Ivar The Boneless - Death

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.