Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Studies in the History of Daily Life 800-1600) 9782503588728, 2503588727

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Vanina Kopp and Elizabeth Lapina. Introduction
Katherine Forsyth and Mark A. Hall. Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games: Literary and Archaeological Evidence Combined
Paul Hardwick. ‘Turne Over the Leef’: Games and Interpretation on Misericords
Lena Asrih and Jennifer Garner. Gambling Miners
Akash Kumar. Chess and Cultural Crossings in Boccaccio
Daniel E. O’Sullivan. Visualizing Chess and Love in Les Eschéz d’Amours
Tülün Değirmenci. Games as a Sign of Social Status: Backgammon in Ottoman Literature and Visual Culture
İrvİn Cemİl Schick. Chess of the Gnostics: The Sufi Version of Snakes and Ladders in Turkey and India
Elina Gertsman. Playthings: Ivory on Ivory
Michael A. Conrad. The Playing Eye: On the Transfer of Game-Related Knowledge through Miniatures in Alfonso X’s Book of Games (1283/84)
Annemarieke Willemsen. Children’s Toys in Italy, 1350–1550
Louise Fang. The Printed Book and the Visual Culture of Chess in the Late Middle Ages: William Caxton’s 1483 Edition of The Game and Playe of Chess
Julie Mell. Graffiti as Gaming: Vikings at Play in the Orkney Islands
Walter Crist. Scratching the Surface: Graffiti Games in the Byzantine Empire

Citation preview

Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF DAILY LIFE (800–1600) Volume 8 General Editor Gerhard Jaritz, Central European University Editorial Board David Austin, University of Wales Lampeter Christian Krötzl, University of Tampere Svetlana Luchitskaya, Russian Academy of Sciences Anu Mänd, University of Tallinn Daniel Smail, Harvard University Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Edited by Vanina Kopp and Elizabeth Lapina

F

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

© 2020, Brepols Publishers n. v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2020/0095/182 ISBN 978-2-503-58872-8 E-ISBN 978-2-503-58873-5 10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.119616 ISSN 2565-8212 eISSN 2565-9561 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

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Introduction 13 Vanina Kopp and Elizabeth Lapina

Games and Society Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games: Literary and Archaeological Evidence Combined Katherine Forsyth and Mark A. Hall

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‘Turne Over the Leef’: Games and Interpretation on Misericords 77 Paul Hardwick Gambling Miners 93 Lena Asrih and Jennifer Garner Chess and Cultural Crossings in Boccaccio Akash Kumar

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Visualizing Chess and Love in Les Eschéz d’Amours 129 Daniel E. O’Sullivan Games as a Sign of Social Status: Backgammon in Ottoman Literature and Visual Culture Tülün Değirmenci

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Chess of the Gnostics: The Sufi Version of Snakes and Ladders in Turkey and India İrvin Cemil Schick

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Materiality of Games Playthings: Ivory on Ivory Elina Gertsman

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The Playing Eye: On the Transfer of Game-Related Knowledge through Miniatures in Alfonso X’s Book of Games (1283/84) 237 Michael A. Conrad Children’s Toys in Italy, 1350–1550 Annemarieke Willemsen

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The Printed Book and the Visual Culture of Chess in the Late Middle Ages: William Caxton’s 1483 Edition of The Game and Playe of Chess 289 Louise Fang Graffiti as Gaming: Vikings at Play in the Orkney Islands Julie Mell

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Scratching the Surface: Graffiti Games in the Byzantine Empire Walter Crist

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1. Joust between Tristan and Palamedes. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. fr. 99, fol. 92r, 1463. 13 Figure 2.1. Board layout for alea evangelii. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 122, fol. 5v, ‘The Corpus Irish Gospels’.  35 Figure 2.2. Selection of glass gaming pieces from a set of twenty-four found, together with three dice and the remains of a wooden board with ornate handles, in a furnished cremation grave, c. 10 bce, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England.  38 Figure 2.3. Glass domed playing piece from Dundurn, Perthshire, Scotland.  38 Figure 2.4. Selection of items from hoard of walrus-ivory gaming pieces from Lewis, Scotland, twelfth century.  48 Figure 2.5. Anthropomorphic stone gaming pieces, Shetland, fifth–seventh centuries. Left: Mail. Right: Scalloway. 51 Figure 2.6. Pegged wooden gaming piece in the shape of a bird, possibly a raven. Later Iron Age or Roman period, Braughing, Hertfordshire, England. 54 Figure 2.7. Bone playing pieces with decorative copper alloy fittings, including pins for use on a perforated board. Viking Age, Lough Sewdy, Co. Westmeath, Ireland.  58 Figure 2.8. Two of the gilt ivory gaming pieces from mound grave 1, Fyrislund, Uppland, Sweden.  58 Figure 2.9. Carved yew gaming board from Ballinderry crannog, Co. Offaly, Ireland, tenth century.  60 Figure 2.10. Romano-Celtic mask puzzle padlock (working replica): open; securing a leather pouch; closed shackle.  64 Figure 3.1. Ball game. Gloucester Cathedral, fourteenth century.  79 Figure 3.2. Dice players. Ely Cathedral, sixteenth century.  81 Figure 3.3. A game of tables. Manchester Cathedral, sixteenth century.  83 Figure 3.4. A game of tables. Windsor, St George’s Chapel, fifteenth century.  84 Figure 3.5. A game with dice and balls or tokens. Gloucester Cathedral, fourteenth century.  86 Figure 4.1. Wooden bowling game of Altenberg. Deutsches BergbauMuseum Bochum, thirteenth century.  95 Figure 4.2. Stone discs of Altenberg. Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, thirteenth century. 99 Figure 4.3. Scribbled dice in the mining law of Massa Marittima. Firenze, Archivio di Stato. Statutum Comunis et Populi civitatis Masse, n. 4: Ordinamenta facta per commune Masse super arte ramerie et argenterie, fol. 81v, 1322–1325. 103

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Figure 5.1. Illustration of Filocolo’s approach to Sadoc, the guardian of the tower in Boccaccio’s early prose romance Filocolo. UB Kassel Ms. poet. et roman. 3, fol. 143v. Fifteenth century.  Figure 5.2. Illustration of the chess game between Filocolo and Sadoc, complementing what is by far the lengthiest description of the series of games within the Floire and Blanchefleur tradition. UB Kassel Ms. poet. et roman. 3, fol. 144r. Fifteenth century.  Figure 5.3. Detail of illustration of the chess game between Anichino and Beatrice in Decameron 7.7. Detail of Paris, BNF Arsenal 5070, fol. 260v. Fifteenth century.  Figure 5.4. Detail of illustration of the chess game between Anichino and Beatrice in Decameron 7.7. Paris, BNF ms. ital. 63, fol. 221r. Fifteenth century.  Figure 6.1. Les Eschéz d’Amours Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Oc 66 (MS D), fol. 1r SLUB Dresden / Digital Collections / Mscr. Dresd. Oc. 66. Fifteenth century.  Figure 6.2. Les Eschéz d’Amours Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Oc 66 (MS D), fol. 22r. SLUB Dresden / Digital Collections / Mscr. Dresd. Oc. 66. Fifteenth century.  Figure 6.3. Les Eschéz d’Amours Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Oc. 66 (MS D), fol. 24v. Fifteenth century.  Figure 6.4. Les Eschéz d’Amours Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Oc. 66 (MS D), fol. 27v. Fourteenth century.  Figure 6.5. Chess diagram from Venice, Marciana fr. app. 23, fol. 66r. Fifteenth century.  Figure 7.1. A backgammon set, twentieth century. Private Collection.  Figure 7.2. An Ottoman coffeehouse, Album, late sixteenth century, Dublin Chester Beatty Library, T. 439, fol. 9a.  Figure 7.3. Backgammon players, Nihal-Mural Sungur Bursa Collection, c. 1900.  Figure 7.4. Costume Album, mid-seventeenth century, Bologna, Bologna Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio, A 365, fol. 282.  Figure 7.5. Şehnâme-i Türkî by Medhî, 1620, Uppsala University Library, O. Celsing 1, fol. 1b–2a.  Figure 8.1. Indo-Muslim gameboard, Delhi or Ajmer, c. 1815. Accession no. EA2007.2.  Figure 8.2. Indo-Muslim gameboard, Delhi-Agra or Lahore, c. 1850. Collected and donated by Lt. Col. R. C. Lawrence. Accession no. 1951.995.  Figure 8.3. Ottoman gameboard, printed by chromolithography, Istanbul, c. 1880.  Figure 8.4. Manuscript Ottoman gameboard, Istanbul, c. 1900.  Figure 8.5. Manuscript Ottoman gameboard, Istanbul, c. 1900. 

