Who Was Ivar The Boneless - A Ruthless Invader Of England?

Ivar the Boneless was a 9th-century Viking commander who led the Great Heathen Army into England in 865 and took York in 866. Legend names him a son of Ragnar Lothbrok, and many historians link him to Ímar of Dublin, though no source states this outright. Why he was called "boneless" remains unproven.

Through countless Viking stories, we could hear about many leaders of these fearless warriors. The stories talked about them as people with strong moral codes, legendary strength, and passion for war.

Some of the most famous Viking leaders did not practice democracy. They were made for war. They fought and died for what they believed in.

Ivar the Boneless was one of them. As the son of the legendary Viking Ragnar Lothbrok and the leader of the Great Heathen Army (the name of the army comes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), Ivar the Boneless was one of the most notorious Viking warriors in history.

He is portrayed as a bloodthirsty warrior longing for power. But what was his life really like? What were Ivar's family ties like, and why was he called "the Boneless"?

Stay tuned as we're going to answer all of these questions below.

Was Ivar the Boneless a Real Viking?

Let's start with one of the biggest questions about the Viking Age: was Ivar real?

Most historians say yes. English sources name a leader called Iware or Inwær among the commanders of the army that invaded England in 865 (accounts of St Edmund's martyrdom call him Hingwar, and the chronicler Æthelweard writes Iuuar), and later medieval writers consistently treat Ivar as a real person. What the sagas add on top of that core, his parentage, his curse, his clever schemes, is legend written down centuries later.

His background is harder to pin down. Some traditions make him a Danish prince, others tie him to Dublin and the Irish Sea, and the sagas give him a mother of divine ancestry. We'll treat him the way most scholars do: a real 9th-century commander whose life story survives mostly through legend.

As for the famous nickname, several theories compete, and none of them is proven. We cover them in detail below.

Who Was Ivar the Boneless (Ivar Ragnarsson)?

Ivar the Boneless was a 9th-century Viking leader. Whatever lay behind his nickname, Ivar was one of the most feared Vikings of all time. Under his leadership, the Vikings began an era of domination over Great Britain, which lasted even after his death.

Boneless Ivar was trained to be a warrior from an early age, so it can be said that he dedicated his entire life to wars.

Ivar entered historical records when, together with his brothers Halfdan and Ubbe, he landed in East Anglia at the head of the Great Heathen Army in 865.

After wintering in East Anglia, Ivar invaded the kingdom of Northumbria in 866 and conquered its capital York, which the Vikings came to call Jorvik.

Furthermore, the sources say that Ivar left control over the conquered territories to his brothers and left England. Where he went next is where history gets interesting. Irish annals describe a leader called Ímar who fought alongside King Olaf the White around Dublin from the 850s and returned there in the early 870s. Many historians identify this Ímar with Ivar the Boneless, and the timelines fit well. Still, no medieval source states the identification outright, so it remains a strong theory rather than a settled fact.

Although Ivar the Boneless entered historical records thanks to his prominent role in the Viking Wars, his name is most often mentioned in sagas about Ragnar. The most notable among them is the Icelandic saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, written in the 13th century.

The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok and the Origin of Ivar The Boneless

The saga begins by describing the childhood of Aslaug (Ivar's mother). According to the legend, Aslaug was the daughter of the hero Sigurd and the valkyrie Brynhildr. Her parents died when she was only three years old, and she grew up in a poor Norwegian family that, to hide her origin, gave her the name Kráka (crow).

During a stop in Norway, Ragnar Lothbrok meets Aslaug and decides to marry her despite her poverty. As a result, they had several sons, among them Ivar the Boneless, Björn Ironside, Hvitserk, and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye.

Before marrying Aslaug, the saga says, Ragnar had been married to the noblewoman Thora Borgarhjort, with whom he had two sons, Eirik and Agnar. The famous shieldmaiden Lagertha belongs to a different tradition entirely; she appears only in Saxo's Danish chronicle, which we cover below.

Although all of Ragnar's sons grew into brave warriors, Ivar, according to the legends, was the bravest of them all. For that reason, Ivar the Boneless led his brothers on the battlefield, showing a great talent for strategic planning and tactics.

This saga also describes the reason why Ivar was born with a lack of bones. According to the legend, Ivar's handicap is the result of a curse. As Ivar's mother Aslaug was a vǫlva (according to Nordic mythology, the vǫlva was a female shaman), she cast a curse on herself.

