![]() In the end, how King Aella died is irrelevant. According to historian Roberta Frank, however, the notorious “blood eagle” is actually a sensationalist misreading of Viking poems gloating on the birds of prey picking over the defeated Aella’s corpse. The Saga tradition, however, begs to differ and has the Northumbrian King taken alive for the son of Ragnar to torture him to the Viking version of death by a thousand cuts. York fell to the Vikings in 866 and King Aella himself died six months later in an unsuccessful attempt to retake the city. English sources identify an Ingwar as a leader of the “Great Heathen Army”, but it’s the sagas that take us that tantalising step back to Ragnar himself by identifying this Ingwar as one of the sons of Hairy Breeches himself – Ivar the Boneless. If the saga version of Ragnar’s death is fiction, then the Viking capture of York is undisputed fact. With the venom entering his bloodstream, the dying man then made a terrifying prophecy – that his sons would descend on York to avenge their father’s death.ġ9th century artist’s impression of the execution of Ragnar Lodbrok How lucky then that he was still wearing the same protective clothing and King Aelle’s snakes proved powerless against him! But the magic left as soon as Ragnar was stripped of his clothes and the snakes crowded in for the kill. Stories have him fighting a dragon as a young man, and surviving only because he boiled his clothing in pitch beforehand. If we can believe the sagas, this wasn’t Ragnar’s first encounter with a serpent either. So the king was in no mood to offer hospitality to any stranded Vikings and when Ragnar refused to give his name, Aella threw him into that most unlikely of Yorkshire settings – a pit full of snakes. ![]() But he ruled a kingdom that was politically unstable: for several generations, it had suffered from Viking raids, starting back in 793 when the longships swooped down on Holy Island ( Lindisfarne) the spiritual powerhouse of Northumbria. Aella was a full-blooded historical figure whose rule of northern England was attested by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. ![]() Ragnar’s time was up when he was shipwrecked off the Yorkshire coast and fell into the hands of King Aella of Northumbria. The verdict is still out on whether there really was a historical Ragnar, but the lurid account of his death was enough to put York on the map as far as the Viking Sagas were concerned. ![]() The first to die was Ragnar Lothbrok (or Shaggy Breeches). Not one of them survived to make the journey home. Towards the end of their careers, each man sailed his longships upriver to Jorvik, or York. Ragnar Lothbrok, Erik Bloodaxe and Harald Hardrada are a trio of legendary Viking warriors. ![]()
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