VIKING GAMING PIECE
PERIOD: VIKING LOCATION: LINCOLNSHIRE, UK MATERIAL: LEAD
What a find.
It really isn’t everyday that a gaming piece pops up, and especially not one bearing such beautiful delicate braided decoration across it’s form. There is quite some archeological controversy over just what classes as a gaming piece rather than a weight as they can appear quite similar, however this one, bearing it’s decoration and classic hollow interior, ticks all the right boxes.
If you had told us when we headed out that we would be coming back with a gaming piece and not just any gaming piece but a VIKING gaming piece, well you wouldn’t have been able to get us into that field fast enough. Since our first discovery of a gaming piece (a lovely hollow Saxon example) you could say that we have been obsessed with them. There’s just something about their form and character that you feel really drawn to, they are such an intimate and charismatic object that would have passed through so many hands and treasured as part of its set. We have been lucky enough to find three examples now, all from completely different parts of our permission and all very different to each other, but this one might just be our favourite yet.
Since our first discovery of a gaming piece (a lovely hollow Saxon example) you could say that we have been obsessed with them.
We were very lucky coming back to our permission after a small christmas break to discover that the farmers had been hard at work and had turned over the fields, starting to prepare them for the spring drilling. Perfect conditions for us and time to get to work with a limited time until that seed goes down. This field which gave us our little gaming piece is one of the more challenging ones due to its vast scale, large soil mineralisation which makes the equipment, particularly the pinpointer, go crazy and huge power lines overhead which stretch across a vast proportion of the field, driving our Equinox 800 insane, but it has brought us some absolute treasures so it is well worth the battle, especially at a fresh turn of the plough.
One particular plague that does truly tip us over the edge in this field is the lead, the sheer vast amount of lead that covers almost every inch, but you have to dig it all, you never know which signal is going to be the artefact or lump and for us on that day, the Viking Gaming Piece. We love our lead artefacts at Roman Found and have had some stunning little items from a Lead Plague Cross to Lead Tokens and even Ampulla Fragments but Gaming Pieces are always our favourite.
Dating from 793 - 1066 AD our Gaming Piece has been identified as Viking, not a word that gets tossed around lightly by the Find Liaison Officers, and has most likely come from a Hnefatafl Set.
Hnefatafl was a Viking board game which was centered entirely around strategy, in the game a King and his defenders had to fight off two dozen attackers. Not too much is known about the exact workings of the game but there is evidence showing that the game was so popular and important to the Vikings that wherever they went they would carry their personal Hnefatafl sets with them too, and it’s highly likely that the gaming pieces would have been very treasured and personal to them.
Perfect conditions for us and time to get to work with a limited time until that seed goes down.
There are many examples where gaming pieces have popped up at Viking Burial sites, showing how deeply they were interconnected with the Viking way of life. It has been suggested that their inclusion in burials shows that they were important to their beliefs into the afterlife and that they would help prepare the dead for their journey after death. Some incredibly elaborate and detailed gaming pieces have been discovered, even ones made from swirled glass, so it is likely that the higher a status you had the more elaborate your gaming pieces would be as a reflection.
Hnefatafl is linked to Viking war and strategy and was most likely derived from their way of life so to play a good game of Hnefatafl you would have been a great Viking warrior. Indeed when Hnefatafl pieces and boards are found in ship burials they are normally buried with the leaders, the people with the most strategic importance.
The king and his defenders in the game are normally outnumbered two to one with the attackers being much greater in numbers, a similar situation to the Viking invasion perhaps where crews from boats would be facing an unknown number of attackers that would highly likely outnumber them. A game that could have been developed to prepare them for war, which would explain the evidence for its great importance to Viking Culture and Beliefs as it was so interconnected with real life. Your ability in Hnefatafl would have been incredibly important to your status in the Viking Community and it could have even been the way that Great Leaders were chosen.
So prevalent Hnefetafl was to Viking Life that it even appears in Viking Literature like in the 13th Century Tale: Hervör and Heidrek, Frithiof’s Saga. In this tale Odin (one of the Norse gods) asks this riddle:
“What women are they, warring together before their defenceless king; day after day the dark guard him, but the fair go forth to attack?”
In the 20th Century it was realised that this riddle is describing Hnefatafl, where the darker gaming pieces guard the king from the attack of the lighter pieces and not the game of chess which it was believed before. The game was so highly symbolic to the Vikings, appearing as important status symbols in burials and literature so to find an example of such an important and fascinating game from this period is just mind blowing.
Hnefatafl was eventually replaced by Chess, which by the middle ages was the most popular game played, and the knowledge of how to play Hnefatafl was gradually lost until all that is left behind is the gaming pieces that we can be lucky enough to find today.