She warned that she and Ragnar had to wait three nights before consummating their marriage. Otherwise, the child that was conceived would be born without bones.

Since Ivar's father Ragnar could not restrain himself, although she warned him of the curse, Ivar was born boneless. The saga mentions that Ivar had cartilage where the bone was supposed to be. Whether that was really the case, we cannot know. If the description holds any truth at all, the fact that a man with such a condition became one of the most famous Vikings is remarkable.

For that reason, it's understandable that many historians have written about him in their works. One of the records in which Ivar is described in detail is the work "Gesta Danorum," about which we will write in more detail below.

What Disease Did Ivar the Boneless Have?

Nobody knows, and honesty demands we say so up front. No source from Ivar's lifetime describes any illness or disability. Everything we have comes from sagas written roughly 400 years after his death, plus modern attempts to explain the nickname.

The best-known theory is osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. The Danish scholar Knud Seedorf proposed it in 1949, reasoning that the saga's "cartilage instead of bone" reads like a description of that condition. It's a clever interpretation, but it's a modern hypothesis, not a diagnosis based on physical evidence.

Other explanations compete with it:

• Impotence. Some scholars read "boneless" as a euphemism. The Tale of Ragnar's Sons claims Ivar had no children, which may have fed this tradition.
• Flexibility. Others suggest the nickname praised a snake-like agility in battle rather than mocking a weakness.
• Irony. Viking nicknames were often sarcastic, so "boneless" could have meant the opposite of what it says, much like a giant of a man being called "Little John."

None of these theories has been proven. The warrior burial at Repton sometimes linked to Ivar showed battle wounds, not brittle bones. The honest answer is that the origin of the nickname died with the people who coined it.

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Ivar Ragnarsson and His Brothers (The Tale of Ragnar's Sons)

Ivar and his brothers, more precisely their joint conquests and revenge campaigns, are described in the Old Norse work "The Tale of Ragnar's Sons" (Ragnarssona þáttr), written in the late 13th century or early 14th century.

This saga is also an Icelandic work, according to which Ivar the Boneless and his brothers went on a conquest against the will of their father, Ragnar.

Ragnar did not like the disobedience of his sons, so he appointed Eysteinn Beli to rule Sweden, asking him to defend the country from his sons with all his might. However, in an attempt to conquer Swedish territory, Ivar's half-brothers Eirik and Agnar were killed.

Upon learning of the brothers' death, Ivar the Boneless and Ragnar's other sons, together with their mother Aslaug, attacked Sweden. In this attack, King Eysteinn Beli was defeated and killed.

Ragnar Lothbrok, according to the legend, sails to England with only two ships after this event, wanting to show his superiority over his sons. However, Ragnar is captured by King Ælla of Northumbria. Ælla throws him into a snake pit, and just like that, Ragnar dies. The saga ties this event to the great invasion that followed in 865.

Upon hearing about their father's murder, Ivar and his brothers gathered an army and immediately sailed to England to take revenge. At that time, England was divided into seven smaller kingdoms known collectively as the "Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy." Ivar's goal was to conquer all kingdoms and kill their kings.

He gathered an army that is today known as the "Great Heathen Army." However, when they arrived in England, Ivar allegedly changed his mind and refused to fight.

It turned out that this was only part of a well-thought-out plan to gain the trust of King Ælla. And indeed, when King Ælla saw that Ivar the Boneless did not want to fight against him, he agreed to give him the land to make up for his father's death.

After Ivar got the land he wanted and made new friends, he called on the brothers for the final act of revenge. They captured Ælla, tortured him, and eventually killed him.

According to the saga, Ælla was killed by a ritual method of torture, better known as the "blood eagle." The "blood eagle" involved cutting the victim's ribs along the spine and pulling the lungs out through the hole, forming a pair of "wings." Modern historians still debate whether the blood eagle was a real practice or a later literary invention, so treat this scene as saga drama rather than verified history.

After Ælla's death, Ivar the Boneless remained king in England for a long time, ruling from York. More precisely, the legend says that England was his home until his death.

The Great Heathen Army

In the legends, Ragnar's death was the crucial moment in Ivar's life, the event that turned him into the cruelest Viking leader. It led Ivar to gather numerous warriors and lead them to war to avenge his father's murder. As we've already mentioned, the army he gathered became known as the Great Heathen Army. Under his command, the army plundered and ravaged Great Britain for years.

