Book 4: Ivar 'the Boneless'

1.0 RAISING PRINCE IVAR

CHAPTER ONE

RAISING PRINCE IVAR (Circa 900 AD)

Those who were chosen on the fields of the slain were called in Asgard the Einherjar. For them Odin made ready a great Hall. Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain, it was called. Five hundred and forty doors had Valhalla, and out of each door eight hundred Champions might pass. Every day the Champions put on their armor and took their weapons down from the walls, and went forth and battled with each other. All who were wounded were made whole again, and in peace and goodly fellowship they sat down to the feast that Odin prepared for them. Odin himself sat with his Champions, drinking wine but eating no meat. And the Valkyries, the wise and fearless battle-maidens, went amongst them, filling up the drinking-horns with the heady mead."

THE CHILDREN OF ODIN The Book of Northern Myths By Padraic Colum

When Prince Ivar was four years old, his mother, Princess Eyfura, was teaching him how to paint and he designed his own coat of arms. It was a lone fir tree growing on a rock, an island. The name Eyfura meant island fir and Ivar, or, more properly, Eyfur, meant the same in the masculine, for his mother had named him after herself. But there was something special about his painting. It had the simple strokes of a four year old in the vibrant greens and browns of a child, but those few strokes said 'I stand alone in a sea of troubles' and his mother was touched, for that was her life on vellum. And she told Ivar that that would be his life too. He painted more haunting strokes and, in them, his mother saw a gift, saw a link to the past.

When his brother, Prince Oddi, saw his paintings, he saw caves in Spain and in Giantland and, likely, in the caves of Ragnar's youth, in Beowulf's Heorot, and he knew what that link to the past was and he loved Ivar for it. He told Ivar that as long as he breathed the boy would never stand alone. And Ivar loved his older brother and thought the world of him. But the world kept taking his older brother away from him, away to Kiev or to Constan....far off lands. And Oddi would come back with stories of these mysterious lands and tales of his grandfather, Ragnar Lothbrok, and the slaying of Fafnir, the fire breathing dragonship. And he would tell young Prince Ivar tales about his father, Erik and his Battle of the Goths and the Huns, but he would never tell tales about himself.

But his father would. Tales of Arrow Oddi and his Ship of Boys at the Battle of Constantinople and his discovery of a New Ireland and Scotland and Angleland at the far edges of the western sea, the Atlantean Ocean. And of the travels of Saint Brendan before them and even tales of long lost Atlantis itself.

When Prince Ivar was six years old, he began his education, learning other languages besides the Norse tongue, and learning numbers, and learning art and poetry and learning how to play the lyre. A Greek teacher named Artimis had been brought to Kiev from Constantinople and he was charged with young Ivar's education. And for the lyre, Artimis had selected a local Kievan musician to teach his charge all about stringed instruments, the lyre, the harp and several single stringed instruments that Ivar almost liked. But the lyre he hated with a passion. Bohdan was the local musician teaching him, a young local Poljane man, and he could see that Prince Ivar had talent, but lacked focus.

Bohdan decided one day to take young Prince Ivar into the music quarter of Kiev to let him pick out a lyre of his own choosing. He got permission from both Princess Eyfura and Artimis for a field trip and they set off from the palace with two guards in tow. While Bohdan was examining the lyres, Ivar heard a sound emanating from the back room of the shop. He followed the sound and in the back he saw a young boy, about his own age, playing a lyre most splendidly.

"What are you playing?" Ivar asked the boy in Slav.

"It is a folk song," the boy replied. He looked about and said, "The shop owner lets me practice here sometimes. I don't have a lyre of my own."