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Vikings are everywhere in media and pop culture. We see them featured in video games, movies, TV shows, and books either directly or as re-skinned versions that are totally not Vikings you guys, just a fictional group that’s based on every popular stereotype about Vikings.
What we rarely hear about are the real Vikings behind famous Viking media.
Ragnar Lothbrok, a legendary Viking known for epic showdowns with other historical figures like Charlemagne, is easily the most famous Viking right now thanks to the hit series Vikings. But as the show, well, shows, he isn’t the only notable warrior king among his people.
What Do We Mean by ‘Famous Viking’?
Before we get into it, let’s address the elephant in the room that other listicles about Vikings rarely mention: the true meaning of the word “Viking”.
We tend to think of Vikings as fierce warriors with horned helmets who did nothing but pillage their way through Europe, but the idea that they were specialized warriors of any kind is a recent myth. For one,
Second, the word ‘Viking’ doesn’t strictly refer to a warrior. a vikingr, as they’re called in their own tongue, is just someone who went globe trotting with their longship. They didn’t have to be warriors, though that was typically part of the job description. In a way, they were more like pilgrim settlers coming to the New World than anything like the fictionalized blood thirsty fiends we see them as today.
Academics tend to use the word to generally refer to Scandinavians who traded, settled, raided, and yes, pirated, their way through neighboring nations and at home during the Viking age.
And that’s the definition we’re going with for this list. Not Viking warriors, not legendary Vikings. Just famous Vikings who made an impact on their communities, thereby making them famous.
Meet These 8 Famous Vikings
1. Freydís Eiríksdóttir
Freydís Eiríksdóttir is one of the many famous Vikings who show up in the Vikings series. In the show, she’s an extremely anti-Christian shieldmaiden who’s related to the next famous Viking on this list, Leif Erikson.
The historical Freydís Eiríksdóttir is a hero of the Vinland sagas, two Icelandic oral traditions that tell of the Viking exploration of North America. Here’s the problem: they tell two different accounts of what she was like.
Saga of the Greenlanders portrays Freydís Eiríksdóttir as a cutthroat Viking who breaks her word and tells her husband that Helgi and Finnbogi, two brothers who she is fiercely competitive against, beat her up when she came by to visit, causing him to murder the two. Unfortunately for her, these two men were her brother’s friends so he later forces her to confess her ill deeds.
In Saga of Erik the Red, though, Freydís is a courageous warrior who charges at catapults with a sword while she’s eight months pregnant. Everybody else, even the male warriors at their camp, panicked and fled at the sight of catapults. She, however, effectively calls them cowards, grabs a sword, and goes berserk on their enemies.
2. Leif Erikson
Leif Erikson a.k.a “Leif the Lucky”, is a Viking explorer famous for being the first European to come to North America around 1,000 AD . Yes, that was before Christopher Columbus. In fiction, Leif Erikson is mentioned several times in Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase series.
This famous Viking was the son of another famous Viking, Erik the Red hence the name Erikson. Freydís Eiríksdóttir was a sister of his, though it’s unclear whether they were full siblings or not.
Leif Erikson’s historical tales show exactly why he’s so lucky: the guy gets blown off course and accidentally ends up in Vinland (Wineland), a place widely believed to be on the coasts of North America, where he finds wild grapes and wheat waiting for him to feast on.
After setting up a small settlement to stay at during the winter, Leif returned to Greenland and never returned.
How does Leif’s legacy fair? October 9 is Leif Erikson Day in the U.S. and if you’re in Boston, you can pop over to Commonwealth Avenue to see his statue.
3. Aud the Deep-Minded
Aud the Deep-Minded is such a badass title that makes you imagine a wise, mystical woman sitting under the shade of Yggdrasil, but believe it or not, Aud was a real human woman.
While the fictional Aud the Deep-Minded was just a legendary figure whose only role was getting married, the real Aud the Deep-Minded was a famous Viking known for being one of the pivotal figures in the settlement of Iceland.
According to Claire White, a songwriter who researched Aud’s life extensively, Aud was born in 830 AD and married the King of Dublin. After her husband’s death, however, Aud found herself responsible for protecting her granddaughters in a hostile political climate. So, she decided to set sail with twenty of her men on a journey that brought her through Faroe, Orkney, the Hebrides and Caithness.
She eventually ends up in Iceland where she starts a farm and proceeds to strategically marry off her granddaughters to powerful families in the region, thereby securing her family’s status and safety through both the connections she makes and the dowries her grandchildren receive.
How powerful and influential was this Viking matriarch? She’s believed to have introduced Christianity to Iceland and, at one point, she controlled all the land between the the rivers Dagverdara and Skraumuhlaupsa.
4. Egill Skallagrímsson
Egill Skallagrímsson was a skilled warrior who counted among his exploits the killing of Eiríkr Bloodaxe’s son and placing a curse on him. Obviously, the king was not happy and when Egill ended up shipwrecked in Northumbria, Eiríkr swooped in ready to kill him. Through the power of his sick bars, however, Egill survives.
