Prince Ivar 'the Boneless' Erikson of Kiev falls in love with and marries Princess Helga (Olga) of Chernigov. While taxing her people to finance a war against Denmark, the Chernigov 20 ambush and capture the prince and his retinue and threaten to e...
After the death of Frode, the Danes wrongly supposed that Fridleif (Ivar), who was
being reared in Russia, had perished; and, thinking that the sovereignty halted
for lack of an heir, and that it could no longer be kept on in the hands of the royal
line, they considered that the scepter would be best deserved by the man who
should affix to the yet fresh grave of Frode a song of praise in his glorification,
and commit the renown of the dead king to after ages by a splendid memorial.
Then one HIARN, very skilled in writing Danish poetry, wishing to give the fame
of the hero some notable record of words, and tempted by the enormous prize,
composed, after his own fashion, a barbarous stave.
From Book Six of The Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus
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King Frodi's Ring Fortress near Liere
(917 AD) It took Prince Ivar three months to get well enough to travel. Prince Erik led their combined forces ahead of his son and established forts and supply caches. The young prince followed with the two thousand Varangian Guard cataphracts he had rented from the Roman Emperor Constantine 'the Seventh' of Constantinople. Their polished platemail armour glistened in the sun as they rode along the Mese, their smooth Greek helmets gleaming as the prince's carriage was drawn amongst them. They all boarded longships along the quays of the Golden Horn and the mercenaries waved goodbye to their young Roman wives. They sailed directly north, across the Scythian Sea and on up the Dnieper, stopping a few days in Kiev while the Medical Alchemists checked out their prince and gave him two years' worth of opiates while his mother and young wife begged him not to continue.
Prince Erik had already established a base on the Island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. From there Erik and Ivar led half their men to Sweden to gain the promised support from King Halfdan, the grandson of King Bjorn of the Barrows, the king who had spared Erik his head for a drapa in his name. They returned to Gotland Isle with five thousand of Sweden's finest in tow. Bypassing the island of Oland, their fleet landed in Oster Gotland and soon gained tribute from both the Oster and Vaster Goths. For the Tmutorokan Goths, both the Greutunga Eastern Goths and the Therving Western Goths, it had been over four hundred years since their forefathers had left these Gotland shores, when global cooling had caused vast crop failures, and they went off in search of better prospects near warmer Roman lands. For some, it was a great reunion, for others who had let their family histories slip away, it was not. But the total Gothic forces augmenting the Hraes' army doubled in size to ten thousand.
