Ivar's strategy is a total success: Aethelwulf's Saxon army is utterly defeated and flees back to the Wessex and Mercia capital Winchester, where king Ecbert still decides to abdicate in his favor and prepares the royal family for his fate with bishop Edmund. As the triumphant Vikings seize Winchester, Ivar just demands utter bloody revenge, but Bjorn accepts instead 'high king' Ecbert's offer -in return for the right to die as he chooses, actually slitting his wrists in the grand bath- to grant them legal title to the kingdom of East Anglia, to realize Ragnar's dream of an agricultural Viking colony. Bjorn gets few volunteers from the Great Army to settle then for his own raids on the rich Mediterranean. Frustrated to be denied a blood-eagle executing of Ecbert, Ivar picks a fight with his weakling siblings which ends in bloodshed.
—KGF Vissers