The Viking Whose Bones May Have Been Found

Thanks to the TV shows, almost everyone now knows the name Ivar the Boneless. But the real Ivar — and the real history behind the legend — is even stranger than the fiction, and it’s a story where the sagas and the archaeology don’t always agree.

Ivar was, according to the sagas, one of the sons of the legendary Viking king Ragnar Lothbrok. And he was set apart by a mysterious physical condition. His famous nickname — “the Boneless,” in Old Norse inn beinlausi — has never been fully explained. The most dramatic saga tradition claims he was born with legs that had no bones, or bones like cartilage, so that he could not walk and had to be carried everywhere he went, borne into battle on a shield held aloft by his warriors.

But whatever was wrong with his legs, everyone agreed on one thing: Ivar had the finest mind of any Viking of his generation. He was a brilliant strategist, a master tactician, and utterly ruthless. If he couldn’t march, he could out-think anyone alive — and that made him more dangerous than any warrior.

The Horror

The saga tells us Ivar’s war began with his father’s death. Ragnar Lothbrok, raiding in England, was captured by King Ælla of Northumbria and — as the legend goes — thrown into a pit of venomous snakes to die. When the news reached his sons in Scandinavia, they were consumed with fury. And Ivar, the crippled genius, became the mastermind of their revenge.

In 865, Ivar and his brothers assembled an invasion force unlike anything Britain had ever faced — not a hit-and-run raiding party, but a massive army of conquest that the terrified Anglo-Saxons named the Great Heathen Army. And here the legend and real history merge, because the Great Heathen Army was absolutely real, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It landed in England and began to tear the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms apart.

Ivar was its brain. There’s a famous saga tale of his cunning: offered only as much land as an ox-hide could cover, he supposedly had the hide cut into one impossibly long, thin strand, and used it to encircle a whole fortress — a trick that shows how the sagas remembered him, not as a brute, but as the clever one.

In 866, the army captured the great city of York, the capital of Northumbria. And then Ivar hunted down the man he’d come for: King Ælla, who had killed his father. Ælla was captured in 867.

And according to the sagas, Ivar took a revenge so horrifying it has become one of the most infamous images of the entire Viking age: the “blood eagle.” The legend describes a gruesome ritual execution — the victim’s ribs cut away from the spine and bent outward to form the shape of blood-stained “wings,” the lungs drawn out through the back. In Ælla’s case, the saga adds, they poured salt into the wounds to prolong the agony. It was said to be the ultimate Viking vengeance, a death offered to the god Odin.

With Ælla dead and the north conquered, Ivar and the Great Heathen Army rolled on. They marched into East Anglia, where — in the events of another famous story — they captured and martyred King Edmund, shooting him full of arrows for refusing to renounce his God. Kingdom after kingdom fell before the crippled strategist and his army. Ivar the Boneless became the most feared man in England — a warlord who couldn’t stand on his own two legs, and who conquered a huge swathe of a country from a shield.

THE MODERN RELIC And here is where it gets genuinely thrilling — because Ivar may have been found. The sagas say that when Ivar died in England, he asked to be buried in a prominent mound at a place that had seen battle, believing his bones would magically protect the land from future invaders.

In 1686, a workman digging at Repton in Derbyshire — a place where we know from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that the Great Heathen Army spent the winter of 873-874 — broke into an ancient burial mound. Inside, according to the old account, he found the skeleton of a giant, said to be nine feet long, lying in state — and arranged carefully around it, the bones of hundreds of other people, laid out with their feet pointing toward the central giant, like followers gathered around a lord.

The site was lost, then rediscovered and properly excavated by the archaeologists Martin and Birthe Biddle in the 1970s and 80s. They found a charnel mound containing the jumbled bones of at least 249 people — overwhelmingly strong, robust men — the war dead of the Great Heathen Army. And at the heart of it, a high-status grave: a powerful warrior, buried with a sword, a Thor’s hammer amulet, and a boar’s tusk, in exactly the place and time the Great Army wintered. Many scholars, including the Biddles, have suggested this could be the burial of one of the army’s great leaders — possibly Ivar the Boneless himself.

The relic is real and you can go to it. St Wystan’s Church at Repton still stands, with its beautiful Anglo-Saxon crypt, and the Viking charnel mound was found right beside it. And the greater relic is York itself — Jórvík — the city Ivar captured, which became the capital of Viking England and gave its name to all of Yorkshire, where you can walk the reconstructed Viking streets at the JORVIK Centre.

A Viking who legend says couldn’t walk, carried into battle on a shield, out-thought and conquered the kingdoms of England — and may still lie beneath an English churchyard, ringed by the bones of his army, exactly where the sagas said he’d be.

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