IVAR the BONELESS was PRINCE IVAR (Igor) of KIEV and his son SVEIN ‘the OLD’ IVARSON was PRINCE SVEINALD (Sviatoslav) of KIEV and KING SWEYN FORKBEARD of DENMARK

I have just posted a first draft of Chapter 1,  ‘QUEEN HELGA/PRINCESS OLGA OF KIEV’  (Circa 945-948 AD) of “The Saga of Svein ‘the Old’ Ivarson” Book to the website SeiberTeck.com under the Book Heading of that name.

Queen Helga/Princess Olga by N Bruni 1901

Book 4, Chapter 1, QUEEN HELGA/PRINCESS OLGA OF KIEV:  After Prince Hraerik avenged Ivar’s death by having a Roman general, a Roman admiral and four Roman Emperors sentenced to life on the Byzantine Island of Princes for crimes against the Hraes’, he returned to Kiev to help Queen Helga prepare the Hraes’ merchant fleets for spring trading in Constantinople and Baghdad.  As soon as the merchant fleets had left Kiev, Princess Helga was visited by an embassy from Prince Mal of the Drevjane of Iskorosten and they requested Helga’s hand in marriage with their prince.  Helga, once more, feared being kidnapped, feared being forced to marry Prince Mal, an accepted practice of the land.  So, she sent her legions to Iskorosten and attacked Prince Mal and they slaughtered 5,000 Drevjane warriors and laid siege to the city.

Prince Hraerik visited Tmutorokan before going to Baghdad and he showed Queen Silkisif his ongoing translation of the Sanskrit Kama Sutra into Norse and told Queen Silkisif that he had just translated a chapter on kissing.

“A whole chapter on kissing?” she said.

“That’s what I thought,” he replied, “when I translated the first draft, but now I’m not so sure Vatsyayana actually wrote this chapter.  He may have copied it from an earlier Veda.  I would like us to go through the whole chapter and see if there is more to it than Vatsyayana explains.”  Not fully understanding the dangers of the Kama Sutra, they began by innocently kissing each other and finished with Hraerik worrying that he had impregnated his queen.

The siege of Iskorosten continued all summer and the Hraes’ legions learned that the City of Wood would not burn.  The fire fighters of Iskorosten were far better than their warriors.

Prince Hraerik stopped in Phasis to visit with the Roman consul’s wife and they went through Vatsyayana’s chapter on biting to much the same result as the prior chapter on kissing.  In Baghdad, Prince Hraerik studied ‘Chapter Six: Of the Different Ways of Lying Down, and the Various Kinds of Congress’ with Roxanna and Saleem, two dancers he had hired to work for the Hraes’ Trading Company there.  He continued on to Gujarat Province in India and complained to Maharaja Rajan of the inherent dangers of the book Raj had given him.

The siege of Iskorosten continued and even beavers entered the fray.  The City of Wood still would not burn.

In the fall, the merchant fleet returned from Baghdad and Prince Hraerik offered to take care of the beaver problem for Helga, but she told him she did not want the beavers hurt and that she did not require assistance with the siege so Hraerik told her he would defeat the Drevjane of Iskorosten with a mere child’s toy.  She is intrigued and allows him the opportunity to try and her young son Svein even uses the toy to begin the attack.  Soon the whole city of Iskorosten is aflame and the Drevjane are defeated by a boy with a toy in six hours after withstanding a siege of six months by thousands of legionnaires.  Queen Helga returns his favour with her grace.

Book Four, “The Saga of Svein ‘the Old’ Ivarson,” demonstrates how Prince Svein ‘the Old’ (Slavic: Sviatoslav ‘the Brave’) of Kiev later moved to Norway and fought to become King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark.  But before being forced out of Russia, he sated his battle lust by crushing the Khazars and attacking the great great grandfather of Vlad the Impaler in a bloody campaign into the Heart of Darkness of Wallachia against the Army of the Impalers and their 666 salute.  The campaign was so mortifying that the fifteen thousand pounds of gold that the Emperor of Constantinople paid him to attack them seemed not nearly enough, so Prince Svein attacked the Eastern Roman Empire itself.  He came so close to defeating the greatest empire in the world, that later Danish Christian Kings would call his saga, and the sagas of his kin, “The Lying Sagas of Denmark” and set out to destroy them.