IVAR the BONELESS was PRINCE IVAR (Igor) of KIEV and his son

SVEIN ‘the OLD’ IVARSON was PRINCE SVEINALD (Sviatoslav) of KIEV

I have just posted a first draft of Chapter 4,  ‘PRINCE SVEINALD (SVIATOSLAV) THE BRAVE’   (Circa 960-965 AD) of “The Saga of Svein ‘the Old’ Ivarson” Book to the website SeiberTeck.com under the Book Heading of that name.

Book 4, Chapter 4, PRINCE SVEINALD (SVIATOSLAV) THE BRAVE: 

Emperor Constantine had divorced his wife, Empress Helena, and he had married Princess Helga in the summer of 959, but the citizens of Constantinople had protested the marriage and had rioted and attacked the Capitol Building, shouting ‘Hang Helga’ and ‘Hang Constantine’ and they’d driven Empress Helga out of the city and then the Emperor was dead.  So, Prince Sveinald used all that he had learned while training with the Varangian Guard in Constantinople to develop a new mobile legion based on the Roman legion and the Pecheneg horse warriors of the steppe.  He invented a new type of shield, the Kite shield, based on kites his grandfather, Prince Hraerik, had imported from Cathay.  The Norman’s, also descendants of Ragnar Lothbrok, would adopt the kite shield for their later attack at the Battle of Hastings in the conquest of England as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestries.

Back in Liere, Prince Canute’s death led to the death by grief of King Gorm ‘the Old’ of Denmark, followed by the suttee death of Queen Thyra and the Danish crown was taken up by Prince Harald ‘Bluetooth’, even though Prince Svein, as King Gorm’s half brother, had the right of succession by ancient Scandinavian law.  But Sveinald soon has bigger fish to fry when Emperor Romanos dies and Svein has a claim to the throne of Eastern Rome.

Prince Hraerik was once more in India trading and he visited his wives in Mumba and helped Maharaja Rajan fight off a Chaulukyan attack on the Jat city of Ashaval.  His wife, Myia, was a polymath and cosmologist and she was helping the Prince to understand the visions he had seen while in a coma in his youth.  Myia explained to him that the universe he had seen while hanging from the tree, Yggdrasil, was just too large for them to fathom.  But the Indian mathematicians loved the concept because they felt they could model it mathematically.  Heavy stuff for a tenth century Viking!

While sailing back north to Kiev, Prince Hraerik stopped in Sinope and visited the Roman consul’s wife for a week and again confirmed that she was the best Hraes’ station manager that his son, Ivar ‘the Boneless’ had ever hired.

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.