Ragnar Lothbrok
Of all the many heroes of the Norse sagas, Ragnar Lothbrok is doubtless the most famous today, owing to his story being the subject of the History Channel series, Vikings. Historians however doubt that Ragnar ever existed outside of the literature written about his daring exploits, though many other characters and events in the legends are real. In the sagas, Ragnar is the son of King Sigurd Hring of Sweden, and leads many devastating raids on Francia and Anglo-Saxon England in the 9th century, before being captured and thrown into a pit of deadly snakes by King Ælla of Northumbria.
Though he was chiefly occupied with terrorizing England and continental Europe, Ragnar also found time to kill a dragon. According to Saxo Grammaticus’s 13th-century Gesta Danorum (‘deeds of the Danes’), Herraud, Earl of Götaland, commanded his daughter, Thora Borgarhjört, to raise a pair of serpents he found when out hunting. They grew into a type of dragon called a lindworm, a flightless dragon known to kill people with its poisonous breath, like Fáfnir in the previous section. Thora fed the serpents an ox a day and they soon reached a prodigious size, ‘and scorched the country-side with their pestilential breath’.
Herraud promised the hand of his daughter to the man who could rid him of the out-of-control lindworms. Hearing of this, Ragnar divorced his first wife, Ladgerda, and made his way to Götaland, where many before him had failed. Ragnar dressed himself in a woolen mantle and especially-hairy trousers to repel the serpents’ bites, jumped in water, and let the cold air freeze the garments to make them extra tough. Having tied a spear to his right hand, Ragnar confronted the lindworms, whose poisonous spittle was ineffective against the strength of the special trousers, their fangs deflected by his shield.
Eventually, Ragnar speared the pair of lindworms through their hearts, and was given Thora in marriage. Herraud could not help laughing at Ragnar’s unusual trousers, and gave him the lasting nickname Loðbrók (Old Icelandic, ‘hairy-trousers’ or ‘shaggy-breeches’). Why Herraud thought it was a good idea to make his daughter raise two snakes as pets is unclear, as is often the case in Norse sagas, but there may be a sense that he brought the destruction of his land upon himself, from which a moral can be drawn. Ragnar and Thora had two sons together, but Thora later died of sickness.