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Figure 8.6. Turkish gameboard, Istanbul, 1948–1949. Calligraphy by Mustafa Halim Özyazıcı, illumination by Muhsin Demironat, snakes by Léopold Lévy.  Figure 9.1. Ivory mirror case with a couple playing chess, Paris, 1325–1350, diameter: 102 mm.  Figure 9.2. Saint Hedwig worshipping images of saints and of the Virgin and Child, Silesia, 1353. The J. Paul Getty Museum, ms. Ludwig XI 7, fol. 46v.  Figure 9.3. Elephant and his handlers, from the so-called ‘Charlemagne’s Chess Set’, Salerno or Amalfi, Italy, c. 1075–1200, BNF, Paris. Elephant ivory, traces of gilding and red polychrome, 11.7 cm.  Figure 9.4. Fountain of Youth, The Capture of the Unicorn; the Elephant with a Castle Upon Its Back, from a Casket with Scenes from Courtly Romances, 1330–1350 or later, France, Lorraine (?), ivory Overall: 9.8 × 25.9 × 1 cm.  Figure 9.5. Christ’s body as a parchment charter, from the Carthusian Miscellany in Northern English, including an epitome of Mandeville’s travels, Northern England, 1425–1475, British Library, ms. Add. 37049, fol. 23.  Figure 9.6. Panel with Hunting Scenes, c. 1350, Paris, France, ivory, 4 5/16 × 12 1/8 × 3/16 in.  Figure 10.1. ‘Arab men playing chess and consulting a textbook on the game’, Alfonso X, Libro de acedrex, dados e tablas, Escorial, MS T-I-6, fol. 14r, c. 1283/84.  Figure 10.2. ‘Four men playing the Chess of the Four Seasons’, Alfonso X, Libro de acedrex, dados e tablas, Escorial, MS T-I-6, fol. 88v., with lines of different colours added by the author indicating the typical compositional spaces of the game miniatures included to the book, c. 1283/84.  Figure 10.3. ‘Tabular representations of two chess problems, with the names of chess pieces in black and red ink’, Nicolas de Nicolai or Boncompagno da Signa (?), Bonus Socius, problems 13 and 14.  Figure 10.4. ‘Painted representation of a chess problem decorated with gold leaf, tendrils and droleries’, Nicolas de Nicolai (?), Traité du jeu des échecs, MS BnF Latin 10286, fol. 4r, c. 1300–1380.  Figure 10.5. ‘Two players at tables’, Codex Buranus, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich (BSB), MS Clm 4660, fol. 91v, c. 1230 (with additions until the second half of the fourteenth century).  Figure 10.6. ‘Two chess players’, Ḥadīt Bayâd wa Riyâd, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Arab. 368, fol. 31r, thirteenth century, Seville (?). Table 10.1. Tabular overview showing the structure of the Libro de acedrex, dados e tablas.  Table 10.2. Tabular overview showing the image types in chronological order as they appear in the Libro de acedrex, dados e tablas. 

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Figure 11.1. Frieze with boy holding whirligig, from Palazzo Chiaramonti at Palermo, early sixteenth century. Palermo, Galleria Regionale della Sicilia, inv. no. 98.  266 Figure 11.2. Putto with whirligig in a painted loggia, Pietro Venale, 1550–1555. Roma, Villa Giulia.  266 Figure 11.3. Maiolica dish with putto holding ball, Gubbio, c. 1530. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. BK-17308.  268 Figure 11.4. Fresco with boy riding hobby horse and girl holding pullcart and doll, flanking the Moon, 1361. Padova, Chiesa degli Eremitani.  269 Figure 11.5. Cancer in Liber Physiognomia with boy riding hobby horse and girl holding pull-cart and doll, flanking the Moon, c. 1440. Modena, Biblioteca Estense, ms. a.W.8.20, fol. 4r.  270 Figure 11.6. Fresco with Moon, Old Age, Mars, and Infancy riding hobby horse, early fifteenth century. Foligno, Palazzo Trinci, Sala delle Arti Liberali e dei Pianeti.  272 Figure 11.7. Birth tray with boy holding pinwheel and riding toy, Bartolomeo di Fruosino, Florence, 1430s. Isola Bella, Collezione Borromini, unknown inv. no. 275 Figure 11.8. Maiolica dish with putto riding hobby horse, Pesaro or Venice, 1510–1520. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, inv. no. WA1899. CDEF.C515.275 Figure 11.9. Putti spinning tops in manuscript margin, attributed to Francesco d’Antonio del Chierico, after 1455. Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. Lat. 224, fol. 2r.  277 Figure 11.10. Maiolica relief with playing putti, one on hobby horse, 1540. Rimini, Tempio Malatestiano.  279 Figure 11.11. Painting with various toys, Bernardino Detti, Madonna della Pergola, Pistoia, 1523. Pistoia, Museo Civico, inv. no. 42. 280 Figure 11.12. Detail of Fig. 11.11 showing two rattles.  281 Figure 11.13. Detail of Fig. 11.11 showing boy with whirligig and girl holding rag doll.  282 Figure 11.14. Wooden spinning tops, excavated in the centre of Alghero (Sardinia), fifteenth century. Alghero, Museo Archeologico della Città di Alghero, showcase 14.  283 Figure 12.1. A German chess board from the late sixteenth century. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 291 Figure 12.2 A knight. William Caxton’s The Game and Playe of Chesse, 1483. 293 Figure 12.3 A knight. An early sixteenth century German chess piece. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 293 Figure 13.1. ‘Interior View of Maeshowe’ Farrer, Notice of Runic Inscriptions (1862), Pl. II.  300 Figure 13.2. Aerial view of Maeshowe, Edinburgh, Historic Environment Scotland, DP 273441.  304

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Figure 13.3. General View of Maeshowe from N.E. Farrer, Notice of Runic Inscriptions (1862), Pl. II.  304 Figure 13.4. Maeshowe – cross sections and ground plan drawn by H. Dryden, Edinburgh, Historic Environment Scotland (Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Collection), DP 150448. 1861–1866. 306 Figure 13.5. Cross below inscription no. 3.  308 Figure 13.6. Crosses encircling inscription no. 17, Farrer, Notice of Runic Inscriptions, (1862), Pl. IX.  308 Figure 13.7. Inscription no. 5: Vémundr reist (Vémundr carved).  309 Figure 13.8. Type 1 graffiti — self-reflexive.  310 Figure 13.9. Type 2 graffiti — performative.  311 Figure 13.10. Decoding twig runes. Example taken from Farrer, Notice of Runic Inscriptions (1862), Pl. XI.  312 Figure 13.11. Above: Disguised runes, Lithograph No. 22. Below: Otter or dog, Lithograph No. 23. Farrer, Notice of Runic Inscriptions (1862), Pl. XI.  312 Figure 13.12. Type 3 graffiti – place and space.  314 Figure 13.13. Serpent knot carving located on north-east elevation at XXVI (see Fig. 13.9), Edinburgh, Historic Environment Scotland, SC 1330895.315 Figure 13.14. Dragon carving located on north-east elevation at XXV (see Fig. 13.9), Edinburgh, Historic Environment Scotland, SC 1330893.  315 Figure 13.15. Spatial placement of inscriptions nos 25–28.  316 Figure 13.16. Maeshowe interior (1875).  320 Figure 14.1. Two pente grammai boards in the third intercolumniation on the step and stylobate of the Theodosian Basilica of Hagia Sophia.  337 Figure 14.2. Drawings of two double pente grammai games from the elite residence at Salamis/Constantia.  342 Figure 14.3. Merels game boards on the balustrade of the west gallery of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.  346

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Introduction

Figure 1.1. Joust between Tristan and Palamedes, 1463. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. fr. 99, fol. 92r. © Bibliothèque nationale de France. Vanina Kopp.    Deutsches Historisches Institut, [email protected] Elizabeth Lapina.    University of Wisconsin-Madison, [email protected] Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. by Vanina Kopp and Elizabeth Lapina, HDL 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020) pp. 13-29 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.120701I

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Looking at the illumination on a page of Roman de Tristan, executed by Évrard d’Espingues in 1463, many medieval readers would be able to identify Palamedes, son of a ‘Saracen’ sultan of Babylon, as the knight wearing a black and white pattern on his coat of arms (Fig. 1.1).1 At least some would go a step further and engage in a playful interaction with the image, interpreting the codes hidden within and unravelling levels of meaning. They would identify the pattern on the coat of arms as resembling a chessboard, recollect that the game of chess, like Palamedes himself, came to Western Europe from the Muslim world, remember that the ability to play chess was one of the identifying markers of aristocrats, and recall comparisons between chess and combat. Alternatively, or in addition, they would remember another tradition, according to which Palamades was a Greek warrior who invented dice and board games during the siege of Troy. The presence of the woman in the scene, Queen Yseut, would bring a further assortment of associations having to do with chess, the game of love and the norms of comportment in relations between the genders prescribed to members of courtly community. It is important to note that the image did not only reflect these different meanings but participated in creating and transmitting them. The ability of visual culture to say / do a lot with little, all the while engaging in an often playful interaction with the viewer / user is the main subject of the present volume.

