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Did the Anglo-Saxons Play Games of Chance? Some Thoughts on Old English Board Games

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Ian Payne
Ian Payne
Affiliation:
79 Foxhunter Drive, Oadby, Leicester LE2 5FH, UK. E-mail:.
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Abstract

H J R Murray, the distinguished board games historian, stated categorically in 1952 that the popular Germanic game of tæfl (more specifically referred to in a ninth- to twelfth-century Norse context as hnefatafl), a game entirely of skill, was the only board game played in Anglo-Saxon England. But Old English literary evidence might pose a challenge to Murray's thesis, and could be taken to suggest that the English also played games of chance (perhaps even tabula, an ancestor of backgammon) in the first millennium AD.

Type
Shorter Contributions
Information
The Antiquaries Journal , Volume 86 , September 2006 , pp. 330 - 345
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 2006

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References

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