Lagertha

Lagertha enters Saxo Grammaticus's ninth book fighting: when the Swedish king Frø killed the Norwegian king Siward and forced the royal women into a brothel, the women who escaped went to war dressed as men, and at their head fought one 'with a man's courage, her hair loose over her shoulders' — the detail by which the astonished army discovered her sex. Ragnarr, come to avenge his grandfather, credited her with the victory.

His courtship met due diligence: Lagertha set a bear and a hound to guard her door, and Saxo — no admirer of warrior women, which makes his testimony the better — records that Ragnarr speared the bear, throttled the hound, and won a wife on those merits. The marriage produced children and ended in divorce (Ragnarr, Saxo sniffs, never quite trusted the animals incident), but the alliance outlasted it: when civil war cornered her ex-husband, Lagertha arrived with a hundred and twenty ships, turned the battle with a counter-attack, and — in Saxo's most Lagertha sentence — went home and killed her interfering second husband with a spearhead hidden in her gown, 'preferring to rule without a partner.'

She may be a euhemerised echo of the giantess-valkyrie tradition, or a memory of the armed women whose graves — like the Birka warrior, confirmed female by DNA in 2017 — keep complicating the textbooks. Television made her a global figure; Saxo's original needed twelve sentences and no help.

The legend as Saxo tells it

Everything we know about Lagertha comes from one source: book IX of the Gesta Danorum, the Latin history of the Danes written around 1200 by the Danish cleric Saxo Grammaticus. In Saxo's telling, the Swedish king Frø kills Siward, king of the Norwegians, and — as calculated degradation — puts the women of Siward's family into a brothel. When Ragnar Lothbrok, Siward's grandson, arrives from Denmark to take vengeance, the wronged women meet him dressed in men's clothing and determined to fight, "choosing to redeem their shame with weapons rather than endure it." Among them, one fights at the front with such skill that the army takes her for a man until her loose hair betrays her: Ladgerda, as Saxo latinizes the name — a woman, he says, "with the courage of a man," a skilled fighter (amazona in his Latin), to whom Ragnar afterwards publicly credited the victory.

Ragnar's courtship is the story's second movement, and Saxo tells it with a straight face that only improves it. Smitten, Ragnar pressed his suit; Lagertha, outwardly agreeable, stationed a bear and a hound at the door of her hall in Gaulardal. Ragnar arrived, speared the bear, throttled the hound, and claimed his bride — a wooing conducted on exactly the terms a shield-maiden would set, courage verified in person. They married and had children (Saxo names a son, Fridleif, and two daughters), but the marriage failed: Ragnar, Saxo says, never forgave the beasts at the door, divorced her, and married Thora — the serpent-guarded princess who dominates the saga tradition.

The finest hour comes after the divorce. Years later, with Ragnar's kingship in Denmark cracking under civil war, he sent to Norway for help — and Lagertha, "whose love for him had never wholly cooled," came in person with a hundred and twenty ships. In the battle that followed, when Ragnar's line buckled, Lagertha's counter-attack around the enemy's rear turned rout into victory; Saxo says the credit for the day belonged to her. Then comes the sentence that has made her immortal: home in Norway, she quarrelled with her husband (she had remarried), killed him with a spearhead concealed in her gown, and "usurped the whole of his name and sovereignty; for this most presumptuous dame thought it pleasanter to rule without her husband than to share the throne with him." Saxo intends this as scandal. Eight centuries of readers have received it as a character reference.

Was Lagertha a real person?

Almost certainly not — and it is worth being precise about why, because the honest answer is what makes her interesting. She appears in no saga, no Eddic poem, no skaldic verse, no chronicle: only in Saxo, writing in Denmark around 1200 about events supposedly of the ninth century, three and a half centuries earlier. Saxo's early books are legend systematically dressed as history, and his warrior women follow a pattern: he presents several (Lagertha, Rusla, Stikla, the captains Hetha and Visna at the legendary battle of Brávellir), always with a mixture of fascination and clerical disapproval, and scholars have long noticed that his accounts of "maidens who dressed as men" read like a set-piece topos rather than reportage.

Where did he get her? Three overlapping possibilities are commonly argued. First, that Lagertha is a euhemerised mythological figure — her name, Old Norse Hlaðgerðr, and her Norwegian home in Gaulardal have suggested to some scholars a connection with the valkyrie-like guardian spirits of the Hlaðir region (the tradition around Þorgerðr Hölgabrúðr), a supernatural bride demoted by Saxo into a human queen. Second, that she is simply a literary construction: Saxo needed Ragnar's Norwegian adventure to have a prize, and built her from the shield-maiden stock-figure his sources supplied. Third, that she preserves, at whatever distance, a genuine memory of armed women in the Viking Age — a category that archaeology has recently forced back onto the table.

None of these makes her historical in the way Ælla of Northumbria or Björn Ironside are. But the third possibility is no longer dismissible.

Is Vikings' Lagertha historically accurate?

Katheryn Winnick's Lagertha in Vikings (2013–2020) is the reason most people have heard the name, and the show deserves credit for taking her from twelve sentences of Latin to a fully imagined life — earl, queen, farmer, avenger. But nearly all of it is invention: the source gives no Kattegat, no earldom, no rivalry with Aslaug, no death scene (Saxo's Lagertha simply exits ruling Norway, undefeated and unpartnered — arguably the better ending). What the show kept faithfully is the core: the front-line debut, the marriage to Ragnar, the divorce, and the refusal to be anyone's subordinate. As with Ragnar himself, the series adapts the legend, not history — there being, in Lagertha's case, no history to adapt.

Shield-maidens: what do historians actually think?

Lagertha's afterlife is now entangled with a real archaeological debate. Norse literary tradition attests warrior women repeatedly — Saxo's shield-maidens, the valkyries, Brynhild in mail, Hervör taking her dead father's sword — but for a long time historians filed all of it as fantasy. Then in 2017, DNA analysis of grave Bj 581 at Birka in Sweden — a classic tenth-century warrior burial, furnished with sword, axe, spear, arrows, two horses, and a gaming set, assumed male since its excavation in 1878 — showed the occupant was female. The finding does not prove she fought, and the interpretive argument continues in the journals; but it demonstrated that at least some individuals buried with a warrior's full identity were women, and it forced a re-examination of how many assumptions had been doing the work of evidence. The sober consensus today: warrior women were at most rare and exceptional in Viking society, not a standing institution — but the legends were not inventing the category from nothing. Saxo, who disapproved of shield-maidens and recorded them anyway, turns out to be a better witness than he intended.

In the primary sources

One source only: Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, book IX, written c. 1200. She is wholly absent from the Icelandic tradition — Ragnars saga loðbrókar gives Ragnar's wives as Þóra and Áslaug and knows nothing of a Norwegian first wife. That silence matters: the two branches of the Ragnar legend grew independently, and Lagertha belongs to the Danish-Latin branch alone. Readers who want her context should also look at Saxo's other warrior women — Hetha and Visna commanding at Brávellir in book VIII, and the sea-raider Rusla — and, on the archaeology, the Birka Bj 581 studies of 2017–2019.