Historiography As Johan Huizinga highlighted in his seminal study Homo ludens (1938), play is a constant in the history of human civilization. In fact, readily found in the animal world, it both predates civilization and is a fundamental part of the civilizing process. Unsurprisingly, Huizinga’s definition of medieval ‘ludus’ (‘play’) is broad: ‘play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life”’.2 Most scholars today distinguish between the broader ‘play’ and the narrow ‘game’ (one should note, however, that this applies, above all, to scholars working in English, since many languages have only one word for both, such as ‘jeu’ in French, ‘Spiel’ in German, ‘игра’ in Russian, ‘oyun’ in Turkish, etc.).3 The difference between the two is not easy to pin down. Serina Patterson provides an excellent working definition: ‘Games are designed experiences; they model behavior and imply intent from players (those who participate).

1 On this image, see Pastoureau, L’art de l’héraldique, p. 199. 2 Huizinga, Homo ludens, p. 28. 3 Kendrick, ‘Games Medievalists Play’.

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Unlike unstructured, freeform play… games have identifiable rules within a contained system. They require varying degrees of abstract thought, cognitive representation, skill, imagination, and an understanding of rules’.4 Thus, according to Patterson, while both humans and animals engage in play, only humans can play games. In demonstrating how ‘ludus’ permeates society, Huizinga paid little attention to games narrowly defined. In his Man, Play, and Games (1958), Roger Caillois was one of the first to address this lacuna. He made a bold argument that, in order to understand a society, one should look at its games: ‘It is not absurd to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there. In fact, if games are cultural factors and images, it follows that to a certain degree a civilization and its content may be characterized by its games’.5 With rare exceptions, medievalists have taken more than two decades to heed Caillois’ call. Since the 1980s, under the auspices of cultural turn, and especially in the 2010s, the number of publications on medieval play in general and on medieval games in particular has increased exponentially.6 This development coincided with and benefited from the remarkable expansion of the fields of theatre studies7 and sports history.8 The last thirty or forty years witnessed both a growing variety of evidence employed and of approaches to this evidence. Scholars have examined the seemingly well-known games, such as chess and tournaments, from new angles.9 Children’s and adolescents’ play has begun to receive their due as a way to transmit knowledge from one generation to another, to channel violence and to integrate young people into adult world.10 Scholars have addressed the potential of play to give structure to the agonistic desire to prove oneself against another.11 They have re-evaluated Mikhail Bakhtin’s

4 Patterson, Games and Gaming, p. 7. 5 Caillois, Man, Play, and Games. 6 The first issue of a specialized review, Ludica. Annali di storia e civiltà del gioco, came out in 1995. For some general monographs and edited volumes on games, in addition to those cited elsewhere in our Introduction, see Hardwick, The Playful Middle Ages, Mehl, Les jeux et les hommes; Mehl, Les Jeux au Royaume de France; Favreau and others, Jeux, sports et divertissements au Moyen Âge. For games in the early modern period see, among others, Levy, Playthings in Early Modernity. 7 Lavéant, Un théâtre des frontières; Bouhaïk-Gironès, Les clercs de la Basoche; Runnalls, ‘Medieval trade guilds’; Lalou, ‘Les cordonniers metteurs en scène’. 8 von Mallinckrodt and Schattner, Sports and Physical Exercise; McClelland, Body and Mind; Carter, Medieval Games; Henricks, Disputed Pleasures; Carter, ‘Study of Medieval Sports’. 9 On chess see Murray, History of Chess; Eales, Chess; Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen; O’Sullivan, Chess in the Middle Ages; Adams, Power Play; Constable, ‘Chess and Courtly Culture’. On tournaments see Fleckenstein, Das ritterliche Turnier im Mittelalter; Barthélemy, ‘Les origines du tournoi chevaleresque’. 10 Caflisch, Spielend lernen; Aceto and Kopp, Jeux éducatifs et saviors ludiques dans l’Europe medievale; Taddei, Fête, jeunesse et pouvoirs; Rizzi, Statuta de ludo; Reid, ‘The Triumph of the Abbey of the Conards’. 11 Bougard, Le Jan, and Lienhard, Agôn.

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famous interpretation of play, based on his study of the works by François Rabelais, as a temporary subversion of established order and now tend to consider the ‘carnavalesque’ not as a conflict between ‘popular’ and ‘official’ cultures, but as a way to create shared moments / spaces for the entire community.12 Incidentally, Rabelais is also at the centre of scholarly attention in game studies due to a list of 217 games, found in his The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel. Scholars have tried to trace the origins of many of these games to the medieval period, which provides further proof of the continuities of gaming cultures between the medieval and the early modern period.13 Bans on games have turned out to have a long and revealing history, as at different moments, both secular and ecclesiastical authorities forbade or discouraged different games and practices associated with games and, more broadly, play for a variety of reasons.14 At the same time, recent studies have uncovered play in ecclesiastical spaces, such as, for example, in monastic cloisters, where monks played tennis, a game with complex rules, which made it suitable for edification not only of the body, but also of the spirit.15 They have examined play as a vehicle for the sacred, especially in the context of lay religious devotion of the later Middle Ages.16 Finally, scholars inquired into the functions of games in the context of crosscultural or interfaith relations, especially between Christians and Muslims.17 In short, recent research demonstrates that games were much more than staples of ‘carefree childhood’, ‘leisure’ or ‘entertainment’, which is how Western societies often view today’s games.18 Rather, as key expressions of

12 Бахтин, Творчество Франсуа Рабле; Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. For a critical re-evaluation of the work, see Bouhaïk-Gironès, ‘De l’usage de Bakhtine en histoire medieval’. See also Le Goff and Schmitt, Le charivari; Zemon-Davis, ‘The Reasons of Misrule’; Richard, ‘Le jeu des aveugles et du cochon’; Humphrey, The Politics of Carnival; Reid, ‘Carnival in Rouen’. 13 Rabelais, Gargantua, chapter XXII, pp. 58–63; on the possible identification of games see Mehl, Jeux au royaume de France, pp. 492–94. Interestingly, many later editors did not see Rabelais’ list as ‘fixed’. As observed by Bakhtin, many editions of Gargantua, in different countries, extended the litany by adding other games (Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 231–32). 14 Rizzi, Statuta de ludo; Esders, ‘Der Klerus und das Spiel im kirchlichen und weltlichen Recht’. 15 On games within the context of Christianity see Gillmeister, ‘Chaucer’s Monk’; Sonntag, ‘A Matter of Definition?’; Sonntag, Religiosus ludens; Knäble, Eine tanzende Kirche; Hall, ‘Where the Abbot Carries Dice’ and Hall, ‘Ecclesia Ludens’. 16 See, for example, Hoogvliet, ‘Metaphorical Images of the Sacred Workshop’; Gros, Le poète, la Vierge et le prince du Puy. 17 Akasoy, ‘The Influence of the Arabic Tradition of Falconry and Hunting on Western Europe’; Constable, ‘Chess and Courtly Culture’; Lapina, ‘Gambling and Gaming in the Holy Land’; Kopp, ‘Aachen, Baghdad, Constantinople’; Fenech Kroke, ‘Ludic Marginalities’. 18 It is worth noting that the concepts of ‘childhood’, ‘leisure’, and ‘entertainment’ had dramatically different definitions in pre-modern times.

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cultural, societal and even religious norms, games were an integral part and an organizing principal of medieval and early modern world.19

Description of the Volume The present volume focuses, albeit not exclusively, on what we call ‘table-top’ games.20 These games, to use Roger Caillois’ classification, could belong to the group that had to do with agôn (when players put their skills to the test) or with alea (when players have no control over the outcome).  Medieval typology of games was behind our decision to impose this particular limitation on the material: the introduction to arguably the most famous medieval work on games, Libro de acedrex, dados et tablas, completed in 1283, separates ‘games’ into three types, depending on the player’s position: on horseback, on foot, or sitting down. The Libro explains the advantages of the latter type of games over the other two: games played sitting down were readily available to women, old men, prisoners, captives and sailors.21 Variations on this classification of games have survived into the early modern era. For example, in 1531, Thomas Elyot wrote about games ‘wherein is no bodily exercise’.22 The volume will attempt to draw a panorama of games played in a broad geographical area ranging from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula. We have also included three contributions that deal with artefacts that are not Western European in origin, but Byzantine, Ottoman, and Indo-Muslim. While most chapters focus on the medieval period, the present volume includes material from the later period as well, thus challenging the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, which is largely artificial considering that the commonalities between the two are more numerous than the differences. The division between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is especially questionable for areas outside of Western Europe, which three of our contributors discuss.23 One of the articles, by İrvin Cemil Schick, goes even further by examining a modern game that traces its mythical origins to the Middle Ages.

