Viking Chess or Hnefatafl

Long before chess reached the North, Vikings were hunched over hnefatafl, ‘the king’s table’. (Hnefi, ‘fist’, was the name of the king piece.) It is a game of unequal armies. One player starts in the center with a king and a small band of defenders, trying to get the king to safety at the board’s edge or corners. The other commands a larger force spread around the edges and tries to surround and capture the king. Boards came in several sizes, including 7×7, 9×9, 11×11 and 13×13. No rulebook survives from the Viking Age, so modern rules are educated reconstructions.

Sami Tablut

The Sámi, who lived alongside the Norse, played a close relative called tablut. It was still being played in 1732, when the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus recorded its rules in his Lapland journal (published later as Lachesis Lapponica).

Modern Adaptation

Linnaeus wrote the rules in Latin, which were incorrectly translated to English in the 1800s. The incorrect translation made the game much easier for the defending player. Modern players experimented with the rules to create a more balanced game, and a new translation helped clarify those rules in the 1900s.

Vikings and Play

It may be difficult to think of the Vikings as people who played games, but like any society, they had different forms of fun. The sagas record a ball game. The sagas mention dice games, and Viking chess was popular enough that some burial sites contained playing pieces and parts of boards.

Confusingly, the lawn game kubb, where players throw sticks to topple their opponents’ wooden blocks, is also marketed as ‘Viking chess’. Its Viking origin is a modern claim with no real evidence behind it.

Chess, itself, likely made its way to Scandinavia before the end of the Viking age. Some scholars believe its arrival sounded the death knell for Viking Chess, or Hnefatafl.