Was Jarl Haakon a Real Person? All About ‘Vikings: Valhalla’s Badass Lady Leader

Netflix‘s new hit series Vikings: Valhalla takes viewers into the world of early 11th century Viking culture. We discover the Vikings are now something of a superpower, sprawled all over the world from the frigid wastes of Greenland to the metropolises of Egypt. Nowhere is the Vikings’ strength seen more than in the great Norwegian city of Kattegat. Introduced in the original Vikings series as the home of Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) and his allies, the harbor town is now ruled over by Jarl Haakon (Caroline Henderson), a formidable Viking warrior woman whose grandmother is from Alexandria, Egypt.

Vikings: Valhalla takes its inspiration from the Viking sagas of yore and the annals of medieval history. Great explorers like Leif Eriksson (Sam Corlett) and Freydis Eriksdotter (Frida Gustavsson) get to rub elbows with Harald Hardrada (Leo Suter) and Emma of Normandy (Laura Berlin). Jarl Haakon, however, is an amalgam of a few Viking figures. There was a white male Jarl Haakon who ruled during this period, but Vikings: Valhalla wanted to highlight just how diverse Viking culture had gotten by this time in history.

The Jarl Haakon we meet is a woman of color, but one universally accepted as a Viking. In her version of Kattegat, she has established a truce between pagans and Christians. Traders from all over the world hock their wares in her city and her walls are protected by shieldmaidens. She is one of the most exciting characters in Vikings: Valhalla Season 1 and she is loosely based on the historic record.

Vikings: Valhalla creator Jeb Stuart told Decider,  “I did a lot of research on the Vikings and I certainly wasn’t about to put a person of color into a role that the actor would spend all the time saying, ‘I don’t know why I’m here.'”

“But the fact of the matter is that we do know that the Vikings spent a good bit of time by the time of my story going through the Mediterranean and they spent a lot of time in Egypt,” Stuart said, setting up Jarl Haakon’s backstory. “But they also found as they went into different cultures, they didn’t dominate. They didn’t conquer, what they did was they assimilated, and they brought people in. For this particular time, we know for a fact that there were people of color who had come up with the Vikings around the Iberian Peninsula. There were Vikings who ended up in Ireland who were from North Africa. There were Sub-Saharan Vikings who had come up and had married Vikings or had been brought into it.”

“Was [Jarl Haakon] based on a particular person? No, but it was based on an amalgamation of lots of interesting stories,” Stuart said.

Caroline Henderson, the Danish-Swedish actress behind Jarl Haakon said, “Of course fictional. We don’t know that much about women anyhow unless they were queens.”

“But for me, I think it was great because I don’t think people realize how much Vikings actually traveled. They traveled to America 500 years before Columbus. They traveled to Asia, Africa, and of course, they traded,” Henderson said. “They raided, but they also met loved ones. They mixed and mixed culture and knowledge and religions and everything. So a character like mine is most likely to have existed.”

“But of course it’s not a documentary. It’s fictional so the writers had the liberty to kind of bend story. I think it kind of portrays a more possible truth than what we have seen before,” Henderson said.

Watch Vikings: Valhalla on Netflix