List of legendary kings of Sweden

The legendary kings of Sweden (Swedish: sagokonungar, sagokungar, lit. 'saga kings / fairy tale kings') according to legends were rulers of Sweden and the Swedes who preceded Eric the Victorious and Olof Skötkonung, the earliest reliably attested Swedish kings. The stories of some of these kings may be embellished tales of local rulers or chiefs that actually existed. For example, Hygelac (500 A.D.) is believed to have historical basis due to his name being attested in Frankish, English, Danish and Icelandic sources. But the historicity of most legendary kings remains impossible to verify due to a lack of sources.^[1] The modern Swedish monarchy considers Eric the Victorious to have been the first King of Sweden.^[2]

In medieval Swedish lists of kings, the figure generally represented as the first king of Sweden is Olof Skötkonung,^[3] the first Christian king of Sweden and the first Swedish king to mint coins. The 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.^[4] The earliest legendary dynasty, the Ynglings, may be an entirely invented sequence of kings, serving to justify and legitimize the later dynasties and rulers in Scandinavia who claimed descent from them.^[5] Many of the legendary kings would have ruled during the Migration Period (c.  375–550) and subsequent Vendel Period (c.  550–790), but larger political structures in Scandinavia (i. e. the medieval kingdoms of Sweden, Norway and Denmark) are not believed to have formed and centralized until the Viking Age.^[6]

The legendary kings of Sweden, as presented in the sagas, covers three legendary dynasties of rulers; the Yngling dynasty, claimed to have been descended from the Norse god Odin, the dynasty founded by Ivar Vidfamne, who conquered Sweden and deposed the Ynglings, and the House of Munsö, which succeeded Vidfamne's dynasty. The final few kings considered part of the Munsö dynasty by the Icelandic sagas; Eric the Victorious, Olof Skötkonung, Anund Jacob and Emund the Old, were real historical kings, though that does not mean that their legendary ancestors were real historical figures. Contemporary primary sources from 9th–11th century Germany, such as the accounts of Adam of Bremen and Rimbert, contradict the line of Munsö kings purported to have existed by the sagas.^[7]