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From: "Todd A. Farmerie" <>
Subject: Re: Sv: Ragnar Lodbrog
Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2000 22:58:22 -0600


I cannot answer most of your questions, as it is more Stewart's bag, but
I can address one comment.

Kristian Andersen Nyrup wrote:
>

> "At that time there were other kings(*) of the danes or normans harrying
> France with pirat-attacks; the most important ones among them were the
> tyrants Horich, Orwig, Gotafrid, Rudolf , and Ingvar. Ingvar, son of
> Lodparch, the cruelest of them all, was everywhere tormenting the
> christians to death. This is written in "Gesta Francorum"."
>
> (*: Adam has just been telling about the danish kings Sigfrid and Halfdan,
> who made peace with the emperor i 873. This can be found in Annales
> Fuldenses - Adam calls his source "Historia Francorum".)
>
> This - of course - has something to do with the legend of Ragnar Lothbrok. I
> am not (yet) convinced that he is just a legendary figure (too much smoke
> not to have a fire), and this is the origin of some of my doubts.
>
> If Adam is reliable here, then the first occurrence of Lothbrok as father of
> Ivar the Boneless, is not c.1070, but somewhere between 911 and 1070, most
> likely in the beginning of that interval.

One should be careful about equating references to Inguar, son of
Lodparch with Ivar the Boneless, son of Ragnar Lothbrok. Ragnar
Lothbrok appears to be an amalgamation of several historical
individuals, with a lot of legend thrown in. One can find Ragnalls,
Lodparchs, Inguars, Bernos, etc., who in turn appear to match with the
traditions, but there is every reason to believe that the traditions
were concocted by joining these unconnected individuals into a single
story (and in the case of the first two, into a single individual). I
have seen other near-contemporary accounts of Inguar, son of Lodparch
(in fact, just last night, but I don't recall what I was looking at at
the time - Asser's Life of King Alfred, or AEthelweard's Chronicle
perhaps), and he probably served as one model for the heroic Ivar the
Boneless, son of Ragnar Lothbrok, characters of later fiction, but
aspects of Ragnar's life can also be seen in the battle between Anulo
and Reginfrid, which involved different people.

ta

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