Gogosz R., "Hver er sterkastr? " The Sports and Games of the Northmen in the Middle Ages. Role, Rules and Aspects: Study with the Special Focus on Saga-Age Iceland (original) (raw)
Related papers
For medieval Icelanders, horses were among the most important animals. It should come as no surprise, as they were used for transport, in pagan rites (hippomancy, funerals, sacred horses), eating, and also for sports. These sports were the horse-fights (hestavígs) and horse-racing (skeið). Reading the sagas, one can find a lot of references to horse-fighting. This sport was considered of such importance among medieval Icelanders that laws have been written down regarding this entertainment, yet there is no exact description of how such events were organized. Only by putting all the references together can one endeavor to explain what these horse-fights may have actually been like. In my paper I would like to present the basis for these horse-fights. Their terminology has been frequently misinterpreted, and no critical investigation yet exists into the staging and organization of such events, which would shed light on the meaning and role of this sport to medieval Icelanders. It will be shown that horse-fighting functioned not only as brutal entertainment in itself, but also played a social role in the broader context of inter-district assemblies.
Viking sports and fun – What they did to pass the time
Viking culture has been seen as violent, rough and uncultured. However, research and archaeological finds and research have revealed a sophisticated society with ample time to pursue entertainment activities during leisure time. This paper explores some of the sports and diversions pursued by adults during the Viking period.
Politics and Courtly Culture in Iceland, 1200-1700
La matière arthurienne tardive en Europe, 1270-1530. Late Arthurian Tradition in Europe, 2020
A chapter in La matière arthurienne tardive en Europe, 1270-1530. Late Arthurian Tradition in Europe, ed. Christine Ferlampin-Acher, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2020, 733-741.
New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the third volume of collected essays to appear in Islandica, the series inaugurated in 1908 by Halldór Hermannsson, first curator of the Fiske Icelandic Collection at Cornell University. This long-lived series in Icelandic and Norse Studies was founded with a bequest from Willard Fiske (1831-1904), far-faring and passionate collector of rare books and manuscripts and professor of North European Languages as well as Cornell's first university librarian and Gilded-Age man of letters. 1 Limiting oneself to Fiske's wide-ranging bibliophilic interests-indicated only in part by the most famous collection that bears his name-one would have to mention an array of subjects extending from Iceland to the Italy of Dante and Petrarch, to Rhaeto-Romanic language and literature, and (as another of his collections, housed at the National and University Library of Iceland, still attests) to chess. Fiske's desire to furnish an already rapidly expanding scholarly world with "an annual volume relating to Iceland and the [Fiske] Icelandic Collection" has been realized in diverse forms in the series' one-hundred-seven-year history: first, primarily as a venue for 1. The curious reader is invited to consult the online exhibition devoted to Fiske's life and work in 2005, The Passionate Collector: Willard Fiske and his Libraries, at http:// rmc.library.cornell.edu/collector/index.html. Kristín Bragadóttir has published an extensive study of Fiske's relationship with Iceland and the Icelanders in Willard Fiske: vinur Íslands og velgjörðamaður [friend and benefactor of Iceland] (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 2008), of which an English translation is forthcoming.
From Dróttinn to King: The Role of Hnefatafl as a Descriptor of Late Iron Age Scandinavian Culture
2013
Nothing invigorates nor expresses a culture quite like a national sport or game. These events could be viewed as outlets functioning not only as a means of entertainment, but as a manner through which competitors strive to sculpt their minds and bodies with the mentality, prowess, and raw strength that epitomise the ideals of the associated culture(s). The sports and games of a culture can lead to the creation and reinforcement of generalisations—thereby ultimately leading to a fabrication and proliferation of stereotypes. However, through careful observation of the rules, cultural ideas, and messages contained within these games, one may be able to see past the stereotypes and gain a glimpse of the true character of the associated culture. Using the relationship between the game of chess and medieval European culture as a comparison, this paper will examine the Iron Age Scandinavian board game of hnefatafl in order to dispel misconceptions and suggest an alternative, more constructive, means of describing Late Iron Age Scandinavian culture.