That’s not a joke, by the way. He really does write a complex poem called Höfuthlausn where he strokes the king’s ego to calm him down.
And it worked.
Egill lived a long, fruitful life that was so long, he was able to poems about his own senility. Up until his death, he was deeply involved with local politics
5. Rollo
If you’ve watched Vikings, you’ve already heard of Rollo. But that’s the fictional him. The real life famous Viking was a different man.
Rollo or Hrólfr, as he’s called in Old Norse, was a notable Viking who raided up and down the coasts of Scotland, England, Flanders, and France. Other than that, there’s little known about his life before his pact with Charles the Simple, a Frankish king, to convert to Christianity and stop raiding the Kingdoms of West Francia.
The deal was to be sealed by his marriage to Charles’ daughter Gisla. In return, Rollo could stay and have his own lands. Knowing he was in a position to negotiate, Rollo wore Charles down into giving him Brittany, where he reformed laws to essentially outlaw fraud and defamation.
6. Harald Bluetooth
Harald Gormsson was a Danish king known for his reconstruction of the Jelling runic stones and being the person after whom Bluetooth was named. Some sagas portray him as a cowardly and incompetent king, but Harald Bluetooth is credited with the first unification of Denmark.
This famous Viking was also notable for his extensive construction projects that led to the creation of several fortresses throughout Denmark and Sweden as well as the Ravning Bridge, the oldest bridge in southern Scandinavia.
Aside from that, Harald was the first to introduce a national coin for Denmark which was widely adopted throughout the country, confirming his bold claims on the Jelling runic stones about having ruled over all of Denmark.
7. Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir
Leif Erikson had other siblings that weren’t Freydís Eiríksdóttir. Two brothers, in fact, and it was one of them who was married to this famous Viking lady.
Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir is one of the Vikings who made it to Vinland but unlike Freydís Eiríksdóttir, she has no stories of sword-wielding action to tell. Instead, she lives a happy life of adventure throughout Greenland, Vinland, Norway, and even Rome.
Before that happens, Gudrid is widowed. Her husband doesn’t make it to Vinland, but he comes back as a ghost to tell her that she will have a great destiny. Or so the sagas say.
She eventually marries an Icelandic merchant and promptly disappears from the sagas before coming back as a middle aged woman in Saga of the Greenlanders where we find out that she did live a great life. By then, Gudrid had travelled to Rome and returned to her farm.
Now, before you say there’s nothing extraordinary about a woman living on a farm, but Gudrid is praised in the saga as “a woman of striking appearance, and wise” and she is credited with helping to end the famine that threatened to snuff out Greenland on her return. The exact how isn’t clear, because like many oral traditions, the sagas are filled with less than realistic versions of events.
As for the rest of her legacy, many historic Icelanders trace their lineage back to her. So many, in fact, that it’s her lineage listed at the end of Saga of the Greenlanders instead of Erik the Red’s.
8. Sigrid the Haughty
You just know a famous Viking is going to be a badass when her title calls her, in modern terms, a bitch.
Why did people think she was a bitch? Because Sigrid the Haughty (or the Proud, if you’d like to be more civil) had the audacity to reject marriage proposals.
One of them was from King Harald Grenski who, though very much enamored with Sigrid, was not pleased when she said she liked her stuff and her kingdom in Sweden just as much as she liked his in Norway. His displeasure, unfortunately, did not stop him from proposing to her because he thought his current wife was too lowborn. This also effectively told her that he didn’t really care about her, he just wanted to marry her for her lineage and money.
Though she lets him down gently, he comes back with several other kings to bother her in her own house.
So Sigrid set them on fire.
She has another rough chapter in her marriage to King Óláf Tryggvason who gravely dishonors her twice. Still, Sigrid got the last laugh when she convinced King Svein Tjuguskegg to beat Óláf and his forces, a move that deeply affected the balance of power in the region.
Should We Trust What We Know About These Famous Vikings?
You’re likely wondering where Lagertha is on this list and perhaps starting to think you’ve been clickbaited so let’s get on with it: Lagertha isn’t here because there isn’t enough proof that she was real.
Lagertha only shows up in Saxo’s Gesta Danorum and, to make matters worse, mostly only in Book IX.
Many of the historical famous Vikings on this list suffer from similar issues. Aside from Harald Bluetooth, Aud the Deep-Minded, Leif Erikson, and Egill Skallagrímsson, it’s almost impossible to get the complete truth of whether all the details of the lives of the Vikings on this list, or any listicle about them, are real.
Most of the records we have of famous Vikings, including Ragnar Lothbrok, are mired in supernatural events and blurred by the fact that the sagas began as oral traditions rather than written ones. Conflicts in accounts about Freydís Eiríksdóttir or the lack of clarity on where Rollo came from reflect how these factors affect our modern ability to find information about famous Vikings.
