Having expressed the doubts and uncertainties, one can turn to the story as the Vikings’ descendants remembered it. Ivar, regularly nicknamed inn beinlausi, the Boneless, is agreed by all of them to be the leading Ragnarsson. Saxo adds an Ubbi, who does not appear in ‘Ragnar’s Saga’; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle adds the third of this trio, Halvdan, or, in Anglo-Saxon, Healfdene. It is this last item which takes us right out of legend and folktale into documented history (just like Hygelac/*Hugilaikaz), for the Chronicle was composed well within living memory of the events described, by someone who was extremely well-informed. In it, Healfdene appears several times between 871 and 878, while from 865 the Chronicle is completely preoccupied with the activities of the mycel here, the great army of Vikings, led in many other accounts (though the Chronicle does not name him) by Ivar. A vital link comes in the Chronicle entry for 878 – a crisis year for both Vikings and Anglo-Saxons – which records that a Viking leader was defeated and killed with 840 of his men by the local levies in Devonshire. It was obviously a heartening victory for the men of Wessex, whose king, Alfred, was at that time hiding out in the marshes of Somerset and trying to rally supporters (and in later legend, ‘burning the cakes’). Yet the chronicler does not know the Viking leader’s name. What he does say with certainty is that he was ‘the brother of Ivar (Inwær) and of Halvdan (Healfdene)’.24 One manuscript of the Chronicle adds, furthermore, that the levies also captured the Vikings’ ‘Raven’ banner,25 while the later Annals of St Neots (c. 1120–c. 1140) states that the leader was called Ubbi and that the banner was woven by the three sisters of Ivar and Ubbi. If the raven on it flapped its wings, the Ragnarssons would conquer; if it hung limp, they would lose.26 We don’t have to believe in magic banners to accept the general agreement that there were three brothers, Ivar, Halvdan and Ubbi, later identified as Ragnarssons, and that these men dominated the military scene in the British Isles as a whole for close to twenty years.