Iceland had no native indigenous population before European discovery and settlement by the Norse in the second half of the 9th century, approximately 874 CE. Now archaeologists have found a small round piece of sandstone carved with a picture of a Viking ship. “The stone was found at the archaeological site of Stöð in East Iceland in a longhouse that is believed to predate the permanent settlement of the island.” (Ciric 2023) This means, of course, that there should be no prehistoric rock art.
“The first exploratory digs at Stöð were made in 2015 and archaeologists have returned every summer since to continue excavating the site, where they first focused their efforts on a settlement-era longhouse. ‘The longhouse is among the largest found in Iceland, 31.4m [103 ft] long. In Scandinavia, only chieftains’ farms had longhouses larger than 28m [92 ft]. It is also the richest longhouse ever excavated in Iceland. We have found 92 beads and 29 silver objects, including Roman and Middle Eastern coins,’ Bjarni F. Einarsson told Iceland Review for a 2020 article on the archaeological site.” (Ciric 2023) This provides a striking illustration as to how cosmopolitan the Vikings really were. Even in this out-of-the-way place there were artifacts from varying cultures throughout much of the known world.
“What makes the site still more significant is that archaeologists discovered an even older longhouse underneath the settlement-era longhouse, estimated to date back to around 800 AD, some 75 years before permanent settlement of Iceland. The most striking feature of the older structure is the conspicuous absence of the bones of domesticated animals. ‘My theory is that the older longhouse was a seasonal hunting camp, operated by a Norwegian chief who outfitted voyages to Iceland to gather valuables and bring them back across the sea to Norway,’ Bjarni told Iceland Review. One of these valuables may have been walrus ivory: in 2019 DNA analyses and radiocarbon dating confirmed that Iceland was previously inhabited by a North Atlantic subspecies of walrus, now extinct.” (Ciric 2023)
Much of the
ivory used in Medieval Europe was walrus ivory supplied through trade with the
Vikings. “New finds of walrus bone and ivory in
early Viking Age contexts in Iceland suggest exploitation of nearby walrus for
meat, hide and ivory that appears to have driven local Icelandic walrus
populations to extinction.
Current evidence
suggests that walrus hunting and ivory extraction was a significant activity for early settlers in
Iceland, and was probably not limited only to the best-known areas of the
south-west coast.
The new excavations and
zooarchaeological work appear to support the notion of an initial settlement of
at least parts of Iceland driven and ‘financed’ by walrus hunting and
connections to Viking Age exchange networks.
As a preliminary
conclusion it seems that we can now refine the ‘trading hypothesis’ by
verifying or disproving that walrus ivory in north-west European exchange
networks may be Icelandic c. 850–1000 CE, but increasingly Greenlandic from
1000 CE onwards.” (Frei et al. 2015)
So Ciric (2023) is proposing that this earlier pre-colonization longhouse/hunting camp may have existed to hunt walrus ivory before the Iceland walrus was driven to extinction by overhunting.
But the
subject of this column is the small engraved piece of sandstone found in the
walls of the older longhouse.
“The small but remarkable sandstone featuring
a Viking ship with its sails unfurled was found in the walls of the older
longhouse, Bjarni told reporters. Such carvings of ships, made in bone, wood,
and stone, are fairly common artefacts in the Nordic countries, he stated, but
this is the first ever found in Iceland and is likely the oldest picture of any
kind ever found on the island.
This spring, archaeologists used survey equipment to scan a larger area around Stöð and found indications of still more structures and boat burial sites. While there is much that is unknown about the early settlement of Iceland, the amount of beads, coins, and silver found at Stöð certainly suggests significant wealth and trade.” (Ciric 2023)
Wherever they roamed, whether for trade, colonization, or raiding, Vikings carried with them an important element of their culture, the board game known as hnefaltafl.
"Over the past 150 years, excavators have unearthed large quantities of gaming material from Viking boat burials. Dating from the 7th to the 11th centuries, most of it consists of checker-like pieces constructed from glass, whale bone, or amber. These pieces range from ordinary discs to ornate figurines and are usually uniform in shape and size, save for one prominent king piece, known as the hnefi. The archaeologist Mark Hall recently chronicled the contents of 36 burials containing such pieces in a 2016 article for the European Journal of Archaeology. This material, he says, indicates the game was much more than a frivilous way to kill time between raids. 'Its presence in these burials suggests it was an aspect of everyday life that was desirable to see continued,' he says, as well as 'a significant element that helped define the status of the deceased." (Crown 2018) In other words hnefaltafl seems to have had a ritual or ceremonial element as well as just recreational. Between its recreational popularity, and its ritual/ceremonial importance it seems to have been ubiquitous in the Viking world.
"That archaeologists and game historians can confidently make such claims is a testimony to more than 100 years of painstaking research. Indeed, until the early 20th century, few scholars differentiated hnefatafl from other contemporary board games. Early published editions of the Sagas relied upon wildly disparate translations of medieval Iclandic texts,, with also confused the matter. Because the oldest extant copies of these documents often refer to the gam as 'Tafl' - a Germanic word denoting 'board' or table' - translators regularly mistook references to it for generic allusions to chess." (Crown 2018)
Early assumptions that hnefatafl somehow developed from contact with cultures that played chess have been proven wrong, indeed, some claim that the Viking game preceded chess. In any case, their origins are hard to pin down and they were played side-by-side in some cultures.
"Tafl games (pronounced [tavl], also known as hnefatafl games) are a family of ancient Northern European strategy board games played on a checkered or latticed gameboard with two armies of uneven numbers. Most probably they are based upon the Roman game Ludus latrunculorum." (Wikipedia)
So, we have a very early Viking residence in Icelend, apparently there some time before the actual period of settlement by Europeans, and in excavating it a small piece of sandstone was found hiddenn in the wall as it it were important enough to keep concealed. It is my suggestion that perhaps the small piece is a prized game piecer, and logically the game would have been hnefaltafl, the Viking board game. Now, being made from sandstone it would not have been valued so much for its material, but Vikings were very superstitious by today's standards. Maybe this piece was prized for the number of games it won, much like a boy playing marbles today prizes his winning shooter almost superstitiously.
NOTE: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.
REFERENCES:
Ciric, Jelena, 2023, Stone Carved With Viking Ship May Be Oldest Picture Ever Found in Iceland, 15 June 2023, https://www.icelandreview.com. Accessed online 17 June 2023.
Crown, Daniel, 2018, The Board Game at the Heart of Viking Culture, 26 June 2018, https://atlasobscura.com. Accessed online 24 June 2023.
Frei, Karin M. et al., 2015, Was it for walrus? Viking Age settlement and medieval walrus ivory trade in Iceland and Greenland, Taylor & Francis, ISSN 0043-8243. Accessed online 24 June 2023.
Wikipedia,
Tafl Games, https://en.wikipedia.org. Accessed online
25 June 2023.
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