19 Kopp, ‘Sacred, Serious, Subversive’; Burke, ‘The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe’; for an anthropological approach, see Hamayon, Jouer. 20 This name is admittedly misleading, since during the period in question, even more so than today, people played games in a variety of setting that did not involve a table. 21 Alfonso X’s Book of Games, translated by Sonja Musser Golladay, [last accessed 12 December 2018]. 22 Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (London, 1531), quoted in Fang’s chapter in the present volume. 23 For one of the recent and most vocal standpoints on Westeren Europe, see Le Goff, Faut-il vraiment découper l’histoire en tranches? For a non-Western perspective, see Bauer, Warum es kein islamisches Mittelalter gab. On games between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, more specifically see Aceto and Lucioli, Giocare tra Medioevo ed età moderna.

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The second limit that we impose on the evidence is our focus on visual culture associated with games. Visual culture is central to the study of the Middle Ages for a variety of reasons.24 W. J. T. Mitchell defined it as ‘the study of visual perception and representation, especially the social construction of the field of visibility and (equally important) the visual construction of the social field’.25 Thus, game-related images and objects both reflected and shaped gaming culture. They reveal why, where, when, with whom, etc. people played games and also what meanings medieval men and women gave to games in a variety of different contexts.26 Finally, images and objects that have to do with games functioned as a medium to discuss ‘serious’ subjects, be it war or love, politics or theology. The chapters that make up the present volume examine two types of evidence: (1) representations of games and (2) material artefacts that have to do with games, such as game boards and pieces. In Mitchell’s classification, both fall under the rubric of ‘graphic images’ (although several contributors also deal, in greater or lesser depth, with ‘verbal images’).27 Although one looks at representations of games, but plays with game boards and pieces, the difference between two types of evidence is insignificant. After all, visual culture perceives the exchanges between images and the people who encounter them as ‘interactive and dynamic’.28 It shifts its focus from the images to the people and the act of their encounter with the images. To quote Jamal J. Elias, ‘rather than possessing a transparent meaning as “natural sign”, visual images are somewhat opaque and yield their meaning not through looking at them directly but through observing those for whom they hold meaning’.29 In the case of many of the representations of games examined in the present volume, encounter with them was ludic. For example, one of the contributors, Paul Hardwick, remarks that an examination of carved misericords, only visible after turning up the seat, involved an element of chance and surprise, just like many games.30 While our focus is on what we would call ‘table-top’ games, it was not our intention to ignore other types of games entirely.31 On the contrary, we

24 For instance, relationship between images and the sacred played a key role in theological conversations both in Western and Eastern Christianity during this period (Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte; Camille, The Gothic Idol; Schmitt, ‘La question des images’). For images and Islam see Elias, Aisha’s Cushion. For more general discussion of images in the medieval period see Schmitt, Le corps des images; Schmitt, ‘L’historien et les images’. 25 Mitchell, Image Science, p. 6. 26 Of course, one cannot assume that images are faithful representations of actual practices of playing games. 27 Mitchell, Iconology, p. 10. 28 Horstkotte, ‘Visuality and Visual Culture’, p. 299. 29 Elias, Aisha’s Cushion, pp. 20–21. 30 See Hardwick’s chapter in this volume. 31 See above n. 20.

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wanted the reader to get a glimpse of the world beyond games that one played ‘while sitting down’. Thus, where the material warranted it, the contributors to this volume have included discussions of physical contests (Paul Hardwick); bowling (Lena Asrih and Jennifer Garner); children’s toys (Annemarieke Willemsen); and even carving graffiti on the wall of a cave ( Julie Mell).

Games and Society Two themes dominate the volume. One finds them in all of the chapters, albeit in different proportions. The first theme has to do with the place of games in society and their roles in responding to — and influencing — power dynamics, gender relations and religious practices. Medieval and early modern games could be, at once, an egalitarian and an elitist past time. Although everyone and anyone played games, the way that one played roughly corresponded to one’s place within society. Familiarity with certain games was a marker of status. Different games could be the most prestigious in different contexts. As Tülün Değirmenci demonstrates, in the Sassanian Empire, ability to play both chess and backgammon was a necessary component of a nobleman’s upbringing. In the Ottoman Empire, however, chess retained its high status, while backgammon acquired a reputation as a pleasurable but meaningless way to bide time. One’s game board and pieces could also be important markers of status. The material used and the quality of workmanship made some of the artefacts accessible to many and others limited to the elite few. On one end of the spectrum, game boards carved onto slabs of stone in public places, examined by Walter Crist, by their very nature did not even have an obvious owner. On the other end, expensive game boards and pieces were precious heirlooms that one passed on from one generation to the next. Wherever it was played, chess was predominantly an elite game. This was because of the relative complexity of the paraphernalia required for playing the game, as well as because of allegorical meanings, often having to do with war, attached to chess. In this context, as discussed by Louise Fang, William Caxton’s decision to translate Jacobus de Cessolis’s fourteenth century treatise on chess, Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium super ludo scacchorum (Book of the Customs of Men and the Duties of Nobles or the Book of Chess), from Latin into English was remarkable. The two editions of The Game and Playe of Chess, the first published in 1474 and another in 1483, aimed no longer at an elite, but at a ‘middle-class’ public. Especially in the second edition, with its additional twenty-three woodcut illustrations, sophisticated imagery associated with chess, hereto only accessible to those who could afford luxury boards and pieces, became accessible to those who could only afford to play with the crudest of pieces. Thus, Caxton made the metaphoric world of chess available to the wider public.

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If Caxton’s The Game and Playe of Chess, following Cessolis, used chess to comment upon society, Eschéz d’Amour, a late fourteenth-century allegory discussed by Daniel E. O’Sullivan, relied on chess to put forward a lesson on moral values, extolling the primacy of reason over sensuality. Thereby, both works have to do with the metaphorical and allegorical world of chess, which is only tangentially related to chess as an actual game. However, the division of games into ‘aristocratic’ and ‘popular’ has its limitations. If we are to trust the sources, it was possible for members representing different strata of society to play together. Katherine Forsyth and Mark Hall mention an early Irish tale, where the hero plays a game against his charioteer. Akash Kumar analyses an episode from Boccaccio’s Filocolo, where a prince plays a game against a guardian of a castle. In his examination of game boards carved in public places, Walter Crist argues: ‘By providing an acceptable mechanism through which people are able to act across a suite of social boundaries (e.g. socio-economic, ethnic, religious, kinship), games allow people to negotiate their identities vis-à-vis other individuals with whom they have no previous relationship’. At the same time, this does not mean that players forgot about their difference in status when sitting down to play a game. For instance, according to one eleventh-century Persian text discussed by Tülün Değirmenci, the socially superior player of backgammon was supposed to roll the dice first. Moreover, ‘aristocratic’ or ‘popular’ cultures were not homogeneous, even during the same period and in, more or less, the same location. Lena Asrih and Jennifer Garner, for example, refer to the thesis that medieval miners — who had more spare cash than, for example, peasants — seem to have developed their own patterns of gaming and gambling. Not only was the choice of games significant, but also the location where one played them. Many games took place under the gaze of spectators and, thereby, became performances. Libro de acedrex dados e tablas depicts a wide variety of setting, including a public bath, a gambling house and a pharmacist’s shop. Similarly, Walter Crist describes a variety of public spaces where one finds carved game boards: stadiums, theatres, baths, agoras, basilicas. Tülün Değirmenci focuses on the custom of playing games, especially backgammon, in coffeehouses, a staple of Ottoman social life. İrvin Schick writes about the game of Snakes and Ladders played in dervish lodges. On some occasions, however, games could become intimate affairs involving just two people. When looking at representations of such games, the viewer becomes a voyeur. Some representations of games emphasize the tension between private and public realms. For instance, one of the illustrations of Eschéz d’Amour features a man and a woman playing chess, ostensibly alone; several onlookers, however, peer at the players through the holes in or around the hedge. In the Middle Ages, most games, including chess, were not only public affairs, but also involved stakes, which undoubtedly increased the chances of the loser resorting to violence. A chessboard could then turn into a lethal weapon. Usually, however, games sublimated and channelled violence: one

