We honestly aren’t sure why the Vikings chose 865 as the year they wanted to come ripping across the North Sea on a mission of conquest. Maybe they were just seeking glory and power and the opportunity to exert their ruthless might against a rival kingdom they viewed as soft and weak. Maybe some of the Norse warriors were looking to start a new life far from the frozen tundra of Scandinavia and claim huge chunks of fertile farmland where they could settle down with their families. Maybe they just had a lot of guys sign up for Viking raids that year and figured, “Hey, what the heck, let’s go for it.” Historians today aren’t certain. And that’s partly because the only explanation for the attack comes from the Viking sagas, and their version of the story is so over-the-top nuts that it’s a little hard for most folks to believe it.
Remember that I said back in my author’s note that Norse history can be hard to write because the Viking sagas include some magical elements that push the border between history and fairy tales? The Great Heathen Army is one of those stories. Basically, the story starts like this: Once upon a time, the most powerful Viking in Denmark was this big, scary guy named Ragnar Hairy-Breeches. Ragnar was a Viking so bone-shatteringly manly that many historians aren’t even sure if he was a real person or just some kind of Viking comic-book superhero. Historians who believe he was real suggest that he took part in the Sack of Paris in 845, plundering the richest city in the Western world, but that was hardly his biggest achievement. His claim to fame would be his cool nickname, Hairy-Breeches, which came from the time when he rescued a princess from the clutches of a giant evil serpent by constructing homemade armor and stuffing horsehair down his pants.
According to the saga, this princess was captured by an evil king, who used an enormous, venomous serpent to guard her. Never one to back down from the opportunity to rescue a princess, Ragnar made a pair of awesome leather pants, lined them with animal hair, dipped it all in tar, and then dunked the whole thing into ice-cold water to harden it up into the sort of thing you probably couldn’t resell at a thrift store. Ragnar’s rock-hard hair pants did the job, though. They worked like armor to protect him against the poisonous bites of the serpent, and the Viking warrior ended up killing the monster, marrying the princess, and riding off into the sunset. Like I said, Norse sagas are weird.
But it gets better. Ragnar’s son was a guy named Ivar the Boneless, who was actually an even more dangerous Viking than his dad. Unlike with Ragnar, we don’t know where Ivar got his all-time-great Viking nickname. Some historians think there might have been a mix-up in translation that turned the Latin word exosus (“detested”) into exos (“boneless”). Others say that Ivar had a degenerative musculoskeletal disease that made it difficult for him to stand or walk. This makes sense, because we do know that he didn’t travel on foot or by horse. Instead, anytime he wanted to head to the battlefield, he would sit on his shield and have four big Viking dudes carry him.
Since he wasn’t your everyday axe-swinging Viking warrior, Ivar had to use his cunning, wits, and intelligence to lead his armies to glory. And he was pretty good at it. During the 850s, he led dozens of raids up and down the British Isles, and eventually took over as ruler of Dublin in Ireland after Turgeis the Devil got himself tortured and thrown into a lake to drown.
Now, if the stories are to be believed (and they probably aren’t), Ivar became so popular that his dad, Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, started getting insecure and jealous of his son’s fame. So he decided to one-up Ivar with a daring move—he would take a mere three ships full of Viking warriors and personally conquer the entire English kingdom of Northumbria.
This was a stupid plan, and it shouldn’t surprise you to hear that it failed miserably. As soon as Ragnar unloaded his ships on the shores of Northumbria, a guy named King Aella showed up, destroyed Ragnar’s forces, and killed the Viking warrior by throwing him into a pit filled with poisonous snakes. Ivar responded by becoming obscenely enraged and deciding to avenge his father at the head of a fleet so massive that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (the earliest known history of England) refers to it simply as “the Great Heathen Army.”
As I said, that backstory is probably about as historically accurate as Disney’s portrayal of Pocahontas, so don’t take it too seriously. It doesn’t really matter why they came across the sea. What matters is what they did once they got there.
They kicked butt.
