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Age of Charlemagne module for Attila is probably a better place for a Ragnar mod, because of the larger geographic range. IIRC, there actually is a mod, called 'Age of Vikings' or something, that has Ragnar and company in it, and I think it works on the Age of Charlemagne base.
I suspect they won't ever do a Ragnar dlc or saga (kinda ironic given how he features in the opening) but I'm guessing it will get a mod. Won't be a hard mod to do either, pretty much everything you need is either in ToB or Atilla, and you can style whatever you lack off the TV show vikings.
Come to think of it, probably be the easiest and most cost effective DLC in TW history outside of blood, if they were to do it. Really couldn't take that long at all to set up. I'd probably throw it in if I was Jack Lusted for £5.00 as a DLC, and slap up a steam advertisement screaming Ragnar to attract all the goth kids to play.
How about a historic battles DLC of Ragnar's life? How many battles do we believe he was in. I know some think he lived in France.... How many battles potentially if we still wanted to be fairly reasonable in terms of history could CA squeeze out of his know life, if they accepted he existed, was in France, Norway, and England?
What would be the battlefields, years? I'm trying to imagine this like the Rome 2 historic battles.
Ragnar is very similar to Merovech for the Franks, or the Iclingas founding patriarch for the Angles and Saxons, in terms of historical attestation (i.e. lack of), and the idea that his origin is mystical, and also that he in turn has a bunch of different men, apparently from different lineages, all claiming descent from him.
The 'sons of Ragnar,' and Ragnar himself, is a cultural construct, an eponymous figure that the Norse peoples settling overseas could share in identity with, as they went through the process of forming a self identify as a consequence of living in the midst of other cultural groups. In this sense, Ragnar fulfills a similar role to other figures, Aeneas for the Romans and Latins, for example.
There just isn't nearly enough evidence to establish Ragnar as an historical person.
When exactly did the myth that Ragnar was synthetic, culled from many and/or sociological forces that abetted his creation out of a necessity to have a founder myth originate? We're the descendants of vikings who settled sufficiently aware of Roman histographical conventions on needed a founding mythological figure to unify their people and culture as one in the beginning? I find this needed parallel peculiar, as they settled everywhere and knew where they came from, and didn't have a history of firmly entrenched hereditary kingship, and that they all had this Ragnar at about the same time as real invasions are known to of happened....
Can't blame anyone on the forums, but seems absolutely contrived, like you gotta try really hard to pretend like he didn't exist when we have plenty of evidence he did exist. The inability to reach academic consensus is not considered proof whatsoever that someone existed or not that is mentioned a few times in the annals. All it signifies is, academics have issues, quite possibly not based on history at all but rather themselves and their approach to history, and it is a mark of wisdom to hold conservatively to the historical records in admitting he likely existed and not throw all the facts out just caused some professor is working really hard to get his tenure with provocative ground breaking assertions. I have more trust in the coincidence of annalists (primary sources) each recording a guy with a pretty similar name, location and time doing things than in the reasoned syllogisms of professors at Oxbridge University telling us all how it really is given the synthesis of their last call for papers at self-invited conference X at location Y, paid for by University Z as host. It is all a big marketing scam. Everyone selling books +300 plus so their friends can buy it from their university provided book allowance. Gotta cram something novel in these damn things, why not just be skeptical of everyone mentioned in history and write them off because history didn't conform to the demands for standards of the last conference?
I'm fairly confident the guy existed. I can take some debate of give and takes. I think a campaign of his battles at the most optimistic would be credible, even if Ragnar wasn't at all of them, a Ragnar likely was, and these would still be battles in time and space. You can make a series of battles out of it.
I'm not saying that Norse were aware of Roman histiography or myth and then decided to emulate that; I'm saying it was an organic process that happened naturally for the Norse, like it did with the Romans and many, many other peoples.
At the end of the day, we just don't have enough evidence to say Ragnar existed as a historical person.
Written and oral tradition establish that he existed as a folk or mythic figure, but to be an historical figure we need to weigh against another burden of proof on the scale.
And that is where the academic or scholarly consensus that you mention comes in.
It is a numbers game, to get enough "weight" to tip the scale: there has to be a minimum number of historical references to the figure, and these references need to meet certain criteria, before the scales tip and we can say, "yes, there was an historical person named so-and-so."
This is for documentary evidence, of course. If physical evidence is found, then that can obviously change things very quickly.
There is a Viking leader in Frisia and Francia named Ragnar mentioned in Frankish chronicles, but there is nothing in that which corroborates the Ragnar of the Sagas, in terms of his lineage, who he married, his children, let alone anything about being captured in Britain. So even if "Ragnar Lothbrok" actually existed, there is no way to prove right now he is the same man known as "Ragnar" in Francia: we might be simply looking at two Viking leaders who had the same first name, and a first name alone isn't much to build a case on.
As mentioned in this thread, the big thing with Ragnar is his death, since that is the legendary reason for the Great Heathen Army kicking the Englishmen's asses.
Thr problem is, the place where it supposedly happened doesn't leave any trace of this event.
Ælla of Northumbria is the one who captured and then executed Ragnar according to Sagas, but the Sagas themselves are the only source for this, and they weren't compiled and put down on paper till hundreds of years later, in the 1200s and 1300s.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Asser, Symeon, and other English sources close to the event in time and place, don't say anything about Ælla throwing Ragnar into a pit, or even dealing with a Ragnar at all. So while the Sagas and the English historical accounts agree that a guy named Ælla was ruler in Northumbria, and that the GHA invaded and deposed him, that is about as far as it goes.
p.s theyve even shown the pit of vipers to be a complete myth.
I am curious as to why you consider the Bible to be a myth.