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fought on the board, not with the board.32 A number of texts compare agonistic games to warfare and note that both often required the same strategic thinking. An element of competition is even present in the graffiti discussed by Julie Mell: some of the carvers brag about being more skillful (in climbing higher or in writing ‘better’) than the rest. In a curious twist, winning was not always a player’s main goal. Participating — knowing and abiding by the rules — already demonstrated one’s belonging to a community. Moreover, especially when it came to chess, it was often judicious to lose. One lost (the game and any accompanying stakes) in order to win (friendship, trust, help…). The winner was sometimes, but not necessarily, aware of what the loser was doing. Probably the most frequent goal of purposely losing a game was to win love. Akash Kumar quotes a poem entitled Il Fiore (The Flower), attributed to Dante, which gives the following advice: ‘If you play chess or a table game / with your lady, make sure you have the worst / of the game and tell her that she is the best’. One can find chess games between a man and a woman in a number of sources discussed in this volume, especially illuminated manuscripts, but also objects, such as a mirror case made in Paris between 1325 and 1350 and analysed by Elina Gertsman. Although most ‘mixed’ games had to do with love, both visual and textual representations of such games allowed for a number of variations. For instance, a thirteenth-century roman d’aventure known as Huon de Bordeaux, mentioned by Elina Gertsman, provides a surprising twist: it describes the game, in which the man and the woman play for the man’s right to spend the night with the woman. The woman falls in love with her opponent and purposefully loses; the man, however, refuses to claim the reward. As Katherine Forsyth and Mark Hall demonstrate, men and women played against each other long before the thirteenth century. One Old Irish tale that dates from the ninth century has a wife, Fand, lamenting the happy days that she used to enjoy with her husband before he abandoned her: ‘When handsome Manannán took me (as his wife), I was a proper spouse: he never in his life won from me an extra game of fidchell’. This means that she and her husband played fidchell equally well; their marriage-long score was even. However, if women could sometimes play the same games as men, girls’ play differed from boys’.  As discussed by Annemarieke Willemsen, representations of children at play produced during the Italian Renaissance show girls almost exclusively with dolls and boys with balls, hobby horses, whirligigs, and spinning tops. Pull-carts seems to be the only toy that both girls and boys could enjoy. Games were of utmost importance not only in the relations between the genders, but also in the relations (whether real or imagined) between different countries and cultures. Both games themselves and game-related representations and artefacts travelled widely and became adapted and adopted

32 Of course, not all games were necessarily agonistic. For instance, Willemsen refers to children’s games revolving around mimicry or imitation of adults.

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by other societies. In their article, Katherine Forsyth and Mark Hall mention that, even before Romans conquered most of Britain, Roman games began to make their appearance on the island. Lena Asrih and Jennifer Garner note that the pins found in archaeological excavations in Altenberg, Germany, turn out to be made of pear and plane, two types of trees that do not grow locally. The black-and-white pattern on Palamedes’s coat of arms on the miniature discussed in the beginning of the Introduction is just one example of the continued association of chess with the Muslim world. Similarly, two authors draw attention to Western European medieval texts that feature Muslim chess-players. These players include Floro in Boccaccio’s Filocolo (discussed by Akash Kumar) and the daughter of a ‘Saracen’ emir Yvorin, who plays chess against a Christian knight in Huon de Bordeaux (discussed by Elina Gertsman). As noted by Michael A. Conrad, illuminations found in Libro de acedrex dados e tablas feature a number of Arabs, identified as such by their garb and headdress. Tülün Değirmenci discusses a sixth or seventh-century Middle Persian text, The Explanation of Chess and the Invention of Backgammon, which contains a fictional account of the introduction of chess from India to Iran. A Muslim tradition attributes the invention of Snakes and Ladders not only to a distant land, but also to the distant — and equally ‘exotic’ — past. Although the earliest extant boards only date to the eighteenth century, the tradition credits the invention of the game to a medieval Andalusian mystic, Ibn Arabi. The place of games in relation to religious practices and beliefs is ambiguous. On the one hand, authorities, especially religious ones, whether Christian or Muslim, tended to disapprove of and sometimes even ban games. The problem was not so much with playing itself, but with associated activities. At times, critics highlighted a connection between games and violence (sometimes exacerbated by alcohol); at others between games and lust. A seventeenth-century Ottoman image, discussed by Tülün Değirmenci, criticizes games from a new angle: it depicts an onlooker of a game of backgammon, who is tumbling down. The pipe that he holds in his hand indicates that he probably consumed too much opium. On the other hand, a variety of traditions made a connection between games, especially games of luck, and divination or, more broadly, cosmology or eschatology. For instance, according to Tülün Değirmenci, The Explanation of Chess and the Invention of Backgammon, mentioned above, reflects Zoroastrian traditions in that it describes backgammon as a reflection of the world, where black and white pieces correspond to nights and days. Michael A. Conrad attracts attention to the likely hypothesis that the manuscript of Libro de acedrex dados e tablas originally presented 144 games: the same number as the measurement, in cubits, of the walls of Heavenly Jerusalem as described in Revelation 21. 17. This choice of the number of games to include in the Liber reflects the author’s or patron’s desire to harmonize religious and game-related knowledge. Even in sacred sites, games were not necessarily out of place. The very building of the church could become a location for playing games or for representations of games. Walter Crist, for instance, analyses game boards scratched in various

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locations within the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.33 In this case, the clergy probably turned a blind eye to the games that took place in the building. In other cases, the clergy sometimes took a deliberate decision to make representations of games part of the fabric of the church. Hardwick discusses representations of games that appear on misericords, located in the most sacred part within a church, east of the crossing. Paul Hardwick argues that these representations of games were supposed to ‘focus the mind on the rules’ governing the ecclesiastical space.

Materiality of Games The second major theme of the volume has to do with the material culture of games and with the act of playing. A number of chapters in the present volume support W. J. T. Mitchell’s famous statement that ‘All media are, from the standpoint of sensory modality, mixed media’.34 This means, first, that whether one deals with game pieces or representations of games, ‘other modes of sense-based perception such as listening, touching, feeling, tasting or smelling’ are involved.35 Several chapters make it clear that an encounter with images related to games involves senses other than sight. Most notably, Elina Gertsman focuses on the act of touching and handling artefacts made from one type of material, ivory, the material of choice for elite chess pieces and for depictions of games of chess. the contributor argues that the makers and users of these two types of objects were keenly aware of the origins and properties of ivory. Elina Gertsman also discusses the importance that medieval men and women attached to the similarities of ivory, especially if made warm by the action of holding it, to human skin (and, conversely, of human skin to ivory). It is difficult to gauge the extent to which the senses of taste or smell were involved in game playing. One can speculate with more assurance about the sense of hearing. Katherine Forsyth and Mark Hall quote a thirteenth-century Irish poem that mentions ‘the sound of fidchell being played’. In his article, Walter Crist also emphasizes the necessity of paying attention to the sounds that games must have made, such as the sound of a die rolling on a stone surface. This particular sound could be a nuisance if the game took place during church service. Ocular engagement in itself is not as straightforward as might appear. First, the appearance of some artefacts changed over time. For instance, Katherine Forsyth and Mark Hall draw attention to the fact that the famous Lewis chessmen were originally painted red. Only traces of paint remain, so they now appear ‘light brown with a hint of red’. Second, looking at an artefact

33 For similar examples in Western Europe see Hall, ‘Des jeux gravés dans la pierre’ and Hall, ‘Play and Playfulness’, pp. 535–37. 34 Mitchell, Image Science, p. 125. 35 Horstkotte, ‘Visuality and Visual Culture’, p. 301.

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in the Middle Ages often took place under conditions very different from ours (assuming that most of us encounter medieval artefacts in a museum setting). The authors inquire how Celts played games when natural lighting was not available. The answer is that they did so either close to the hearth or, in better-off households, with the aid of candles, so that some boards were actually designed to accommodate candles. ‘Words’ — both texts and verbal utterances — are another crucial factor that contributes to the ‘mixed’ nature of the media that we call ‘visual’. W. J. T. Mitchell argued that, even when one encounters modernist paintings, ‘words’ — in this case, ‘the discourse of theory, of idealist and critical philosophy’ — are crucial.36 When it comes to medieval and early modern images, the presence of ‘words’ is most obviously apparent in illuminated manuscripts or illustrated printed editions.37 Whether found in manuscripts or books, images and words do not simply exist in close proximity to each other, but participate in an interaction that Jay Lemke described as ‘meaning multiplication’.38 To quote John A. Bateman, ‘text “multiplied” by images is more than text simply occurring alongside images’.39 Conversely, images ‘multiplied’ by texts are more than images simply occurring alongside text. In the present volume, the authors of three chapters dealing with manuscripts and another one analysing a printed book examine the ways illuminations or illustrations transform both the reader’s experience of engagement with the work and the work’s meaning. Akash Kumar, for example, makes an argument that an inclusion of illuminations in several manuscripts of Boccaccio’s works brought about ‘a new mode of storytelling’. Michael A. Conrad writes about ‘codal complementarity’ of texts and images in Libro de acedrex dados e tablas when it comes to transmission of game-related knowledge. Game-related images that appear in manuscripts do not necessarily take the form of conventional illuminations or illustrations. A diagram in one of the manuscripts of Les Eschéz d’Amours, examined by Daniel O’Sullivan, is an example of another type of image and of ‘meaning multiplication’. The diagram shows the opening position of a chess game with pieces assigned allegorical values, such as Hope, Patience or Desire. The diagram was well worth a thousand words: one page distills the text of 30,000 verses. As discussed by Lena Asrih and Jennifer Garner, the text of the mining laws of Massa Marittima features another unusual type of interplay between images and words. The presence of the image of dice that one finds there is still largely a mystery, since the passages on the same pages do not have to do with gambling. It is possible,

36 Mitchell, Image Science, p. 126. 37 On the performance of words see Austin, How to Do Things with Words; Fischer-Lichte, Performativität; see also Kopp, ‘Sacred, Serious, Subversive’. 38 Lemke, ‘Multiplying meaning’. 39 Bateman, Text and Image, pp. 6–7.

