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...
"Erik came to me in a dream and he said, 'Ivar the Boneless
is Prince Igor of Kiev'.
Brian Howard Seibert
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King Harde Knute of Denmark and Northumbria
(927-930 AD) When King Ivar returned north with the Hraes' trading fleet in the fall, he stopped in at Kiev to talk with Queen Helga. "Prince Mal has been causing you trouble," he said. "Would you like me to deal with him?"
"No," she replied. "I'll handle him."
"Tell him you're still my wife," Ivar said. "We haven't seen eye to eye for a number of years, but he should still respect that."
"Are we?" she asked. "Are we still man and wife?"
"I think so. I think some day you will realize how much your Drevjane friends took away from me and you'll do the right thing. Or you'll let me do it."
"Thank you," she said.
"For what?" he asked.
"For respecting my opinion and letting me handle it."
Ivar left King Frodi's Hall and went to the Hraes' Trading Company treasury, and checked the tithes for all the merchant ships and he matched payments collected against the value of goods shipped and he collected chests of gold Byzants and silver Kufas and he set off with his fleet of thousands of merchant ships and they headed north for Chernigov, the land of the Drevjane, and he collected a share of profits then paid out a share of tithes to the Swedish station owners there. He did the same at Smolensk and Surazh and sent men to handle Polotsk. Most of the merchant ships continued west along the Dvina River to the Baltic but, once more, King Ivar took the northern leg on his way to Sweden and portaged his ships from Surazh to the Lovat River and collected gifts from Vadim the Brave of Staraja Russa and collected profits and paid out tithe shares at Hraes' stations in Novgorod and Staraja Ladoga before sailing along the Gulf of Finland and across the Baltic to the Hraes' station in Birka and then to Uppsala in Sweden to visit with King Halfdan.
"I think Helga is contemplating punishing the 'Chernigov Twenty'," he told Halfdan.
"Will you be getting back together?" he asked.
"We had always planned to have a son after Alfhild was born. Perhaps we could get back together and try. You seem to have had much luck in that area," he said, as he watched Halfdan's sons at play in his highseat hall.
