IVAR the BONELESS was PRINCE IVAR (IGOR) of KIEV

I have just posted a first draft of the final Chapter 29  THE HRAES’-ROMAN TREATY OF 945 of “The Saga of Ivar ‘the Boneless’ Hraerikson” Book to the website SeiberTeck.com under the Book Heading of that name.

In the prior chapter, Prince Ivar died of the Plague and his father, Prince Hraerik, holds the Roman General John Kourkouas responsible, so he makes an attack upon Constantinople with a great fleet of dragonships by sea and a huge horde of Pecheneg allies by land.  The Roman Emperor, Romanos Lekapenos, sends the Pechenegs gifts of gold to make peace, but when the vast Hraes’ war fleet surrounds Constantinople, Prince Hraerik avenges his son while getting a renewed trade agreement out of the Romans.  But the Kourkouas blood runs deep in the Roman Empire and revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

Two years ago, I had decided to follow The Saga of Ingvar the Traveler’s version of Prince Ivar’s death, his death by plague, instead of the version out of the Russian Primary Chronicle where he is killed in a second attack by the Drevlians.  Little did I expect to be writing the actual chapter while under lockdown during our own pandemic.  The first time I read Ingvar’s Saga, I didn’t recognise the beak on the healer’s mask, which Ivar hit with an arrow, as indicating that it may have been a plague mask similar to the beak masks that Nostradamus wore when he was battling the plagues of the sixteenth century.  This sequence and others tell me that there is much factual material that can be gleaned from Ingvar’s Saga if it is read from the proper perspective.  For instance, when the saga said “One evening, they saw in the distance what looked like a half moon standing on the earth”, I wondered if perhaps they were in Islamic lands.  I did a little research and learned that the crescent moon was a symbol of Constantinople and that the Turks inherited it when they conquered the city in 1453.  The Byzantine lands had many buildings that had crescent moons at the top of their domes, so ‘a half moon standing on the earth” is what they would have seen from a distance.  Once I saw it as a symbol of Constantinople, it made more sense of the poison and fire breathing dragon attacks that soon befell Ingvar and his men, what with Greek fire ships being the secret weapon of the Byzantines.

The chapter ends with another interpretation out of the Kama Sutra, a book that Prince Hraerik fell in love with while trading in India.  The Kama Sutra was written circa 200 BC, so we should be able to handle the explicit descriptions.  It serves to temper the resolve of our readers who move on to Book Four, The Saga of Svein ‘the Old’ Ivarson, when Prince Svein has to battle the ‘Army of the Impalers’, led by Prince Vlad, the great, great grandfather of Vlad the Impaler, Count Dracula, of fifteenth century Wallachia.  The ‘Salute of the Impalers’ gives new meaning to the number 666.  Prince Svein’s armed intervention into Prince Vlad’s Wallachia shall rival the final scenes of Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ and may have been the original ‘Heart of Darkness’.  It is during this battle that the Vikings earn their horns.

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 Ivar’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”.