Was Lagertha a Real Person? What History Actually Says
Lagertha is one of the most famous women in Viking legend, but the honest answer to whether she was a real historical person is: probably not, at least not in the way the stories describe her. She appears in a single medieval source, the Gesta Danorum (roughly translated as “The Deeds of the Danes”), written by a Danish chronicler named Saxo Grammaticus around 1200 AD. The events he describes are set roughly 300 years earlier, during the 9th century. That gap alone should give any reader pause.
Saxo was not a historian in the modern sense. He was a Christian cleric writing a national epic, drawing on oral tradition, Norse skaldic poetry, and almost certainly classical literary sources including the Greek and Roman tradition of the Amazon warrior woman. Scholars today debate whether Lagertha was based on a real individual, a composite of several women, a mythological figure borrowed from Norse religion, or a literary invention shaped by the Amazon archetype. The honest verdict is that we simply do not know. What we can say is that her story, as written, reflects real anxieties and ideals about gender, power, and warfare in the Viking world, even if the woman herself may never have existed.
That uncertainty does not make Lagertha any less fascinating. If anything, it makes her more interesting, because the question of why a 12th-century Christian monk chose to write about a female Viking warrior tells us something important about how the Norse world was remembered and mythologised. The legend has outlasted almost everything else from that era, and it continues to shape how we think about Viking women today.
Lagertha in the Gesta Danorum: The Only Primary Source
Every detail we have about Lagertha comes from Book Nine of Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, completed around 1200 AD. There is no other primary source. No runestone bears her name, no skaldic poem survives that names her directly, and no archaeological find has been linked to her. She exists, historically speaking, entirely within Saxo’s pages.
According to Saxo, Lagertha’s story begins in the Gaula valley of western Norway, after the Norwegian king Siward is killed by the Swedish king Frø. Frø reportedly forces the women of Siward’s household into a brothel as a form of humiliation. When the young Ragnar Lothbrok arrives to avenge his grandfather Siward, some of these women take up arms and fight alongside him, dressed as men. Lagertha is among them, and she fights with such ferocity that Ragnar falls in love with her before he even knows she is a woman.
Saxo describes her as having “the courage of a man” and fighting with her hair loose around her shoulders, a detail that reads more like literary flourish than historical record. After the battle, Ragnar seeks her out and they marry. Together they have three children: two daughters and a son. When Ragnar later divorces her to pursue a more politically advantageous match, Lagertha does not fade from the story. She goes on to rule her own territory as an earl, and when Ragnar later faces a rebellion and calls on his former allies, Lagertha answers with a fleet of 120 ships.
Saxo’s account of her death is brief and brutal. After returning from battle, Lagertha kills her second husband with a spearhead she had hidden in her dress, deciding she would rather rule alone than share power. It is a striking end, and one that reads more like a moral fable about female ambition than a factual record. Saxo was writing with an agenda: to celebrate Danish greatness while also, as a Christian cleric, occasionally moralising about pagan excess. His Lagertha is heroic and monstrous in equal measure, which tells us more about his worldview than hers.
The Amazon comparison is not accidental. Saxo was educated in the Latin tradition and would have been familiar with classical accounts of warrior women. Several scholars, including Judith Jesch, whose work on women in the Viking Age remains a key reference, have noted that Saxo’s shieldmaidens bear a suspicious resemblance to the Amazons of Greek myth. That does not mean he invented Lagertha from nothing, but it does mean his account should be read critically rather than taken at face value.
Were There Real Female Viking Warriors? The Archaeological Evidence
Even if Lagertha herself was not a real person, the broader question of whether women actually fought as warriors in the Viking Age is one that archaeology has started to answer in genuinely surprising ways.
The most significant find is grave Bj 581 at Birka, Sweden, excavated in the 19th century and long assumed to belong to a male warrior because of its contents: a full set of weapons including a sword, axe, spear, arrows, and two sacrificed horses, along with a set of gaming pieces that suggest the occupant held a strategic or command role. In 2017, a team led by archaeologist Anna Kjellström published a DNA analysis of the skeletal remains that confirmed the individual was biologically female. The study, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, caused significant debate in the field, with some scholars questioning whether the burial goods necessarily indicated the woman was a warrior herself, or whether they might reflect status, ritual, or identity in more complex ways.
