of some of his friends or in a battle, or he's possibly tortured

to death, depending on which chronicle you read about him. And then the year later, he dies at Carlingford Loch at the hands of a rival, and then again on a raid on Anglesey. And finally, in the account that is the Great Saga account, of course, he goes to attack King Aela in North Umbria, and Aela captures him and throws him in a pit of snakes. And having seen he's wearing a magical silk vest, they remove the vest and the snakes bite him and he dies. And as he dies, he sings his famous death song. And this is the song that inspires his sons to come and get revenge. And their revenge is the Great Heathen Army's invasion of England. So we get a very negative view of Ragnar and a view in which he dies a lot,

but they all relate somehow to someone around this time who seems to be one of these first major Viking attackers, from whom all later Vikings then often claim to have descent. Clearly, if you're a Viking, saying you're a son of Ragnar is a big, bold thing to say. So several Ragnars popping up in the mid-9th century. Yes, they all pop up and they all die. But of course, as you can imagine, Christian chroniclers like their enemies to die. So invariably they pop up and they're sort of wailing and gnashing of teeth and terrible battles. And then they usually put in something about a really horrible death.

Dysentery is a popular one, the idea that God has struck down the pagan. We think of the Viking Age, well, Lindisfarne, the very late 8th century in England, and then last third of the 9th century, obviously, the Great Heathen Army arrived. We should point out Ragnar's French, if indeed it was Ragnar, that's early in the 9th century, wasn't it? They sailed up the Seine, got to Rouen. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Siege of Paris was in 845, where this guy called Ragnar, who may or may not be one of the many Ragnars. Well, nobody really knows exactly why it starts happening, but in sort of the late 700s,

there is this movement out of Scandinavia of war bands, of basically like pirate kings controlling groups of warriors who go raiding. And the first thing they come across around the North Sea, of course, is undefended monasteries. You've got buildings full of very rich and valuable items defended by monks who have no weapons at all. And this is almost too good to be true, really.

And that begins the great sort of age of Viking expansion. And that first stage of Viking contact with Europe, which is, however you spin it, extremely violent. Rich pacifists who refuse to fight. I mean, you couldn't make it up. And live on little islands off the coast where no one can come and help them. Very vulnerable, particularly to amphibious assaults. That's it. That's it.

I mean, you could imagine they would just have found it quite extraordinary. And they did find it extraordinary. And they, you know, I mean, accounts suggest that they really couldn't believe their luck. And they were very practical. You know, if they did get caught, which they occasionally did, particularly in France by the Carolingians, Charles the Bald, all they'd do is convert to Christianity. Charles at that point would say, oh, well, you're a Christian now. I can't really kill you. And they'd let them go and they'd go away and go back to paganism. They're accounts of Vikings converting twice in the same day. Amazing. The Victorians are obsessed with demographics, don't they?

They thought it was a demographic explosion in Scandinavia because they were always worried about how many people there were in all the great empires. We're now, of course, we'll blame climate. We'll assume it was some kind of climactic change and that will be the new theory on why. I mean, that seems a perfectly likely cause. There is a skaldic poem that suggests

that rulers in Scandinavia would send their young children away. We don't know why. It could be because of the very liminal world they lived in, you know, particularly in somewhere like Norway, where some of the first Vikings come from. There's not a lot of farmland.

There are very small areas of usable land. Also, of course, in an age of lots of infighting, you don't want lots of brothers and sons hanging around threatening your rule. So it's a very good reason. And when just across the sea, you've got a land, as you say, full of rich pacifists living in highly available locations, it is almost too good to miss. highly available locations. It is almost too good to miss. Listen to Dan Snow's history, talking about Ragnar Lothbrok. More after this. Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email,

someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers? Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt. And avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence.

Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. We've talked about the Great Ethan Army, which we tend to associate, I think, with Uber and either the Boneless, don't we? But where did these other sons of Ragnar, who are more attested, where did they end

up? Bjorn went to the Mediterranean, didn't he? Bjorn, yes, went to the Mediterranean. One of the great stories of Bjorn is that he travelled down through the Bay of Biscay, around Moorish Spain, into the Mediterranean, raided back up the Spanish coast, overwintered in the Camargue, and then went down the coast of Italy with the intention of sacking Rome, which is quite a bold claim. The sagas suggest that rather than sacking Rome, he actually came to a city called Luna, which he thought was Rome, because being a Viking, he'd never really seen a big Mediterranean city before. And he besieges Luna, but can't get in.

And he plays this famous trick on the locals in that he pretends to be dead and has himself put in a coffin and has all of his warriors wailing and weeping and knocking on the gate saying, oh, it's terrible. Our leader's died. We're going away. Can we just come in and bury him? And the locals being daft, open the door and let him in. And of course, as he gets into the church, he hops out of his coffin. They all pull their swords and kill everyone in the town and take over the town. That is almost certainly legend. Annoyingly, you put that in the Viking show that was so popular that everyone will have watched on TV and therefore made it very famous. That used to be one of my favourite stories.

