The Ice Queen (44 page)

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.

As a boy, Bruce Macbain spent his days reading history and historical fiction and eventually acquired a master's degree in Classical Studies and a doctorate in Ancient History. As an assistant professor of Classics, he taught courses in Late Antiquity and Roman religion and published a few impenetrable scholarly monographs, which almost no one read. He eventually left academe and turned to teaching English as a second language, a field he was trained in while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Borneo in the 1960s.

Macbain is also the author of historical mysteries set in ancient Rome, (
Roman Games
, 2010, and
The Bull Slayer
, 2013) featuring Pliny the Younger as his protagonist. Following
Odin's Child
,
The Ice Queen
is the second in his Viking series,
The Odd Tangle-Hair Saga,