Ragnar Blackmane

Ragnar Blackmane is a Wolf Lord of the Space Wolves Chapter, commander of the Great Company known as the Blackmanes, and one of the more widely recognised warriors to have risen through the Chapter’s ranks during the latter half of the 41st millennium. Born to the Thunderfist tribe on Fenris, he was recruited into the Chapter alongside his tribal companion Strybjorn by the Wolf Priest Ranek, the two youths undergoing the trials and implantation that mark the passage from tribesman to Space Marine together before their paths within the Chapter diverged.

Ragnar’s early service was marked by a rate of advancement unusual even among the Space Wolves. Having distinguished himself as a Blood Claw, he was raised directly to the rank of Wolf Guard following his killing of the ork warlord Borzag Khan, a promotion that passed over the intervening rank of Grey Hunter entirely and marked him from early in his career as a warrior of exceptional promise within Berek Thunderfist’s company. It was during this period of his service that he took to wearing the pelt of a black-furred wolf, a token from which the name Blackmane, by which he became known throughout the Chapter, derives.

The controversy that most shaped Ragnar’s early reputation arose on the shrine world of Garm, where, as a Blood Claw in Berek Thunderfist’s company, he confronted the Thousand Sons sorcerer Madox amid an uprising aimed at recovering the Spear of Russ for use in summoning Magnus the Red. Faced with the ritual’s near completion, Ragnar cast the Spear into a collapsing warp portal rather than permit the Daemon Primarch’s return, an act that halted the summoning but cost the Chapter one of its most significant relics. Though Logan Grimnar, Great Wolf of the Space Wolves, judged the action necessary, the controversy surrounding the loss could not simply be set aside within the Chapter, and Grimnar despatched Ragnar to Terra as a Wolfblade, a posting that carried the outward form of honour but functioned, in substance, as exile from Fenris.

Ragnar’s service as a Wolfblade placed him in the household of Gabriela Belisarius of House Belisarius, a posting that in time drew him into the Hyades Incident, a conspiracy involving the Fallen and the Thousand Sons that threatened to set the Space Wolves and the Dark Angels against one another on the promethium world of Hyades. Berek Thunderfist himself was present during the crisis, and Ragnar found cause to ally, for its duration, with the Dark Angel Jeremiah Gieyus, the two warriors setting aside their Chapters’ mutual suspicion to see the conspiracy defeated. The alliance produced no lasting accord between the two Chapters, but it resolved the immediate threat and allowed Ragnar’s eventual return to active service among the Space Wolves proper.

The matter of the Spear of Russ was not closed by Ragnar’s exile. Years after Garm, he led the strike that recovered the relic from Madox’s refuge on the warp-touched world of Charys, aided there by the long-lost 13th Great Company of the Space Wolves. Ragnar killed Madox in the course of the battle, interrupting a ritual the sorcerer had turned toward the Chapter’s destruction, and returned the Spear of Russ to Logan Grimnar on Fenris. The Battle of Charys was received within the Chapter as Ragnar’s redemption, the controversy of Garm set aside with the relic’s recovery, and his standing restored.

Ragnar’s command responsibilities grew in the years that followed. He led Space Wolves forces to victory against the Bleak Brotherhood during the Magdelon Incursion of 712.M41, an engagement that triggered a major daemonic incursion in its aftermath, and his company is recorded among the Space Wolves who contested the Word Bearers’ occupation of the feral world of Kanak. During this period he also undertook the return of the derelict ship Baryonyx to the Flesh Tearers on their homeworld of Cretacia alongside his companion Nalfir, an episode that ended in near-execution at the hands of Chaplain Scarath, Nalfir’s death, and the beginning of Ragnar’s association with the Flesh Tearers emissary Sergeant Vorain.

The gravest reversal of Ragnar’s career came in 983.M41, when Berek Thunderfist’s Great Company was committed to the defence of the forge world Bhakhar against a Khornate assault. Separated from his commander by the battle-rage that marked his fighting style, Ragnar arrived too late to prevent Berek Thunderfist’s death at the hands of the champion Ghorox Bloodfist, a failure he held himself responsible for in the battle’s aftermath. Ragnar pursued Ghorox Bloodfist to the shrine world of Perfidium, where a prolonged duel through the Templum Incarnadus ended with Ragnar hurling the Khornate champion’s body from the structure’s heights. In recognition of the victory, Ragnar was elected Wolf Lord of Berek Thunderfist’s former Great Company, the youngest warrior to hold that rank within the Space Wolves at the time, and the company took on the name Blackmanes under his command.

Later in his career, grievous wounds sustained in battle on Krongar brought Ragnar to the Primaris implantation process, from which he emerged restored to fighting strength and bearing the enhanced physiology of the newer generation of Space Marine gene-seed, continuing his command of the Blackmanes in that form into the Chapter’s subsequent campaigns.