No one ever heard of it. Primary school kids go absolutely bonkers when you tell them that story. That's my number one story. Trouble is now half of them are like, yeah, I saw that on telly. So thanks, Justin Pollard. Well, that is the flip side of trying to make TV Vikings. It was great using Ragnar. When Michael Hurst wanted to do a series on Vikings,

he asked me, what story could we tell? What could we base it around? And I'd written a series on Vikings, he asked me, what story could we tell? What could we base it around? And I'd written a book on Alfred the Great and said, well, the Sons of Ragnar would be the obvious one because it's Alfred the Great and it's a dynasty, so it can pass over many generations. The problem, of course, is then, you know, Michael says, great, so Ragnar, what did he do?

And you look at the Chronicles and there's literally 25 words written about him contemporaneously so you have to fill him in you have to make a character and to do that we took a lot of the saga material a lot of the saga stories and gave those to ragnar and his sons technically we have no proof that any of those things actually happened. The sagas are written two, three hundred years later, but they are written in a Viking world and for a Viking audience, albeit a Christian Viking audience. And so it seemed to us as close as we could get to telling a story that a Viking would understand about another Viking. And so we stole that story of Bjorn and gave it to Ragnar in Paris, in fact.

I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that very much. I love watching your series because I could see, oh, here we go. Okay. This is another story we've got. I love it. Yeah, no, you'll recognize it. That's the problem. You know all the bits that are coming. But that's what made it so pleasurable to watch. Ireland and Scotland, indeed. We never talk about that in England when we talk about the Viking Age. these sons of Lothbrok ended up right across the Isles. They do, they do. Dublin becomes a very big Viking settlement right the way through this period. Right up in the Orkneys becomes a very powerful Scandinavian earldom that's still threatening kings in England into the reign of Cnut and Edward the Confessor.

So there's sort of two stages to it. You have this initial stage of raiding, who are basically war bands, but then you do find Vikings who do wish to settle. And that was Alfred the Great's genius. Actually, rather than just keep paying off Viking war bands, actually offer them the same terms that he has to live with. Be a king yourself, live in half of the country, live in the Danelaw. And so they become settlers. And of course, what they are is great traders. And the same impetus that took Vikings to the Mediterranean raiding also took them to the Kievan Rus and down to Constantinople, and through all the trade routes of Europe and Central Asia and made them really the connection between the East and Western world. They were the great traders of the era.

That goes hand in hand with the raiding. And in our local environment, that covered the whole of the culture province of the North Sea and the Irish Sea. It was not England, Scotland, Wales, the North Sea and the Irish Sea. It was not England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland. These were all Viking-controlled and certainly Viking-influenced areas. So it was all part of a greater place, really. I've got to ask you what I got you here. So we don't know much about Rag, but you've made him one of the most famous historical characters at the moment because of their wonderful TV show. I always ask historians who do what you do, who have a chance to really mix it up in Hollywood and see your ideas and your dreams and your suggestions enacted on the silver screen.

Seeing it visualised must be so special. It is the very best thing. The great thing about a series like Vikings was, because we made 86 episodes, there was a great deal of investment. We were shooting all year long in Eire, in Ireland. So for the towns we wanted to build we built full-size viking towns we built a dozen ships to put in the harbour sailing ships that actually sailed they had motors as well because obviously you know we

need to go where we need to go acceptable i'll give you that it's fine and on set i walked up onto set oh several years ago and we were doing Ivar the Boneless taking York, which is another great saga story. And in our version, he comes in through the old Roman sewers. And I went up there onto the lot, you know, which is just great big sort of like warehouses and walk past them. They said, I'll come out the back and out the back. They built the whole of the middle of Anglian York.

Now, nobody's walked through the middle of Anglian York since the Anglian period. And I could actually do that. It must have cost millions to put together. But because you shoot all year round, and because you're using your set so intensively, it's worth building the whole thing. So you want a town, they build a town.

You want a village, a ship, they build it. There's very little in the way of computer graphics. We put mountains in the background and things, but most of it was built. You could tell that. I mean, you could certainly tell. So speaking of sewers and angling in York, your director or exec or something comes to you and says,

look, we're going to do either the bonus, the fall of the Northumbrian kingdom. We need a kind of exciting way for him to get in. Is that you then going, look, we're going to do either the bonus, the Fall of the Northumbrian Kingdom. We need a kind of exciting way for him to get in. Is that you then going, well, I did see Dan Snow on the one show crawling through the Roman sewers of York, so maybe we could use that equivalent. Well, no, exactly. It could exactly come from that.

