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:
“And anyone is free to condemn me to death
If he leaves it to nature to carry out the sentence.
I shall will to the common stock of air my breath
And pay a death tax of fairly polite repentance.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“At noon, you walk across a river. It is dry, with not this much water: it is just stones and pebbles. But it rains cats and dogs in the mountains, and towards afternoon, the water descends wildly and she ravages all in its path, the madwoman. That is how death comes. Without our expecting it, and we cannot do a thing against it, brothers.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.”
—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (b. 1926)