Ívarr Magnesson

Ívarr Magnesson was always fascinated by the tales of the great inventors.  Too young and more than likely too small to join his parents and five older sisters on the family’s long ship expeditions, he spent his early years with his grandmother in the port city of Krakensborg.  During daily escapes from her cottage, little Ívarr would toddle down to the bustling waterfront and collect discarded bits of rope and ship pulleys for all his contraptions.  As time when on and his machines became more complex, the great long ship captains began affectionately calling him Ívarr the Inventor, a name which has followed him to this day.  At age ten, he so impressed the daring Sea Lord Ragnar the Rowdy that the old Viking tasked him with developing a more efficient way for catching the deadly, yet delicious, Scandinavian Sea Slug.  Up for the challenge, Ívarr designed a mechanical dredging net that was light enough to cast, yet strong enough to withstand the mollusks’ acidic excretions.

After several successful voyages, Ragnar returned to port with an over-abundance of sea slugs and a rather bedraggled, peculiar looking creature trapped in his nets.  Fearing that the beast’s pronged tail would damage the delicate webbing, he bundled the entire mess over to Ívarr’s makeshift workshop in his grandmother’s barn.  Once Ívarr untangled the knot, a greenish bluish grayish mass tumbled out.  And, after much cajoling, bits of fish, and cuddles, this mass turned out to be a Swedish Speartail Wyvern called Lucia—a name chosen because her frequent sneezes, brought on by a herring allergy (a staple of the Speartail diet), brightly lit up the winter’s sky.

As misfortune or fortune would have it, that winter was also the harshest and iciest that Krakensborg had seen in over nine hundred years.   The bitter frost killed 80% of the summer’s lingonberry harvest causing the Disastrous Lingonberry Famine of 1765.  The whole country was in danger of starvation, as its population required a healthy serving of the jam with every meal.  Determined to save everyone from imminent doom, Ívarr developed a high-speed, steam powered lingonberry processor that increased jam production 11-fold.  Heralded as “his greatest invention,” the Belching Berry Beater won Ívarr countless accolades, the Oar to the City, and a full scholarship to study at the Mouseion at the Great Library of Alexandria, where at age sixteen he became the youngest inductee of the Knights of Archimedes.

After graduation, Ívarr went on to develop hundreds of inventions.  As a ten-time recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Spectacular Innovation and a seven-time winner of the Leonardo da Vinci Visionary of the Year Prize, he became the most decorated inventor of all time.  As the Heron of Alexandria Professor of Engineering at the Mouseion, Ívarr now serves on the advisory board of the Collectors’ Consortium where he continues to hone the world’s brightest minds—several notable pupils and Consortium members include Daraja Obaje, Richard Gatling, Björn Vargsgåd, Fan-Hui, Stiig Lindström, and Alfred Nobel.  Ívarr’s hobbies include wyvern racing with Lucia, gorging himself on chocolate, and knitting.