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

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

I have just posted a first draft of Chapter 28, ‘KING SWEYN CONQUERS ENGLAND’ 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 28,  ‘KING SWEYN CONQUERS ENGLAND’  (Circa 1011-1014 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.

In the early spring, King Sweyn returns to the Isle of Wight in Angleland where he had left his Danish mobile legion over the winter and with him he brought his Danish cataphract legion and he brought his son, Prince Valdamar, who brought his Kievan mobile legion and his Kievan cataphract legion and they met Jarl Eirik, who brought another five thousand Vikings with him.  He then meets Queen Emma in Southampton to receive the Anglish ships that arrive from London with King Athelred’s tribute of forty eight thousand pounds of silver and he gave them peace with the Danes. Sweyn explains that he needs the extra troops to try and control the marauding Jomsvikings that are presently attacking Angleland.

The Jomsvikings lay siege to the walled city of Canterbury and through intimidation are let into the city at night and by morning all within are enslaved.   Archbishop Elphege was imprisoned and tortured, but he works hard while captive over the winter at converting the Jomsvikings to Christianity and he seems very successful at doing this.  Three quarters of the Jomsvikings remain pagan and it is these Vikings who try to exact ransom for the archbishop’s life and, when Elphege refuses ransom, they kill him.  The Christianized Jomsvikings, under Jarl Thorkell ‘the Tall’, then take Archbishop Elphege’s body to London for burial and they offer the service of their forty five ships to King Athelred.  King Sweyn exacts another years’ worth of tribute from the Anglish and he sends his son, Prince Valdamar, and his legions to York to secure the northern districts from Jomsviking attack.  Sweyn has been positioning his Danish legions around London under the guise of preventing Jomsviking attacks, and he spends the rest of the year getting his legions into position for a final assault upon Angleland.

When King Sweyn returned to Angleland in the spring, Queen Emma brought his tribute from London with her, explaining that it was a little short, but more would be forthcoming in the fall.  Sweyn left for the summer for trading in Baghdad, but when he returned in the fall he brought more ships and legions with him and he attacked the new Anglish tall ships that were guarding the Thames and he destroyed them.  He arrived before London with his fleet and he demanded King Athelred’s submission.  Meanwhile, his troops that were located around London, subdued all the surrounding districts and they declared King Sweyn as the new ruler of England.  Only the city of Oxford resisted and they were crushed and enslaved, leading the London fyrds to set up side negotiations with Sweyn.  Jarl Thorkell and his Christian Jomsvikings offered to escort King Athelred to sanctuary in Normandy if he submitted to King Sweyn and he agreed to this, as Queen Emma had already taken her children from Southampton to Rouen.  On Christmas Day of 1013, King Sweyn was crowned king of England, but King Athelred had left assassins behind in London.

This is the concluding chapter of ‘The Saga of Svein ‘the Old’ Ivarson’ and, hopefully, the book has illustrated how it was possible that Prince Svein ‘the Old’ of Kiev, also known as Prince Sviatoslav ‘the Brave’, the brother of King Gorm ‘the Old’ of Denmark, took the throne of Denmark from Gorm’s son, King Harald ‘Blue Tooth’, and led the great pagan Viking conquest of England as King Sweyn ‘Forkbeard’ of Denmark.  Historically, it is claimed that King Sweyn was the Christian King Harald ‘Bluetooth’s son, who deposed and killed his father and reverted back to the Aesir pagan religion, but there are a lot of problems with this history.  Saxo Grammaticus claims that King Sweyn ‘Forkbeard’ was elderly when he died and a contemporary of King Harald would have been elderly, but a son would not have been.  Also, King Harald was not a wealthy king and nor would his son have been.  A decades long assault upon England by the much smaller Denmark would have been very costly and was likely financed by the slave trade run by the princes of Rus’ (Hraes’), which powered the whole Viking domination of that period.

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.