Viking Age Iceland: A Feuding Society
Viking Age Iceland: A Feuding Society, 2001
Yet, as Jesse Byock reveals in this deeply fascinating and important history, the society founded by Norsemen in Iceland was far from this picture. It was, in fact, an independent, almost republican Free State, without warlords or kings. Honour was crucial in a world which sounds almost Utopian today. In Jesse Byock’s words, it was like ‘a great village’: a self governing community of settlers, who adapted to Iceland’s harsh climate and landscape, creating their own society. Combining history and anthropology, this remarkable study explores in rich detail all aspects of Viking Age life: feasting, farming and battling with the elements, the power of chieftains and the church, marriage, the role of women and kinship. It shows us how law courts, which favoured compromise over violence, often prevented disputes over land, livestock or insults from becoming ‘blood feud’. In Iceland we can see a prototype democracy in action, which thrived for 300 years until it came under the control of the King of Norway in the 1260s. This was a unique time in history, which has long perplexed historians and archaeologists, and which provides us today with fundamental insights into sometimes forgotten aspects of western society. By interweaving his own original and innovative research with masterly interpretations of the Old Icelandic Sagas, Jesse Byock brilliantly brings it to life. Publisher: Penguin History, Penguin Books ISBN: 9780140291155
New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Old Norse–Icelandic literature that continue to kindle the scholarly imagination in the twenty-first century. The assembled authors examine the arrière-scène of saga literature; the nexus of skaldic poetry and saga narrative; medieval and post-medieval gender roles; and other manifestations of language, time, and place as preserved in Old Norse–Icelandic texts. This volume will be welcomed not only by the specialist and by scholars in adjacent fields but also by the avid general reader, drawn in ever-increasing number to the Icelandic sagas and their world. Table of Contents Preface; Jeffrey Turco, volume editor: Introduction; Andy Orchard: Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?; Richard L. Harris: “Jafnan segir inn ríkri ráð”: Proverbial Allusion and the Implied Proverb in Fóstbrœðra saga; Torfi H. Tulinius: Seeking Death in Njáls saga; Guðrún Nordal: Skaldic Poetics and the Making of the Sagas of Icelanders; Russell Poole: Identity Poetics among the Icelandic Skalds; Jeffrey Turco: Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics; Thomas D. Hill: Beer, Vomit, Blood and Poetry: Egils saga, Chapters 44-45; Shaun F. D. Hughes: The Old Norse Exempla as Arbiters of Gender Roles in Medieval Iceland; Paul Acker: Performing Gender in the Icelandic Ballads; Joseph Harris: The Rök Inscription, Line 20; Sarah Harlan-Haughey: A Landscape of Conflict: Three Stories of the Faroe Conversions; Kirsten Wolf: Non-Basic Color Terms in Old Norse-Icelandic
This study contends through a formal analysis of extant rules and material gaming pieces that the medieval board game hnefa-tafl served as an important example of cultural and historical record for the Icelandic Commonwealth. Due to the piecemeal and recondite nature of academic research concerning hnefa-tafl itself, an initial objective of this study is to propose a dice-based reconstruction that makes use of available archaeological and literary evidence originating from subsequent tafl games. Because detailed information about these descendant games survives in more complete fashion, the scant material relating to the rules and layout of hnefa-tafl found within earlier Icelandic sagas is supplemented in this diachronic study with conclusions drawn from later tafl games. Players must understand not only the logical rules of play, but also the cultural framework informing its representation. To this end, game mechanics and decision-making in hnefa-tafl are further explored through the cultural lens of saga literature, which serves as the principle source material for fully understanding how much of hnefa-tafl depended on player agency and to what end the incorporation of chance-based gameplay affected interpersonal relations between players. Evidence suggests that these interactions were characterised by an ex post facto distinction made from dice rolls distinguishing lucky and unlucky individuals, which in turn presupposed that fortune was inherent to the player as part of their personality, at once both the cause and the expression of socially recognised accomplishment or condemnation. Such fatalistic aspects inherent to tafl play are also identified in eschatological imagery recounting the development and demise of the Icelandic Commonwealth, which leads this study to conclude that hnefa-tafl constituted a mode of recollection specific to board games wherein societies invest material apparatus with connotations of their owners’ cultural identities.