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however, that one of the representations alludes to the custom of using dice to determine the amount of a fine that the guilty party would have to pay. The acts of writing itself could sometimes become the key element of a game. Julie Mell discusses how each of the Viking carvings that she examines (such as, for example, ‘Eyjólfr Kolbeinssonr carved these runes high’) was a ‘writing event’, at once a move in the game and a commemoration of this move. The act of reading and / or dwelling upon the meaning of words could also be a key component part of playing. Each of the squares of Sufi Snakes and Ladders, discussed by İrvin Schick, contains a word, many of which (such as, for example, ‘certitude’) make full sense only to the initiated. Thereby, the act of playing involved physical movement of pieces, reading the inscription and, as the author argues, a discussion between the novice and his master. Finally, as the above discussion already makes it clear, several chapters emphasize the importance — in fact, the necessity — of bringing together textual and visual evidence, rather than treating each of these types of sources separately. The chapters written jointly by Forsyth and Hall and by Asrih and Garner demonstrate the fruitfulness of cooperation between specialists in two different, but related, fields. As a result, we gain a better understanding of both types of evidence and a more complete and nuanced picture of gaming culture. As the first attempt to address the issue of games and visual culture in the pre-modern period, our volume admittedly has a number of important gaps. The most obvious area for future studies on games and visual culture has to do with games that one played while not sitting down. This includes not only the obvious physical games, such as tournaments, that generated a lot of visual sources such as ‘tournament books’ and compendia of heraldry, but also games that one does not immediately perceive as such, including the misericords analysed by Paul Hardwick or the graffiti examined by Julie Mell. We also hope that future works will feature a more thorough dialogue between games produced and played in different regions (not just Europe and Asia, but also Africa, the Americas, Australia…). However, in whatever exciting directions the field evolves, one thing is clear: the game is not up yet.

Works Cited Primary Sources Alfonso X’s Book of Games, translated by Sonja Musser Golladay, [last accessed 12 December 2018] Paris, BnF ms. fr. 99, fol. 92r., Li Roumans du bon chevalier Tristan, filz au bou roy Meliodus de Loenois, Joust between Tristan and Palamedes Rabelais, François, Gargantua, edition by Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 2009)

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Secondary Studies Aceto, Francesca, and Francesco Lucioli, eds, Giocare tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Roma: Viella, 2019) Aceto, Francesca, and Vanina Kopp, eds, ‘Jeux éducatifs et savoirs ludiques dans l’Europe médiévale i’, in Ludica. Annali di storia e civiltà del gioco, 21/22 (2015/2016) —, eds, ‘Jeux éducatifs et savoirs ludiques dans l’Europe médiévale ii’, in Ludica. Annali di storia e civiltà del gioco, 23 (2017) Adams, Jenny, Power Play (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) Akasoy, Anna, ‘The Influence of the Arabic Tradition of Falconry and Hunting on Western Europe’, in Islamic Crosspollinations: Interactions in the Medieval Middle East, ed. by Anna Akasoy, James Montgomery, and Peter Pormann (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2007), pp. 46–64 Austin, John L., How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) Bakhtin, Mikhail, [Творчество Франсуа Рабле и народная культура средневековья и Ренессанса (Мoscow: Художественная Литература, 1965) —, Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky (Boston: M. I. T. Press, 1968) Barthélemy, Dominique, ‘Les origines du tournoi chevaleresque’, in Agôn, la compétition, ve-xiie siècle, ed. by François Bougard, Régine Le Jan, and Thomas Lienhard (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 111–30 Bateman, John, Text and Image. A Critical Introduction to the Visual / Verbal Divide (London: Taylor & Francis, 2014), pp. 6–7 Bauer, Thomas, Warum es kein islamisches Mittelalter gab. Das Erbe der Antike und der Orient (Munich: Beck, 2019) Bouhaïk-Gironès, Marie, Les clercs de la Basoche et le théâtre comique Paris 1420–1550 (Paris: Champion, 2007) —, ‘De l’usage de Bakhtine en histoire médiévale’, Ménestrel, January 3 2019

Bougard, François, Régine Le Jan, and Thomas Lienhard, Agôn, la compétition, vexiie siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012) Bredekamp, Horst, Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte. Bilderkampf von der Spätantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975) Burke, Peter, ‘The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe’, in Il tempo libero: economia e società (loisirs, leisure, tiempo libre, freizeit): secc. XIII–XVIII: atti della ventiseiesima Settimana di studi, 18–23 aprile 1994, ed. by Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1995), pp. 17–27 Caflisch, Sophie, Spielend lernen. Spiel und Spielen in der mittelalterlichen Bildung, (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2018) Caillois, Roger, Man, Play, and Games, trans. by Meyer Barash (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961) Camille, Michael, The Gothic Idol. Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

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Carter, John Marshall, Medieval Games: Sports and Recreations in Feudal Society (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992) —, ‘The Study of Medieval Sports, Games, and Pastimes: A Fifteen-Year Reflection, 1988–2003’, Sports History Review, 35 (2004), 159–69 Constable, Olivia Remie, ‘Chess and Courtly Culture in Medieval Castile: The Libro de ajedrez of Alfonso X, el Sabio’, Speculum, 82 (2007), 301–47 Eales, Richard, Chess: The History of a Game (New York: Facts of File, 1985) Elias, Jamal J., Aisha’s Cushion. Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) Esders, Stefan, ‘Der Klerus und das Spiel im kirchlichen und weltlichen Recht der Spätantike und des frühen Mittelalters’, in Il gioco nella società e nella cultura dell’alto medioevo (Atti della LXV Settimana di studi, Spoleto, 20–26 April 2017), ed. by CISAM (Spoleto: CISAM, 2018), vol. 1, pp. 291–315 Favreau, Robert, Isabelle Paresys, Annie Saunier, Jean-Pierre Leguay, and Thierry Depaulis, eds, Jeux, sports et divertissements au moyen âge et à l’âge classique: actes du 116e Congrès National des Sociétes Savantes (Chambéry 29 avril – 4 mai 1991) (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 1993) Fenech Kroke, Antonella, ‘Ludic Marginalities: The Other as Player in Early Modern Visual Culture’, Ludica. Annali di storia del gioco, 21–22 (2015/2016), 25–46 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Performativität: eine Einführung (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016) Fleckenstein, Josef, ed., Das ritterliche Turnier im Mittelalter. Beiträge zu einer vergleichenden Formen- und Verhaltensgeschichte des Rittertums (Göttingen: V&R, 1985) Gillmeister, Heiner, ‘Chaucer’s Monk and Sports and Games in Medieval Monasteries and Cathedral’, in Jörg Sonntag, ed., Religiosus ludens: das Spiel als kulturelles Phänomen in mittelalterlichen Klöstern und Orden (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 149–70. Gros, Gérard, Le poète, la Vierge et le prince du Puy: étude sur les puys marials de la France du Nord du xive siècle à la Renaissance (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992) Hall, Mark A. ‘Where the Abbot Carries Dice: Gaming-Board Misericords in Context’, in Profane Imagery in Marginal Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. by Elaine C. Block (Brepols: Turnhout, 2009), pp. 63–81 —, ‘Ecclesia Ludens: Board and Dice Games in a Scottish Monastic Context’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,145 (2015), 283–97 —, ‘Des jeux gravés dans la pierre: graffiti des cathédrals, monastères et églises paroissiales en Grande-Bretagne’, Histoire et Images Médiévales, 28 (February 2012), 30–33 —, ‘Play and Playfulness in Late Medieval Britain: Theory, Concept, Practice’, in The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain, ed. by Christopher Gerrard and Alejandra Gutierrez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 530–44 Hamayon, Roberte, Jouer: étude anthropologique à partir d’exemples sibériens (Paris: La Découverte, 2012) Hardwick, Paul, ed., The Playful Middle Ages: Meanings of Play and Plays of Meaning, Essays in Memory of Elaine C. Block (Brepols: Turnhout, 2010)

