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

King SWEYN ‘FORKBEARD’ IVARSON was Prince SVEINALD (Sviatoslav) of KIEV

I have just posted a first draft of Chapter 27, ‘KING SWEYN ATTACKS ANGLELAND II’ of “The Saga of Svein ‘the Old’ Ivarson” Book Four to the website SeiberTeck.com under the Book Heading of that name.

Book 4, Chapter 27,  ‘KING SWEYN ATTACKS ANGLELAND II’  (Circa 1007-1010 AD):

Please Note: This website is about Vikings and Varangians and the way they lived over a thousand years ago.  The content is as explicit as Vikings of that time were and scenes of violence and sexuality are depicted without reservation or apology.  Reader discretion is advised.

King Sweyn returns to southern Angleland with only one legion Danish cataphracts and they hold jousting competitions for Queen Emma’s entertainment.  Sweyn tells Emma that he has challenged her brother, Duke Richard to a jousting tournament in Rouen.  Emma asks if she can come.  After Sweyn’s tribute, thirty thousand pounds of silver, arrives in Southampton from London, they set out for Rouen in separate fleets.  While the knights are competing, Sweyn and Emma were doing a little jousting of their own.  Prince Valdamar arrives with his wives from Kiev to watch the competition and Princess Svia reminds Sweyn that they have plans to attack Rome soon.

After the jousts, Valdamar takes his Kievan cataphract legion back to Hraes’ and Emma takes Sweyn to Paris, the city of love, to see the Hraes’ stores there.  He has to disguise himself as one of Queen Emma’s bodyguards, as he is, after all, a Viking, and might not be appreciated there.  Sweyn is very impressed with her Paris store and he gains a new respect for the mind of the queen.  Unbeknown to Sweyn, Queen Emma has a liaison with King Robert of Frankia to get her planned Marseille store back on track and she sees some new Mediterranean ship designs that she likes.

The next spring, King Sweyn returns to Angleland and is paid forty thousand pounds of silver for tribute to keep the peace on the Isle of Wight.  Queen Emma moves into her newly completed palace in Southampton and begins work on her new cathedral there.  Because of the peace, Sweyn buys slaves from the Dublin Vikings for his eastern trade.  And he hires a Jomsviking, Jarl Thorkell ‘the Tall’, to protect Ipswich for him, but Thorkell begins raiding and Sweyn has to rein him in.

While the English are distracted in Sussex, Sweyn and Eirik lead a legion west and they sack Bristol in the Roman fashion.  Sweyn called the men of Bristol, pirates, and he would not be the last.  Perhaps because of the raiding or perhaps the rising tributes, King Athelred decides to have a great number of ships built and an army raised to drive the Vikings out of England.  Queen Emma takes care of the actual designing and building and she opts for fixed frame ships like the ones she had seen in Marseille and she has them built over winter as though they were houses all along the Thames and they were launched in the spring to meet the returning Vikings.  Jarl Thorkell ‘the Tall’ and his fleet of Jomsvikings are the first to meet up with the new English fleet of tall ships and the Vikings are defeated quite handily and flee to Sandwich for repairs.

Meanwhile, Emma is in Southampton giving an open house for her new palace and Sweyn sees three women working there all dressed in black, a young girl, a woman and an old crone and he felt they made an odd group for some reason.  Sweyn also sees that Emma’s third floor of her palace is of post and beam construction, not of stone, as the first two floors were, which also seemed odd for some reason.

Jarl Thorkell and his Jomsvikings didn’t need control of the Thames to raid Angleland and they marched cross-country, pillaging and burning as they progressed.  The people of Kent paid the Jomsvikings three thousand pounds of silver for peace, so, they attacked London and plundered Oxford, then overwintered in Sandwich.

King Sweyn returned to Wight in the spring and he brought his son, Prince Valdamar, with him and a fresh Hraes’ legion.  Jarl Thorkell had been reinforced by more Jomsvikings from the Isle of Jom and it would take more of Sweyn’s men to keep the peace.  Because of the Jomsviking problem, Sweyn upped the tribute to forty eight thousand pounds of silver and Athelred paid it.  The Anglish Earl Ulfkytel led a large English army against the Jomsvikings and they were defeated and the survivors fled back to London.  The Jomsvikings controlled East Anglia for months and sent raiding parties out from there.

King Sweyn was with his trading fleet in Baghdad so, Queen Emma pleaded with Prince Valdamar to lead some men to Northampton to stop and impending Jomsviking attack there.  Valdy sailed around to Northampton and saved the town and fell in love with Princess Aelfgifu there.  He wanted to marry her but was not allowed to because he was Orthodox Christian and she was Latin Catholic and there was a great schism between the two Christian sects.  He returned to Wight in disgust.

The Jomsvikings kept raiding all around central England, and when they were raiding east of London, Athelred led his army west, and when they were raiding north of London, Athelred led his army south.  When Sweyn got back from Baghdad, they learned that the Jomsvikings had sacked Northampton, and when Jarl Thorkell ‘the Tall’ brought Princess Aelfgifu to Prince Valdamar on the Isle of Wight, Sweyn has to confess to his son that Thorkell had been working for Sweyn all along, and the plot thickens.

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.