I've seen you many a time crawling through a sewer for Queen and Country. And because it's a long time ago and there's not a huge historical record, it's not a case of me saying to production, well, this happened, that happened, that happened, you must do this. We know very little. So Michael Hurst, who was writing the scripts,

would have a character and situation and he'd say, so how do I get him out of this? Or how do I do this battle that's different from the last battle? And then I go through the historical sources and find recorded ways of doing something that is different and interesting and hopefully of the period. So, for instance, when we did the Siege of Paris. Now, there's very little known about Ragnar's Siege of Paris, but there's another Siege of Paris a few years later that a monk called Abbo the Crooked from Saint-Germain-de-Pré writes about. So I took his accounts of the Vikings

attacking that and gave them to Ragnar. So we had a new way of attacking a town and siege engines and exciting things to do. Again, I noticed that. I'm glad you did it because that was great. And obviously you gave Rollo a bit of French territory there and obviously William the Conqueror's ancestor. I thought that was very clever. And that leads us hopefully into the new series Valhalla where we will pick up on what happens in Normandy with those descendants of Rollo, of Ralph the Walker, which of course are the descendants of William the Conqueror. And did Rollo claim descent from Lothbrok?

Do we know? It's an interesting question. There are later sources that claim he did, but there is nothing contemporary, although contemporary sources for him are sparse, to say the least. But you could quite imagine that he is exactly the sort of man who would claim to be a son of Ragnar. What he does, of course, is take a different course to his brothers, if they were brothers, in saying, I will actually become a ruler in a Christian way. He becomes a Norman Duke. He effectively becomes

a vassal of the Carolingian Empire. So he chooses a different path to the very bloody and dangerous path of being a pirate king. So just quickly, while I've got you, you talked about the new series. So the new series is 11th century, right? That's right. Yeah. So the new series will take us in the 11th century. So Bluetooth or we forkbeard or later than that forkbeard canute and hopefully right up to the norman conquest so we'll see how rollo's story in normandy eventually played out and how his descendants eventually won the day and actually i suppose won the game and won the game the game of thrones speaking of your far less impressive competitor are there lots of nods through to the original?

Like, do they sort of, you know, whisper a prayer to Ragnar when they go into battle and things? Are there nods to the previous series? Absolutely, absolutely. Vikings has been so successful. The whole point of this series is we wanted to continue their story, but not just keep doing generation after generation after generation. It will just turn into a soap opera.

So there is this sort of break in time. Poor old 10th century. The poor 10th century. You're so mean. What about Edgar? What did Edgar ever do to you? I mean, come on, man. Well, you know, Edgar, he will get mentioned

because Newton's a great fan of Edgar. Everyone's a fan of Edgar. I mean, if Edgar had ruled a bit longer, we wouldn't be in any of this mess. Yeah, none of this would have happened. No, we'd be absolutely fine. Man, that's so exciting. And a series called Valhalla, that's going to be great.

When's that coming out? When can we enjoy that? That is a very good question. The first season is in the edit now, but Netflix haven't told me when they intend to screen it. It is in the lap of the gods. And are you, as a historical advisor, do things ever happen that you're just like,

oh my God, please don't do that. Please don't introduce Chinese gunpowder too early and things. Fortunately, I get the first drafts of the scripts before they've actually gone out and indeed i go through with the showrunner on the storyline so everything can usually be picked up there everyone would like to bring in gunpowder because it's exciting and it's very visual and i'm very happy to, you know, push things a bit. But there are limits to how far you can push something. And sometimes writers don't necessarily have an enormous knowledge of the 11th century when they start writing a show.

So there are all sorts of little bits, but it's easy to pick up early on. And God willing, none of it actually makes it through. And so when you say makes it through, because the last thing is some overenthusiastic exec producer in New York just going, love it, right, that's brilliant, we'll have that, because they're the ones whose mind it will be impossible to change. Well, that's why hopefully we get to it before it's actually gone to any of the execs. So by the time we've got a white script, you know, a first version of the script, we're all happy that it makes sense, that it's reasonable for the period, and of course, that it's shootable as well.

Because absolutely, you don't want to excite someone about something they then can't do. Okay, well, I'm very much looking forward to that. Will the Battle of Malden be in there? Ah, that's a very good question, and I wish I could tell you. I'm sorry, of course. You've signed everything, and what am I talking about? But when it comes out, let's get you back on the show. We'll discuss it. That's great news.

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. As soon as we hear from Netflix when season one is out, absolutely. We'll get you straight back on. Well, thank you very much for coming on and talking about Ragnar Lothbrok. I agree, such a fascinating figure right on the edge of myth and history. And if they want to catch up with Vikings, where can they get it now? The series are still available on Amazon, I believe. I think the last season is available on Netflix over here, as far as I know. The new shows will be on Netflix.

And more importantly, Justin, actually, where can people read all your wonderful history books? Because somehow you find time to actually write and create extraordinary history as well. The Vikings all came from my Alfred the Great, The Man Who Made Britain, which is available in all good bookshops

and probably quite a lot of bad ones as well. Brilliant, Justin. Thank you very much. Well, I look forward to seeing you soon when you come back to talk about the new show. I'd love to. Thanks very much. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of dance notes history as i say all the time i love doing these podcasts they are the best thing i do professionally i feel very lucky to have you listening to them if you fancied giving them a rating review obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal it makes a big difference to us i know it's a pain but we'd really really be grateful and if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable,

don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors. That's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods. totaled $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at phys.ca.