Charging through the crashing waves, axes and torches held high, the Vikings raced from their ships into the countryside of the kingdom of Northumbria and immediately started laying waste to the land. And while King Aella could handle a trio of warships led by a delusional old Viking warlord on a suicide mission, he was a lot less prepared to be on the receiving end of an epic Viking beatdown. By the time he built up an organized force and was ready to fight, Ivar the Boneless had already sacked a dozen villages, wiped out a few military garrisons, captured the walled city of York, and set it up as a base of operations so he could bring in more men and supplies from Denmark. York would stand as a Viking stronghold for the next hundred years.
The Northumbrian king massed his troops and attacked Ivar outside the towering stone walls of York, but it was too little, too late. Waves of brave English fighters stormed the fortress city in a heroic attack, but what little progress they made was crushed by the Viking shield wall. Ivar the Boneless and his bloodthirsty men drove back the English assault, counterattacked, sent the English armies scattering into the countryside, killed several members of the Northumbrian aristocracy, and captured the notorious King Aella.
Remembering that this guy was the one who’d supposedly had Ivar’s dad nibbled to death by a vat full of tiny snakes, Ivar the Boneless ordered that King Aella be put to death by “Blood Eagle.” And for those of you who aren’t down with ninth-century torture methods, Blood Eagle is the cool-sounding Viking term for a process that I’d assume has to rank very high on the list of most horrific ways a human being can be killed. The Vikings, in their infinite knowledge of how much punishment a human body can take before croaking, apparently discovered a way to kill people by pulling their lungs out through their backs while they were still alive. In addition to scaring the pants off their enemies, the Vikings also did this as a sacrifice to Odin, who seems to have appreciated that sort of thing.
King Aella understandably didn’t survive without his lungs for very long, but he was really just one of four guys who had lands in England in 865. Far from being a unified island (although it would become one by the time the Vikings were done with it), the place we know as England today was actually four separate kingdoms then: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex—each with its own king.
Now that he had taken Northumbria, Ivar intended to smash the other three.
Operating out of his home base in York, Northumbria—a region beginning to be known to the English as the “Danelaw” (because it was subject to the law of the Danes)—Ivar the Boneless coordinated a massive assault on all things English. As soon as winter was over, he raided the kingdom of Mercia, destroying its army and only agreeing to leave town after the king of Mercia bought him off with giant donkey carts full of gold and jewels. Ivar’s Viking marauders then rampaged to the south, where they annihilated the forces of yet another English ruler, King Edmund of East Anglia. Edmund was a hardcore ultra-religious Christian, and even after his army was stomped into fertilizer, the king refused to surrender because he didn’t want to submit to a non-Christian, Odin-worshipping heathen.
So Ivar the Boneless captured Edmund by force, tied him to a tree, had his archers use the king for target practice, and then cut off his head and threw it in a hole. The Catholic Church declared Edmund a martyr and made him into Saint Edmund, which was a nice consolation prize. Saint Edmund’s vengeance-loving ghost will later be credited with killing another invader from Denmark, Svein Forkbeard, 150 or so pages from now, in chapter 19.
So now Ivar the Boneless and the Great Heathen Army were in a really good spot. They’d conquered East Anglia and Northumbria, and ruled the eastern part of the English island with an iron fist, dominating their subjects and bringing in more troops and supplies from Denmark on a daily basis. Mercia, to the west of York, had been pummeled into submission and was dishing out its lunch money to avoid being beaten up by Vikings.
Ivar left the conquest of the fourth kingdom, Wessex, to his lieutenant Guthrum (I’ll deal more with Guthrum in the next chapter), so this is pretty much where Ivar’s story ends. Content with conquering most of England in a flurry of axe blows to the dome, Ivar retired from a life of dismembering people and went back to rule from his dual castles in York and Dublin. He died around 873 from unknown causes—he either passed peacefully on his farm or was stabbed to death by Irishmen while leading a raid.
One thing that’s certain is that England would never be the same. Ivar had entered an island kingdom divided by four factions all bitterly fighting one another. His actions, and those of the Great Heathen Army, started a process that would unite the four kingdoms into England as we know it today.
