Ivar the Boneless and the Cycle He Could Not Break

I am deep into Vikings right now and something in a recent episode just bugged me and I could not let it go.

Ivar has a son. Or at least he thinks he does. That is the first layer of this whole mess. The baby’s mother had actually been with another man. The entire pregnancy was part of a scheme to make Ivar believe he had fathered a child, feeding into his delusion that he was a god. So the baby was not even his to begin with.

And yet when the child is born with a deformity, Ivar takes him out and leaves him in the wilderness. Alone. Without telling the mother.

Now here is what really bugged me about that. Ivar himself was left to die as an infant. Ragnar made that call. He left him out there. The only reason Ivar survived is because his mother Aslaug went out and found him and saved his life. Without her, there is no Ivar. The entire legend of Ivar the Boneless does not exist.

He knew that. He grew up knowing that. He carried that wound into every battle, every relationship, every ruthless decision he ever made. The fact that his father left him to die was the fire that forged everything he became.

And then he turned around and did the exact same thing. Except this time there was no mother waiting to go back out and save the child. This time nobody came. The show implies the baby was taken by foxes. They only found parts of him.

The irony is brutal. Not poetic irony, not the kind you appreciate from a distance. The kind that just makes you angry because it is so completely messed up. Ragnar left Ivar. Aslaug saved him. Ivar left his child. Nobody saved him.

When the mother discovered what Ivar had done the betrayal was complete and it ultimately cost him his kingdom in a way that probably would never have happened otherwise.

But beyond the political fallout what bugged me most was the method. If you are going to make that decision why leave a baby out there to be taken by animals? The answer is rooted in actual Viking Age practice. Infant exposure was real. A father had the right to examine a newborn and decide whether to accept it. Picking the child up off the ground meant acceptance. Leaving it there meant letting fate decide. They were not killing the child with their own hands. They were outsourcing it to nature and calling it the will of the gods. That moral distance made it easier to live with even if the outcome was identical or worse.

Ragnar left Ivar. Aslaug saved him. Ivar left his child and no one came.

That is the difference. And that is what makes it so dark.