GIRLS OF THE RED HOUSE # 2  (Circa 950 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.

The Red House was a very high class and expensive operation, what some would call a house of ill repute, but its reputation was so much more than that.  Like Varangians, it ranged from good to bad to downright evil.  The name Varangian comes from Way or Va and Rangers or Wanderers and the Hraes’, or Rhos as they were known to the Romans, were wanderers of the Nor’Way and the southern Dan’Way or Danaper River of the Hraes’ of Kiev.  And it was through the slave schools of Kiev that all the new Girls of the Red House arrived.

The upper floors housed the northern princesses, the papered princesses that had been acquired through the infant exposure collection process that had been set up by the recently departed King Ivar ‘the Boneless’ of Kiev.  Queen Helga was very successfully selling these concubine princesses to the royalty of Rome and its surrounding provinces.  The princes and dukes of the so called Macedonian/Armenian dynasty were snapping them up, as were the Thracian and Greek dukes and the princes of Anatolia and Syria.

The middle floors had the rooms of the working girls of the Red House, the girls who strove hard to find their princes and ship’s captains and Viking merchants and, they too, were quite successful at it.  The favourite girls of the captains of commerce received great gifts when their ships came in and often love blossomed between the girls and their captains and the price of these wives could be quite steep, as Queen Helga was known to drive a hard bargain.  New girls were constantly arriving from the concubine schools of Kiev, captives of raids in Ireland and Angleland and Frisia and famine victims of countries in the north, and they were trained to seek their captains, for good lives could be found in the Mediterranean provinces of Rome.

The basement floors housed the Witches of the Red House and their Aesir religious practices of witchcraft and orgies and gladiatorial combats, the ancient entertainments that the Christian Romans found so compelling.  The old Roman Vanir religion was another tripartite god religion of conquest that had been in direct competition with the Aesir religion for millenia in the conquest of the Celts of Europe and had lost, not to the Aesir, but to the new Christian religion that had grown like a cancer within the Roman Empire, and the new Christian Rome had retreated before the violent onslaught of the Aesir, first from Britain in a strategic retreat and then from Gaul in full flight.  The Aesir pressed hard and the Romans relocated their capital to Constantinople before the inevitable fall of Rome to the Aesir Goths.  The Eastern Roman Empire was all that was left, which was still quite a lot, but they now felt threatened by the Aesir Hraes’, threatened and intrigued, enticed by their own old ways and the Greco-Roman witchcraft that had refused to die out.

While very few original documents remain extant from Eastern Roman times, there are numerous accounting documents of the lavish spending on fine dinners that Queen Helga engaged in while visiting the Roman city.  While the Hraes’ Trading Company bookkeepers considered her spending quite frivolous, she considered it an investment in herself.  She may very well have coined the feminine phrase, “I’m worth it!”

The Varangians Series:

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”

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.