Death
Ivar disappears from the historic record sometime after 870. His ultimate fate is uncertain.
It is possible that Ivar may be identical to the Ímar, apparent ancestor of the Uí Ímair dynasty, whose death appears in the Annals of Ulster in 873:
Ímar, king of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain, ended his life.
The death of Ímar is also recorded in the Fragmentary Annals of Ireland under the year 873:
The king of Lochlainn, i.e. Gothfraid, died of a sudden hideous disease. Thus it pleased God.
In 1686, a farm labourer called Thomas Walker discovered a Scandinavian burial mound at Repton in Derbyshire close to a battle site where the Viking "Great Army" dispossessed the Mercian king Burgred of his kingdom. The number of partial skeletons surrounding the body, two hundred warriors and fifty women, would signify an extremely high status of the man buried there and it has been suggested that such a burial mound would be expected to be the last resting-place for a Viking of Ivar's reputation.
The identification of the king of Lochlainn as Gothfraid (i.e. Ímar's father) was added by a copyist in the 17th century. In the original 11th-century manuscript the subject of the entry was simply called righ Lochlann ("the king of Lochlainn"), which more than likely referred to Ímar, whose death is not otherwise noted in the Fragmentary Annals. The cause of death – a sudden and horrible disease – is not mentioned in any other source, but it raises the interesting possibility that the true provenance of Ivar's Old Norse sobriquet lay in the crippling effects of an unidentified disease that struck him down at the end of his life; though "sudden and horrible" death by any number of diseases was a common cause of mortality in the 9th century.
Read more about this topic: Ivar The Boneless
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Every American, to the last man, lays claim to a “sense” of humor and guards it as his most significant spiritual trait, yet rejects humor as a contaminating element wherever found. America is a nation of comics and comedians; nevertheless, humor has no stature and is accepted only after the death of the perpetrator.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“They are girls. Green girls.
Death and life is their daily work.
Death seams up and down the leaf.
I call the leaves my death girls.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)