Ragnar Lothbrok Was Always the Smartest Person in the Room

One of the things that made Ragnar Lothbrok such a compelling character in Vikings was that he was never just reacting. He was always thinking further ahead than everyone around him, including the audience. And one of the clearest examples of that is the way he handled the assault on Paris.

On the surface, letting Floki lead the invasion looked like an act of loyalty. These were two men who had been brothers since the beginning, and handing your oldest friend a major military command reads as respect and trust. That’s exactly how Floki took it. That’s exactly how Ragnar intended it to look.

But Ragnar already knew the assault was going to fail. Paris was fortified in ways the Vikings had never encountered. The walls, the towers, the defenses along the Seine. He could read the situation. A frontal attack was not going to open those gates, and Ragnar was not the kind of man to throw himself at something he couldn’t win without having something else in motion.

So he gave Floki the command. If the assault somehow succeeded, Ragnar benefited. If it failed, which he expected, the loss belonged to Floki. Ragnar stayed positioned for whatever came next without absorbing the damage of a defeat he saw coming.

There was also the matter of Athelstan. Floki had made no secret of his contempt for the Christian monk who had become Ragnar’s closest companion. Most viewers came to believe, and the show eventually confirmed, that Floki was responsible for Athelstan’s death. Ragnar knew it too, or came close enough to knowing that it changed things between them permanently. Putting Floki in command of a campaign likely to collapse was not generosity. It was Ragnar keeping a complicated and dangerous relationship exactly where he wanted it.

And then there was the endgame. Ragnar wasn’t trying to break through the walls of Paris with brute force. He was trying to get inside. The failed siege created the conditions he needed for one of the most audacious moves in the entire series. He had himself carried to the gates of Paris as a dying man seeking Christian burial rites, got himself brought inside, and then climbed out of his own coffin. It only works if Paris has already repelled the Vikings and lowered its guard. The failed assault wasn’t a setback. It was part of the plan.

That’s who Ragnar was. He could make you feel honored while positioning you for a fall, and you would not see it coming until it was already done. Floki believed in that mission. He poured everything into it. And Ragnar let him, because that’s what the situation required.

The best leaders in history have operated the same way, using the people around them not just for what they can do but for what role they play in a larger sequence of events. Ragnar just did it in a fur cloak on a longship, which made it considerably more watchable.