page_title: List of legendary kings of Sweden
section_title: Historicity
hierarchical_section_title: List of legendary kings of Sweden / Vidfamne dynasty / Historicity
context_page_description: The legendary kings of Sweden are the legendary rulers of Sweden and the Swedes who preceded Eric the Victorious and Olof Skötkonung, the earliest reliably attested Swedish kings. Though the stories of some of the supposed kings may be embellished tales of local rulers of chiefs that actually existed, modern scholarship overwhelmingly does not consider the legendary kings of Sweden to have been real historical figures. The modern Swedish monarchy considers Eric the Victorious to have been the first King of Sweden.
  In medieval Swedish lists of kings, the figure generally represented as the first king of Sweden is Olof Skötkonung, the first Christian king of Sweden and the first Swedish king to mint coins. Supposed earlier kings are for the most part only attested in Icelandic sagas, sometimes contradictory mixtures of myths and poetry, written in the 11th–13th centuries, several centuries after the events described in them. What is genuine history and what is myth and legend in the sagas is impossible to determine today, and everything contained in them must as such be regarded as legendary, if not fictional.
context_section_description: The existence of Ivar Vidfamne and his dynasty, at least in the way described in the sagas, is considered highly unlikely in modern scholarship. As with the Yngling kings, precise dates are not presented in the sagas for Ivar Vidfamne or his descendants, but his supposed reign is estimated to have taken place in the 7th century. The only sources that mention Ivar are Icelandic sagas from centuries after his supposed death. As Ivar is described as building a vast empire, including parts of Britain and northern Germany, it is unlikely that contemporary and later writers in Europe would not have written of him, had he existed. It is possible that the saga preserves a grain of the truth, perhaps being an embellishment of vague memories of an ancient warrior king, but most of what is said of Ivar Vidfamne has to be considered legendary and fictional.
caption: Map of Ivar Vidfamne's 7th-century empire according to the sagas. Since he is only mentioned in the Icelandic sagas, an empire of this extent is highly unlikely to have existed.
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