Neil Price, Professor of Archaeology at Uppsala University and one of the leading authorities on Viking Age society, has argued that the Birka burial represents strong evidence that at least some women occupied warrior roles. The gaming pieces in particular suggest not just combat participation but tactical leadership. Price’s broader research into Viking identity suggests that gender in Norse society was more fluid and performative than modern assumptions allow.
The Birka burial is not the only example. Several other graves across Scandinavia contain women buried with weapons, though none as comprehensively equipped as Bj 581. Taken together, these finds suggest that while female warriors were almost certainly not common, they were not purely mythological either. The shieldmaiden tradition in the sagas may reflect a genuine, if rare, social reality: women who, under specific circumstances, took on warrior roles and were remembered for it.
Viking women in general held a legal status that was notably advanced by the standards of medieval Europe. Norse law gave women the right to divorce, to own property, and to manage a household independently. The concept of the frilla, a recognised form of concubinage with legal protections, and the role of the husfreyja (lady of the house) gave women real economic and social authority. A woman ruling her own territory as an earl, as Lagertha does in the sagas, was extraordinary but not entirely outside the bounds of what Norse society could conceptually accommodate.
Lagertha Shield Maiden: Myth, Legend, or Historical Fact?
The most accurate way to describe Lagertha is as a legendary figure rooted in a world where the line between history and myth was deliberately blurred. The Norse oral tradition did not make the same distinctions between fact and story that modern historians do. A saga could preserve a genuine memory of a real person while also layering on mythological meaning, moral lessons, and literary embellishment until the original was almost unrecognisable.
Some scholars have suggested that Lagertha may be connected to the Norse goddess Þorgerðr Hölgabrúðr, a deity associated with battle and sometimes depicted as a warrior woman. Others have proposed that she is a euhemerised version of a real woman whose name and deeds were absorbed into legend over generations of retelling. Neither theory can be proven, and both remain speculative.
What is clear is that Saxo Grammaticus was not simply making things up. He was working from sources, oral and written, that no longer survive. The details he includes, the specific geography of the Gaula valley, the political context of Siward’s death, the names of minor characters, suggest he was drawing on a tradition that had some historical grounding, however distorted by time and retelling. The shieldmaiden as a cultural archetype clearly resonated in Norse society, and Lagertha is its most fully realised expression.
What Happened to Lagertha? Her Death in the Sagas
Lagertha’s fate in the Gesta Danorum is one of the most striking details Saxo records. After divorcing Ragnar, she returns to Norway and marries a jarl whose name Saxo does not give. She continues to rule and fight, and when Ragnar faces a civil war in Denmark, she brings 120 ships to his aid. Her forces are credited with turning the battle in his favour.
Her death comes not in battle but at home. Saxo writes that after returning from the campaign, Lagertha kills her second husband with a spearhead concealed in her gown, unwilling to share her power with him any longer. She then rules alone. It is a morally ambiguous ending that Saxo presents without clear condemnation, which is itself unusual for a Christian writer of his era. Whether he admired her or was simply reporting what the tradition said, the result is a portrait of a woman who refused, at every stage of her life, to be defined by anyone else’s expectations of her.
Lagertha and Ragnar Lothbrok: What the Sources Really Say
Ragnar Lothbrok is almost as legendary as Lagertha, and the historical questions surrounding him are equally thorny. Like Lagertha, he appears in medieval sagas written centuries after his supposed lifetime, and historians debate whether he was a single real individual, a composite of several Viking leaders, or a largely mythological figure. The Tale of Ragnar Lothbrok and the Saga of Ragnar’s Sons are the main sources, alongside Saxo’s Gesta Danorum.
In the sagas, Lagertha is Ragnar’s first wife. Their relationship ends when Ragnar divorces her to marry Þóra, a noblewoman whose hand he wins by killing a giant serpent. Later, he marries Aslaug, a woman of legendary lineage who becomes the mother of his most famous sons, including Ivar the Boneless, Björn Ironside, and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye. Aslaug and Lagertha never directly confront each other in the surviving texts, but their positions as Ragnar’s first and third wives place them in an implicit rivalry that later storytellers, including the writers of the TV series Vikings, found irresistible.
