Hnefatafl final

As of my last update, pieces had been stained and I needed a bag and a board, which I had planned to combine.  It turned out that the goat hide I had for the bag was a bit too dark, so I took an evening to embroider a scrap of linen.


And here's a few close ups of pieces, with a Lego fig for scale.

The King piece, who is made of 3/4" dowel, stands a bit higher than his soldiers and has a more defined sword, cape and shield.




The last part is the documentation. Not my favorite part, but it's important.

Hnefatafl is a board game that was played in northern Europe, both during and before the Viking age.  While no complete accounting of the rules has been found from the time, the basic form they take has.  An attacking force of nearly twice the force of the defending is arrayed on the edges of the board, while the defending team surrounds their king in the center.  Attackers work to catch the king, while the defenders try to hustle him off the board.  Pieces move like chess rooks, and captures are by surrounding a piece on two sides.

I carved the regular pieces from ⅝” dowel and the king from a ¾” piece. The design is my own, and I tried to keep them visually distinct, as they started off the same color. Axes vs swords worked pretty well, but putting shields on the axemen's backs was better. They were still pretty indistinct, so it was time to break out the stain.  My original thought had been to mark the board game into the drawstring bag, but the goat hide I had was really a little too dark for the purpose, especially considering the low light conditions of a longhouse in the winter.  So I embroidered a 11x11 grid on a piece of linen. As long as it’s been moistened to help it flatten, it works fine and is as portable as I had wanted it to be.

The majority of the pieces found (and theorized to be from a tafl set) are either glass or bone.  Amber, bronze and walrus ivory also make appearances.  The boards that have been found are wood, whalebone and stone. The boards are highly decorated, and the pieces are well made in a stylized hemispheric form, and usually the king piece receives some special decoration.  In some cases, the board has holes into which the pieces would peg into.

I went with more realistic figures in my set because the wood I used for the project is easy to work.  Also, the viking age aesthetic prizes intricate and slightly crazy, which I think I managed to capture. I agree that the time and skill would have been more likely to be spent on better raw material, but we can’t all have a stash of walrus tusk in the garage.  As my camp gear improves, I will probably carve a board with twined animal decoration, and my pieces may have their bottoms drilled so I can improve their heft with some lead weights, but I’m happy with how this set turned out.