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Henricks, Thomas S., Disputed Pleasures: Sport and Society in Preindustrial England (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991). Hoogvliet, Margriet, ‘Metaphorical Images of the Sacred Workshop’, Church History and Religious Culture, 99 (2019), 387–411 Horstkotte, Silke, ‘Visuality and Visual Culture’, in Traveling Concepts for the Study of Culture, ed. by Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter 2012), pp. 291–306 Huizinga, Johan, Homo ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge, 1949) Humphrey, Chris, The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) Kendrick, Laura, ‘Games Medievalists Play, How to Make Earnest Games and Still Enjoy It’, New Literary History, 40 (2009), 43–61 Knäble, Philip, Eine tanzende Kirche: Initiation, Ritual und Liturgie im spätmittelalterlichen Frankreich (Cologne: Böhlau, 2016) Kopp, Vanina, ‘Aachen, Baghdad, Constantinople. Games and Intercultural Contact in the Early Middle Ages’, in Il gioco nella società e nella cultura dell’alto medioevo, (Atti della LXV Settimana di studi, Spoleto, 20–26 April 2017), ed. by CISAM, 2 vols (Spoleto: CISAM, 2018), i, 59–94 —, Sacred, Serious, Subversive. Literary Games and Poetic Competitions in Medieval Sociability, Habilitation thesis, publication forthcoming Lalou, Elisabeth, ‘Les cordonniers metteurs en scène des mystères de saint Crépin et saint Crépinien’, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, 143 (1985), 91–115 Lapina, Elizabeth, ‘Gambling and Gaming in the Holy Land: Chess, Dice and Other Games in the Sources of the Crusades’, Crusades, 12 (2015), 133–44 Lavéant, Katell, Un théâtre des frontières: la culture dramatique dans les provinces du Nord aux xve et xvie siècles (Orléans: Paradigme, 2011) Le Goff, Jacques, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds, Le charivari (Paris: Mouton, 1981) —, Faut-il vraiment découper l’histoire en tranches? (Paris: Seuil, 2014) Lemke, Jay, ‘Multiplying Meaning: Visual and Verbal Semiotics in Scientific Text’, in Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science, ed. by J. R. Martin and Robert Veel (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 87–113 Levy, Allison, ed., Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017) Mallinckrodt, Rebekka von, and Angela Schattner, eds, Sports and Physical Exercise in Early Modern Culture, New Perspectives on the History of Sports and Motion (London: Ashgate, 2016) McClelland, John, Body and Mind: Sport in Europe from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance (London: Routledge, 2007) Mehl, Jean-Michel, Les jeux et les hommes dans la société médiévale (Paris: Champion, 2010) —, Les jeux au royaume de France du xiiie au début du xvie siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990) Mitchell, William John Thomas, Image Science. Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)

i nt ro d u ct i o n

—, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) Murray, Harold James Ruthven, A History of Chess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913) O’Sullivan, Daniel E., ed., Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age. A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012) Pastoureau, Michel, L’art de l’héraldique au Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 2009) Patterson, Serina, ed., Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015) Reid, Dylan, ‘Carnival in Rouen: A History of the Abbaye des Conards’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 22 (2001), 1027–56 —, ‘The Triumph of the Abbey of the Conards: Spectacle and Sophistication in a Rouen Carnival’, in Medieval and Early Modern Rituals: Formalized Behavior in the East and West, ed. by Joëlle Rollo-Koster (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 147–73 Richard, Olivier, ‘Le jeu des aveugles et du cochon. Rite, handicap et société urbaine à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Revue historique, 244 (2015), 525–56 Rizzi, Alessandra, Statuta de ludo. Le leggi sul gioco nell’Italia di commune (secoli xiii–xvi), (Rome: Viella, 2012) Runnalls, Graham A., ‘Medieval Trade Guilds and the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages’, Medium Aevum, 39 (1970), 257–87, reprinted in Parisian Confraternity Drama of the Fourteenth Century: the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, ed. by Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 29–65 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Le corps des images: essais sur la culture visuelle au Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 2002) —, ‘L’historien et les images’, in Der Blick auf die Bilder: Kunstgeschichte und Geschichte im Gespräch, ed. by Otto Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1997), pp. 9–42 —, ‘La question des images dans les débats entre juifs et chrétiens au xiie siècle’, in Spannungen und Widersprüche: Gedenkschrift für František Graus, ed. by Susanna Burghartz (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke 1992), pp. 245–54 Sonntag, Jörg, ‘A Matter of Definition? Game, Play, and Ritual in Medieval Monasteries’, in Il gioco nella società e nella cultura dell’alto medioevo, (Atti della LXV Settimana di studi, Spoleto, 20–26 April 2017), ed. by CISAM, 2 vols (Spoleto: CISAM, 2018), ii, 335–56 —, ed., Religiosus ludens: das Spiel als kulturelles Phänomen in mittelalterlichen Klöstern und Orden (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013) Taddei, Ilaria, Fête, jeunesse et pouvoirs. L’Abbaye des Nobles Enfants de Lausanne (Lausanne: Presses universitaires de Lausanne, 1993) Yalom, Marilyn, Birth of the Chess Queen: A History (New York: Harper Collins, 2004) Zemon-Davis, Natalie, ‘The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), 41–75

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Games and Society

Kather ine Forsyth and Mark A. Hall

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games: Literary and Archaeological Evidence Combined

Introduction The playing of board games was widespread, popular, and culturally significant in all medieval Celtic-speaking societies: reason enough, surely, to study Celtic board-gaming. More than this, however, the culturally contexted nature of such play makes it an excellent lens through which to view aspects of a wide range of social and cultural phenomena: truly, a culture reveals itself through play.1 In what follows we range widely across the Celtic-speaking medieval world and draw on diverse materials, including archaeological evidence from the first to thirteenth centuries ce, and literary evidence from the eighth to the seventeenth. In combining our expertise in an interdisciplinary manner, juxtaposing Celtic textual evidence for gaming with archaeological survivals, we are breaking new ground: previous discussions of Celtic literary references, despite their strengths, have suffered from a lack of technical knowledge about medieval games and the equipment used to play them. The pay-off from such collaboration is a more nuanced understanding of the evidence for what was a key element of social and cultural life among the early medieval Celts.



1 The current chapter draws on Forsyth’s keynote lecture to the 37th Harvard Celtic Colloquium, October 2017, ‘Playing with Status: An Interdisciplinary Approach to BoardGames in Medieval Celtic Culture’. Forsyth would like to record her gratitude to the organizers for the invitation to speak, and for Colloquium participants for helpful advice and comments on the oral version. Both authors are most grateful to Dr Geraldine Parsons for generously giving of her time to discuss some of the finer points of the Irish literary texts mentioned here and for kindly commenting on a draft of this chapter, also to Dr Niamh Whitfield who gave invaluable advice on Irish metalworking and who also provided detailed comments on a draft. Go raibh maith agaibh! Katherine Forsyth.    University of Glasgow, Scotland, Katherine.Forsyth@ glasgow.ac.uk Mark A. Hall.    Perth Museum & Art Gallery, Scotland, [email protected] Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. by Vanina Kopp and Elizabeth Lapina, HDL 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020) pp. 33-75 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.120702

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We proceed through a series of detailed examples but have sought also to make a number of wider methodological points, e.g. about the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, the usefulness of a comparative approach, the need to revisit existing translations of what are often difficult texts, and to probe the precise meaning of terms given in dictionaries which are often based on such translations. A central conclusion is the extent to which textual descriptions have, in many cases, a far firmer basis in contemporary material culture than hitherto acknowledged. We focus on contextualizing the pursuit of board games as signifiers of high social status (through the persons depicted playing) and high levels of wealth (indicated by the splendour of the pieces described). In so doing, our aim is to demonstrate the richness of this seam of evidence, its potential for further study, and above all, the pressing need to integrate Celtic material into any discussion of European gaming, both because of how it partakes of, and how it diverges from, wider European trends. There are no visual depictions of people playing board games from early Medieval Ireland or Celtic Britain, as far as we are aware, and only one manuscript illumination showing a board game lay out — the alea evangelii (‘Game of the Gospels’), an allegorical variation of hnefatafl said to have been brought to Ireland by Dub Innse (d. 953), bishop of Bangor, Co. Down, from the court of Athelstan, king of the English (924–39), which was ‘drawn up by a certain Frank [or: by a certain Franco] and by a Roman scholar, that is, Israel’.2 The latter has been identified as the renowned Carolingian scholar, Israel Britto ‘the grammarian’ (fl. c. 900 – c. 960), who from his name and sobriquet appears to have come from part of the Brittonic-speaking world, though whether Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, or south-west Scotland is not known.3 The diagram and the accompanying text explaining the allegory survive in a copy made c. 1140, in the ‘Corpus Irish Gospels’, Corpus Christi Oxon 122 (fol. 5v) (Fig. 2.1). Whether the alea evangelii was actually played or was only ever a literary/ theological conceit is debated.4 Despite the lack of visual representations of board games, there is plenty of archaeological evidence for diverse elements