After conquering Northumbria and killing King Ælla, he set out to conquer other English kingdoms. The most challenging target for Ivar and his army was the kingdom of Mercia. The Viking attacks on this kingdom lasted for more than a year, and in the end, Mercia was conquered.

The Vikings had the tactic of creating a truce with the English rulers and then suddenly breaking the truce and attacking. Jane Kershaw (Oxford University) said that the Vikings had an element of surprise in their attacks that the Anglo-Saxons could not have foreseen and prevented. She also noted that the Vikings were extremely fast thanks to their longships and that their army easily penetrated the interior of Great Britain.

By around 880, all the kingdoms of England were under Viking rule except the Kingdom of Wessex.

Ivar in Saxo's "Gesta Danorum"

It is believed that this work was written at the beginning of the 13th century and that it presents characters and events that were not mentioned in other sources. Unlike the Icelandic sagas, "Gesta Danorum" is a Latin chronicle, and its author, Saxo Grammaticus, tried to unite several versions of stories about Ragnar and his sons in it.

Two of Ragnar's wives appear for the first time in this work, shieldmaiden Lagertha and a woman named Swanloga, while Aslaug is not mentioned at all. It's worth mentioning that Saxo does not describe Ivar the Boneless as a man without bones.

In "Gesta Danorum," Ivar is simply described as a wise warrior in whom Ragnar had great confidence.

The Death of Ivar the Boneless

There are different theories concerning Ivar's death, and the sources honestly do not agree. The Anglo-Saxon chronicler Æthelweard wrote that Ivar the Boneless died in 870. Irish annals record the death of Ímar, "king of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain," in 873. If the Ímar identification is correct, Ivar most likely died in Dublin.

There is also an English candidate for his grave. In 1686, a laborer named Thomas Walker dug into a burial mound at Repton in Derbyshire and found a stone coffin surrounded by heaps of human bones, at the very site where the Great Heathen Army spent the winter of 873 to 874. Modern re-excavation of that mound counted the partial remains of at least 264 people. Some historians have suggested that the central burial belonged to Ivar, though the bones from the coffin itself were later lost.

Excavations led by Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle in the 1980s uncovered a separate warrior burial at the same site, known as Grave 511. The man in it died brutally: he had weapon wounds on his skull and thigh, and a boar's tusk had been placed between his legs, which the excavators read as a replacement for what the blow to his thigh had destroyed.

Whether either burial belongs to Ivar remains an open question. What the finds do confirm is that his army was exactly where the chronicles say it was.

Final Words About Ivar the Boneless

Regardless of the extent to which the legends about Ivar are true, his significance in Viking history is indisputable. The strength and shrewdness he showed in battles terrified his enemies and turned him into the most famous conqueror of the Viking era.

For this very reason, it's often stated that his enemies described him as a bloodthirsty monster.

Whether Ivar was really so cruel and insensitive or just a brave warrior who fights for his beliefs remains to be guessed.

In any case, he left a mark in history, and his name will always be mentioned when it comes to Viking conquests.

Until our next meeting,

Skål!

Keep exploring: browse our Viking jewelry collection inspired by the age Ivar ruled.

Ivar the Boneless FAQ

Why was Ivar called "the Boneless"?

The sagas claim Ivar had cartilage where bone should be, the result of a curse on his parents. Modern theories range from brittle bone disease to impotence, unusual flexibility, or simple irony. None of these explanations can be proven; the true origin of the nickname was never recorded.

Did Ivar the Boneless have a disease?

Possibly, but no source from his lifetime says so. In 1949, the Danish scholar Knud Seedorf proposed osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, based on the saga's claim that Ivar had cartilage instead of bone. It remains a modern hypothesis, not a confirmed diagnosis.

Was Ivar the Boneless a real historical figure?

Most historians think he was a real 9th-century Viking leader who helped lead the Great Heathen Army into England in 865. Many specific details about his life, however, come from later sagas written centuries after he lived and cannot be fully verified.

How did Ivar the Boneless die?

Sources disagree. The Anglo-Saxon chronicler Æthelweard placed Ivar's death in 870, while Irish annals record the death of Ímar, possibly the same man, in Dublin in 873. Some archaeologists have linked Ivar to burials at Repton in England, but no identification has been proven.

Was Ivar the Boneless really the son of Ragnar Lothbrok?

According to the 13th-century Icelandic saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, yes, Ivar was the son of Ragnar and his wife Aslaug. Since the saga was written long after Ivar's lifetime, this family tree is legendary tradition rather than confirmed historical record.