IVAR the BONELESS was PRINCE IVAR (IGOR) of KIEV

I have just posted a first draft of Chapter 26  Hills Like White Elephants (Circa 942) to “The Saga of Ivar ‘the Boneless’ Hraerikson” Book of the website SeiberTeck.com under the Book Heading of that name.

Prince Ivar sets up the Roman consul’s wife as the manager of the new Hraes’ trading station in the city of Phasis, on the eastern Black Sea Coast.  He then joins his father, Hraerik, and the rest of the merchant fleet heading for trade in Baghdad.  With Roman trade sanctioned, Hraerik even has time to join Ivar in his trade mission to Gujarat in India.

Ashaval is the jewel city of Gujarat and Hraerik meets a young Princess Myia there and she becomes determined to teach him to speak Hindi and to read Sanskrit, and the Sanskrit book they read together is the Kama Sutra.  A section of the Kama Sutra is quoted (Circa 400 BCE–200 CE, attributed to Indian philosopher, Vatsyayana) and later, a few paragraphs from Fanny Hill (published in 1749 by John (Jane?) Cleland) are included to illustrate some sexually graphic descriptions through the ages, in case some of Ivar’s explicit actions are deemed as too modern in description.  The princes decide to establish two trading stations in India, one in Ashaval in Gujarat province and one in Mumba in Maharashtra province.

While in India, Prince Hraerik uses his membership in the Alchemists’ Guild to establish contact with alchemists in Gujarat because Indian alchemists have made advances in mathematics and cosmology that may help him understand some of the visions he’d had as a youth.  Maharaja Rajan questions him on their related Aesir and Vanir religions and parallels between Zeus, Odin and Bhraman are drawn as well as Mars, Thor and Indra.  Hraerik has had visions of the Aesir-Vanir wars of the past and he shares them with Raj.  Worldwide warming and cooling cycles turn out to be the main driving force behind these violent migrations instead of the religious differences that Raj had begun to suspect, as he watched the growing schism evolve between the Latin and Orthodox Christians in the middle east.

When the Varangian traders head back north, Ivar learns that his Roman consul’s wife is pregnant again and he winters in Kiev to impregnate his wife, Princess Helga, with their baby Svein.

Book Three, “The Saga of Ivar ‘the Boneless’ Hraerikson,” reveals how Ivar the Boneless Ragnarson was actually Prince Eyfur/Ivar (Igor in Slavic) Hraerikson of Kiev and then King Harde Knute of Denmark. By comparing a twenty year lacuna in the reign of Prince Igor in the Russian Chronicles with a coinciding twenty year appearance of a King Harde Knute (Hard Knot) of Denmark in European Chronicles, Prince Igor’s ‘death by sprung trees’, which reportedly tore his legs off, may have rather just left him a boneless and very angry young king. Loyal Danes claimed, “It was a hard knot indeed that sprung those trees,” but his conquered English subjects, not being quite as polite, just called him, “Ivar the Boneless”.