Aslaug is a significant figure in her own right. She is described as the daughter of the legendary hero Sigurd and the Valkyrie Brynhildr, giving her a mythological pedigree that Lagertha, for all her warrior credentials, cannot match. In the sagas, Aslaug warns Ragnar not to go to England on his final, fatal raid, and her prophecy proves correct. Her sons go on to lead the Great Heathen Army that invaded England in 865 AD, an event that is historically documented, even if the family connection to Ragnar remains unverifiable.
The broader Viking world that Lagertha and Ragnar supposedly inhabited also produced figures like Rollo, the Norse chieftain who was granted the territory that became Normandy by the Frankish king Charles the Simple in 911 AD. Rollo is one of the few Viking Age figures who appears in both Norse sagas and contemporary Frankish chronicles, giving him a firmer historical footing than either Ragnar or Lagertha. His descendants would eventually become the Norman rulers of England after 1066. Whether Rollo knew of Ragnar or Lagertha is unknown, but they all belong to the same turbulent era of Scandinavian expansion that reshaped medieval Europe.
Lagertha vs the TV Show Vikings: What Did the Writers Change?
The History Channel series Vikings, which ran from 2013 to 2020, introduced Lagertha to a global audience and is responsible for much of the current interest in her story. Katheryn Winnick’s portrayal, fierce, politically astute, and emotionally complex, became one of the show’s defining performances. But the TV version departs from the saga record in significant ways, and it is worth knowing which is which.
In the show, Lagertha and Ragnar begin as equals in a farming community, and their marriage is portrayed as a genuine love story disrupted by Ragnar’s ambition and his attraction to Aslaug. The show gives Lagertha a long arc as a jarl, an earl, and eventually a queen, which broadly follows the trajectory Saxo describes, though with enormous dramatic elaboration. Her relationships with other characters, including Rollo (portrayed as Ragnar’s brother), Björn, and Aslaug, are developed far beyond anything in the historical record.
The show’s version of Lagertha’s death, in the final season, is entirely invented. She is killed by an older Hvitserk, one of Ragnar’s sons by Aslaug, in a scene with no basis in Saxo or any other saga. The show also significantly softens the moral ambiguity of Saxo’s Lagertha: the saga version kills her husband in cold blood to secure her own power, a detail the TV series never reproduces. The writers clearly wanted a heroine audiences could root for without reservation, which required smoothing over some of the saga’s harder edges.
What the show gets broadly right is the social context: Viking women did hold real authority, divorce was legally available to them, and women of high status could and did lead households, manage estates, and in rare cases, lead men. The specific details of Lagertha’s battles, her political alliances, and her personal relationships are dramatised invention, but the underlying premise, that a woman in the Viking Age could be a genuine power in her own right, is historically defensible.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Lagertha a real historical person?
Almost certainly not in the literal sense. She appears only in the Gesta Danorum, written around 1200 AD by Saxo Grammaticus, roughly 300 years after the events he describes. Most historians treat her as a legendary figure, possibly inspired by older oral traditions or Norse mythology, rather than a documented historical individual.
What is the Gesta Danorum and why does it matter?
The Gesta Danorum is a 12th-century chronicle of Danish history written by Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish cleric. It is the only source that mentions Lagertha. While it draws on older oral traditions, Saxo also incorporated classical literary influences, which means his accounts of figures like Lagertha need to be read critically rather than as straightforward history.
Were there real female Viking warriors?
Possibly, though they were rare. The most compelling evidence is grave Bj 581 at Birka, Sweden, where a 2017 DNA study confirmed that a skeleton buried with a full warrior’s arsenal was biologically female. Other weapon-graves containing women have been found across Scandinavia, suggesting that while female warriors were not the norm, they were not purely mythological either.
How does the TV show Vikings differ from the historical record?
The show takes Saxo’s basic outline, Lagertha as Ragnar’s first wife, a warrior, and eventually a ruler in her own right, and dramatically expands it. Most of the specific plot details, her relationships, her battles, and her death, are invented by the writers. The show’s portrayal of Viking women holding real social and political authority is broadly accurate, even if the individual story is fiction.
What happened to Lagertha in the sagas?
According to Saxo Grammaticus, Lagertha killed her second husband with a concealed spearhead after returning from battle, choosing to rule alone rather than share power. She had previously brought 120 ships to Ragnar’s aid during a civil war in Denmark. Her death is recorded as a deliberate act of political self-determination, not a defeat in battle.
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