This saga is not for the faint-hearted. Recent archaeological evidence might try to paint the Vikings in a soft and fluffy light, but academics never met Ragnar.

Before we go any further and historians get their knickers in a knot, I understand the terminology and that “viking/vikingr” was a highly specific term. Unless raiding, pillaging, looting, burning and generally leaving behind a trail of destruction, accompanied by a soundtrack of screaming, weeping and wailing, the so-called “Vikings” were simply referred to amongst themselves as Norse, Danes, Gael-Gaidheal etc. However, raiding, pillaging, looting, burning and leaving behind a trail of destruction was what Ragnar did best. He was a Viking every day of his life, even whilst sleeping.

In order to make this historic document as inoffensive as possible (tricky, given that it features a drunken Viking and his unruly horde), swearwords have been left untranslated. If you come across a word and don’t immediately understand what it means, assume the worst.¹

Also: thou, thee, thy and thine are used indiscriminately throughout this text because the scribe was clearly uneducated with regards to grammar and identifying the second person singular object or subject. I suggest thee live with it.

Ragnar’s story has come to light because of one woman; Ethel Woolfe. Readers may have seen her appearance on Antiques of the Future in July 2013. Ethel had wrapped her late husband’s collection of beer bottles in what she thought to be “scrap paper covered in doodles”. The beer bottles were immediately recognised as worthless (although the bacterial life growing in them may have had some value to medical research if Health & Safety hadn’t immediately nuked them). The “doodles” were salivated over by the experts and then wiped clean by Ethel once she realised how much they were worth.

Identified as runor from the 10th Century, the manuscript was sold privately for an undisclosed sum. It may have been unwise to pay out before translating the contents but that’s academics for you. The fact that this translation is sometimes available as a free e-book should not detract from the valuable information it contains.