The tenth to eleventh century was the Age of Conversion for northern and eastern Europe, which until that time had been almost untouched by Christianity. Saints Olaf and Vladimir1 stand out as major figures in that momentous process. Unfortunately, the written sources for this age are often little better than works of fiction themselves2.
Among the major characters, Odd, Stig, Stavko, Putscha, Einar Tree-Foot, and Dag are fictitious. The historical characters are as follows:
Teit Isleifsson, Odd’s amanuensis, grew up to become the greatest Icelandic scholar of his generation. Turning the family seat of Skalholt into a school, throughout a long lifetime he taught Latin and theology to the grandsons of viking warriors. It is only my fancy, however, that his father Bishop Isleif contemplated writing a biography of Harald. It would be another two centuries before Snorri Sturluson and his contemporaries composed biographical sagas of the Norwegian kings.
Yaroslav the Wise, as he is depicted in the Russian Primary Chronicle, is noted for his piety, his learning, his promotion of education, and his fondness for the company of monks. His personality is conveyed best by comparison with his brother, Mstislav. The latter, according to the Chronicle, was strong, brave, ruddy-faced, boisterous and generous—qualities which are never imputed to Yaroslav. We read there also that the prince had a deformed foot—a fact which has been confirmed by examination of his skeleton, entombed in the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Kiev.
Of Ingigerd the Chronicle relates nothing but the bare fact of her death in A.D. 1050, four years before that of her husband. Far more interesting are the Scandinavian sources. In one, The Tale of Eymund, the Princess appears as willful, fearless, and conspiratorial; capable of plotting the assassination of a traitorous captain of the druzhina. While her attempts on Harald’s life are fictitious (as far as we know), they are, at least, not out of character. Ingigerd is depicted, with her daughters Yelisaveta and Anna, in the murals which decorate the interior of Yaroslav’s Church of the Holy Wisdom in Kiev, but the stylized Byzantine portrait displays her true features as little as it reveals her secret thoughts.
Jarl Ragnvald and his son Eilif are historical (though it is only my notion that the former was loathsome and the latter stupid). It would seem that the concentration of power in the hands of Ingigerd, Ragnvald, and Eilif, backed by their foreign mercenaries, constituted a sort of Swedish ‘mafia’ at court. The growing preferment of Harald, culminating in his receiving joint command of the druzhina with Eilif, must have gone down hard with them.
The plot of The Ice Queen springs from the constellation of Ingigerd-Yaroslav-Harald-Magnus-Yelisaveta: all historical figures, and yet no contemporary source gives a believable interpretation of the relationships among them. For the present attempt I claim nothing more than psychological plausibility.
Since Harald’s gigantic stature is, to my mind, so much a factor in the way others react to him, it is worth noting that references to it in the Icelandic sources are many and clear. For comparison’s sake we may note that Tsar Peter the Great, whose diet was, if anything, less wholesome than a Norseman’s, attained a height of six feet seven inches, was immensely strong, and was at age eleven mistaken by a stranger at court for a sixteen year old.
I note a few other particular points below.
The embassy of the Tronder jarls seeking Magnus for their King is factual (excluding, of course, Odd’s part in it) and coincides pretty nearly with Harald’s departure from Novgorod. It is not hard to see a connection between the two events. Cheated of the crown he believed himself entitled to, Harald was forced to seek his fortune elsewhere. His career in Miklagard is narrated in The Guardsman, the next volume of this series.
The question of what language, or languages, the Rus spoke in Yaroslav’s day cannot be decided with certainty. Russian scholars have generally sought to eliminate the Norse element in Rus culture, while Westerners have perhaps exaggerated it. It is well-known that the Vikings, wherever in Europe they settled, quickly abandoned their language for that of the people they lived amongst. To take the best known instance, it is unlikely that William the Conqueror and his Norman (that is, Northman) knights, in 1066, still spoke their native Danish. Why should the same not be true for the Rus, whose forefathers, according to the traditional account, came with Rurik the Dane in the eighth century to rule over the Slavs? On the other hand, Yaroslav’s mother was Scandinavian; his wife, of course, spoke Norse as her mother tongue; and, in general, the prince surrounded himself with Swedish expatriates, with whom surely he could converse. For my purposes, I have taken the middle ground: that while Slavonic was the general language of the court, Yaroslav and his family, as well as other Rurikids like Mstislav, were bilingual. Beyond that narrow circle, some Rus perhaps spoke Norse poorly and most of them not at all. All scholars are agreed that by the generation following Yaroslav’s, at latest, the Norse language was entirely extinguished in Russia.
Odd’s ruse involving the Monastery of the Caves never happened, but it might have. The right bank of the Dnieper south of Kiev is honeycombed with caves and miles of narrow intersecting tunnels, some unexplored to this day. Here, from the eleventh century onward, monks turned their backs on the world and here, after death, their mummified remains were laid to rest. From such beginnings Pechersky Lavra (the Monastery of the Caves) grew to become one of the holiest shrines of Russian Orthodoxy.
Regarding Harald’s gory execution of the Pecheneg chieftain, some scholars have doubted that the ritual execution known as the ‘blood eagle’ ever existed outside the fervid imaginations of Icelandic saga writers.
Yngvar Eymundsson’s disastrous expedition to the Caspian Sea is historical and well-documented. While the details in The Saga of Yngvar Wide-Farer are mostly fantasy, there exists a unique monument to the expedition: twenty-six inscribed memorial stones from Sweden which were erected in honor of local men who (to quote from one of them), “Went out far, valiantly, after gold, and gave meat to the eagles in the south, in Serkland.” We learn from the stones that the men hailed mostly from the Lake Malar region of Sweden and that roughly half were married men who left wives and children behind to mourn them. All sources agree that young Yngvar himself died. It appears that no one (excepting, of course, Odd) came back alive. The expedition’s date, its precise route, and purpose continue to be debated; I have chosen one possible version out of several and have telescoped the chronology a bit.
The Dnieper cataracts disappeared when hydro-electric dams constructed in the 1930’s raised the level of the river. Luckily, we have a Byzantine source which describes the passage of these rapids in vivid detail. In more recent times too, the Dnieper Cossacks used to shoot the rapids in vessels that differed little from the ancient strugi.
1 I have preferred to use the familiar Russian form of his name instead of the Ukrainian Volodymyr, which is undoubtedly more authentic. Either way, the nickname is Volodya.
2 Our principal Scandinavian source is the 13th century Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson. He wrote biographies of the kings of Norway in a work entitled Heimskringla. It can be read online at Project Gutenberg. (www.gutenberg.org). Click on “The Saga of Olaf Haraldson” and “The Saga of Harald Hardrada.” The principal Russian source is the Primary Chronicle. It can be read online at the University of Toronto’s Electronic Library of Ukrainian Literature (www.utoronto.ca/elul/English/218/PVL-selections.pdf). These two works are indispensable, and yet both also contain a great deal of pious myth-making.