[Agnetha Lundin Agnetha Lundin] if you haven't already read it https://www.geni.com/projects/Ragnar-Lodbrog/27426 will give you a brief introduction, read the About of his profile also, if your still interested https://www.geni.com/documents/view?doc_id=6000000023216898633 and https://www.geni.com/documents/view?doc_id=6000000032846134859 are very good reads.
Beware of the many online pages that will make statements of fact about Ragnar without acknowledging the lack of good evidence.
Did someone with a name something like "Ragnar" exist? Yes!
Did all the stories attributed to Ragnar actually occur and to one man? No!
Is his place on the Geni tree and therefore the relationship path Geni displays between you and him accurate? Almost certainly not.
I thought they had disconnected fictional/mythical characters from the trees, but maybe they missed some?
In some main profiles, they write that it's not proven that; for exemple that the parent actually is the real parent of the profile.
Profiles that were in my family tree before, is disconnected now from the tree, because they were either fictional/mythical or not proven that the parent was the real parent of the profile.
Johannes Bureus, (swedish poet, science man and so on) for exemple, did some researches about his family. But he added some fictional characters some that the tree would look better.
Unfortunately, there are several users on Geni that want Ragnar as one of their ancestors, so the reconnect the points that were severed or they add new profiles and make their ancestry back to Ragnar go through thatr profile, which later get merged with the severed one and the connection is reestablished for everyone. It's a neverending story, and a neverending job.
That sounds very annoying and they sabotage for all the other users who taking this seriously.
I want to know the truth about my family history and I'm looking for my distant cousins and my real ancestors.
Do you think it's only users here on Geni that made such things up or is it possible that people back in the history made that up? Maybe it's both?
Christina Nordlund it is not that Geni users invent random connections.
To very briefly paraphrase https://www.geni.com/projects/Ragnar-Lodbrog/27426 there are 3 main sources for Ragnar, two sagas and a history of Denmark written by a bishop, all being written several hundred years after the events they describe based on oral traditions. The 3 tell different versions of Ragnar's life. They can't all be true and in fact there is no way to know if any of them are true.
Here's an interesting (and short!) thread which touches on some of these issues https://www.geni.com/discussions/208987
Start with this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar_Lodbrok
I dont have acces to the books, you can travel to Norway and Sweden.
Patricia Did you read the entire Wikipedia article? It does not support your claim that he was real.
Which books in Sweden and Norway are you referring to? The two sagas relating directly to Ragnar are available for free online in various translations, as is the Gesta Danorum and the Anglo Saxon Chronicle and Irish Annals.
As I said in my earlier post https://www.geni.com/projects/Ragnar-Lodbrog/27426 is a good place to start and there are links at the bottom of the page which will lead to English translations of the sagas
EVERYONE: we go off of the information we have....now. We have faith in its truthfulness. "IF" ... later, we find ourselves wrong, we adjust. "IF" later, we find our faith was not misplaced, then we continue as we want to believe. Until something else comes along.... a new source of more confirming information/data.... we believe what we know now to be our truth.
DON'T ridicule or demean other people for the faith they have..... until otherwise notes in history, as fact.
Glen Stephen Poland if you feel anyone is behaving inappropriately in this thread please use the Report button underneath the timestamp which is immediately under their name next to the post you think would benefit from the review of Geni Staff.
Geni is not a faith based website, it is a collaborative genealogy website. Because it is collaborative people need to be able to support the information that they support with evidence otherwise we have anarchy. The evidence for Ragnar is stories told by people who may or may not have been descended from him but either way wrote the stories down hundreds of years later. Were they faithfully recording facts as they understood them, perhaps. Were they perhaps adding culturally specific moral lessons to the stories to encourage or try to influence cultural norms, perhaps? Were the people that told the authors those stories doing one or both, perhaps?
The Anglo Saxon Chronicles and Irish Annals record hundreds of years of history but they are not a running commentary, more like a teenager's journal. "In July X went here and did this.", "Y was in such and such a place on to do whatever." There is no attempt by the chroniclers to explain or give context so linking any two entries in the chronicle is a matter of interpretation.
To mix my metaphors trying to cross correlate the ASC or IAs to any of the sagas is like trying to work out the history of WW2 by reading the diary of a French solider and the memoirs of a Japanese soldier, perhaps it's not a great metaphor but I think it's suggestive of the difficulty.
To be frank, if you want to believe all the sources and have faith that they are all correct you might as well watch the HBO series Vikings (especially the first few seasons are very entertaining provided your not squeamish about blood).
Thank you, Alex. Well-put and appreciated. I don't feel debating is reportable. In my comment, the term "faith" is not a reference to religious belief, in as much as I have faith the sun will rise today. Until otherwise known, the world was flat and people had faith in the science of the day. Today, there is new information, even though some choose not to believe it. This being my point about a person choosing to believe or not believe. After all, this is a "discussion" board about a historical person we have no real proof ever existed, except for what has been written (as you also stated); much like any historic person. Best ~ Glen