2 ‘Incipit alea euangelii quam Dubinsi episcopus Bennchorensis detulit a rege Anglorum, id est a domu Adalstani Regis Anglorum, depicta a quodam Francone et a Romano sapiente, id est Israel’, cit. Bayless, ‘Alea, Taefl, and Related Games’, pp. 9–10; Murray, History of Board Games other than Chess, pp. 61–62; Payne, ‘Did the Anglo-Saxons Play Games of Chance?’, pp. 331–32; Robinson, Times of St Dunstan, pp. 69–71 and pp. 171–82. 3 Lapidge, ‘Israel the Grammarian in Anglo‐Saxon England’; Charles Edwards, Wales and the Britons, p. 635. 4 For detailed discussion of attempts to reconstruct a playable game from the information provided by text and diagram, see Helmfrid, ‘Hnefatafl – the Strategic Board Game of the Vikings’, http://hem.bredband.net/b512479/ at chapter 3; Walker, Hnefatafl: the game of the Vikings website http://tafl.cyningstan.com/page/173/alea-evangelii and related pages.

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

Figure 2.1. Board layout for alea evangelii. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 122, fol. 5v, ‘The Corpus Irish Gospels’, by permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

of gaming equipment, including boards, playing pieces, and dice.5 To these may be added more than three dozen textual references to board games in medieval Celtic languages (i.e. Old and Middle Irish/Gaelic, Middle Welsh, Old Breton) and associated Latin literatures (Hiberno- and Cambro-Latin).6 These range from passing mentions to pivotal plot devices, and encompass general allusions, precise descriptions, and striking metaphors. Many of the examples highlight the visual appearance of gaming equipment and for this reason we would argue they constitute an undeservedly overlooked element of visual culture. While we should not expect to be able to read directly



5 For example, see Hall, Playtime in Pictland; Hall and Forsyth, ‘Roman Rules?’; Hall, ‘Ecclesia Ludens’; Hall, ‘Matters of Life and Death’. 6 Two pioneering attempts to reconstruct medieval Celtic games from literary references remain very valuable: MacWhite, ‘Early Irish Board Games’; Lewis, ‘Gwerin ffristial a thawlbwrdd’ (article in English). More recently, see Nieheus, ‘All the King’s Men?’; Nuti, ‘Il gioco del fidchell nella tradizione letteraria celtica medieval’, and Hughes, ‘A Chwaryy Di Wydbwyll?’ (in Welsh).

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from literature to reality, it is evident that these literary references worked in partnership with the audience’s sensory understanding of how actual gaming paraphernalia was shaped, textured, coloured, and subjected to metaphorical engagement, in order to conjure up effective images of the actions of heroes, heroines, villains, and saints at play. It is impossible for the modern reader to gain a full understanding of such references, and the texts in which they occur, without first gaining a similar sensory understanding of the physical reality of medieval Celtic gaming. Conversely, the texts yield invaluable insight into the function and significance of the surviving material remains and provide unique evidence of those elements which have not been preserved in the archaeological record. In the past there has been a tendency to dismiss as mere fantasy descriptions of the splendid accoutrements of kings, queens, and heroes in medieval Celtic literature, including their sumptuous sets of gaming equipment. Swift has argued that such dismissals are often overstated, in part because they are based on inexact translations made by philologists unaware of, or uninterested in, the archaeological detail of daily life in the Celtic early Middle Ages.7 In offering close readings and improved translations of passages relating to board games we have attempted to answer her call for more precise and archaeologically-informed translations of early Irish literature.8 In doing so we follow in the footsteps of Whitfield who, in a series of recent articles, has demonstrated that the details of descriptions of material culture (for example, of male and female elite dress) are often far more closely observed and accurate than previously credited.9 We argue that scrutiny of the gaming evidence confirms this conclusion, providing further examples, and yielding new insight into a key dynamic of medieval Celtic society.

Board Games in Medieval Celtic Literature The nature and complexity of board games means they tend to be subject to what the classicist Nicholas Purcell has termed a ‘complex symbolic overburden’,10 which lends them to allegorical and metaphorical interpretations. This, and the actual social circumstances in which games were played gave them rich symbolic



7 Swift, ‘Old Irish for Archaeologists’. 8 Where possible we have provided the original texts of the extracts quoted. The majority of Irish/Gaelic language texts referred to may be consulted in their entirety online at University College Cork’s CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts (https://celt.ucc.ie/). Detailed bibliographic information on each text is also available at the Stichting A. G. van Hamel voor Keltische Studies’s website CODECS: Online Database and e-Resources for Celtic Studies (https://www.vanhamel.nl/codecs/). 9 Whitfield, ‘Dress and Accessories’; Whitfield, ‘Aristocratic Display in Early Medieval Ireland’. 10 Purcell, ‘Literate Games’, p. 5.

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potential as both mime and metaphor,11 and rendered them particularly appealing material to medieval Celtic-speaking authors. Some of the great set-pieces of medieval Celtic literature revolve around board games: Midir wining Étain from Eochaid with a game of fidchell in the ninth/eleventh-century Tochmarc Étaíne (‘The Wooing of Étaín’);12 Medb exciting her husband’s jealousy by playing fidchell with Fráech in the eighth-century Táin Bó Fraích (‘Cattle Raid of Fráech’);13 or Arthur and Owain playing a game of gwyddbwyll that is weirdly replicated by real armies in the late twelfth or thirteenth-century Breuddwyd Rhonabwy (‘Rhonabwy’s Dream’).14 Board-games also quite frequently appear incidentally to the main action, as in the early Irish tale Echtrae Nerai (‘The Adventure of Nera’)15 or the eleventh or twelfth-century Fled Dúin na nGéd (‘The Feast of the Fort of the Geese’)16 in which protagonists are disturbed while playing and end up blinding or maiming adversaries with playing pieces they happened to be holding in their hands; in late ninth/early tenth-century Fingal Rónáin (‘Ronán’s act of kin-slaying’)17 where the fateful treachery is plotted during a game of fidchell; or Gwalchmei defending himself with a gwyddbwyll board which happens to be to hand in Historia Peredur ab Efrawg (‘The history of Peredur son of Efrog’), the twelfth or thirteenth-century Welsh re-working of Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval.18 In Chrétien’s original Perceval uses a chess-board and very large chess pieces as his weapons. More germane to our purposes, board games are drawn on to supply vivid and striking imagery in Celtic literature. The twinkling sparkle of beautiful gaming pieces is evoked by two poets, four centuries apart: the Irish Blathmac son of Cú Brettan (mid-eighth century)19 and the Welsh Dafydd ap Gwylim (mid-fourteenth century),20 both of whom use this as a metaphor to describe the stars. Although splendid rock crystal and amber pieces are known from the Continent and Scandinavia,21 these have yet to be found in Medieval Britain 11 Purcell, ‘Literate Games’, p. 26. 12 Bergin and Best, ‘Tochmarc Étaíne’, ninth-century original with eleventh-century re-working. 13 Meid, ed., Táin Bó Fraích. 14 Richards, Breudwyt Ronabwy; Davies, Mabinogion, pp. 214–26. 15 Carey, ‘Echtrae Nera’, at p. 119. 16 Lehmann, Fled Dúin na nGéd. 17 Greene, Fingal Rónáin. 18 Goetinck, Historia Peredur vab Efrawc; Davies Mabinogion, pp. 65–102. 19 ‘Is lais do-midethar med | na secht nime im rícheth; | is a lám ro-sert indib | in fidchill do chainrindib’, (He [Christ] owns the extent that he marks out of the seven heavens about the kingly seat; it is his hand that has strewn in them the fidchell set of beautiful stars), Carney, Poems of Blathmac, at stanza 192. 20 ‘Gwerin ffristiol a tholbwrdd | Claer eu gwaith, clawr awyr gwrdd’ (The tawlbwrdd pieces of the mighty sky’s board, bright is their work), Loomis, Dafydd ap Gwilym; University of Swansea Dafydd ap Gwilym.net poem 161 Y Sêr ‘The Stars’, lines 69–70. 21 See, for example, Kluge-Pinsker, Schachspiel und Trictrac, cat. A1 and A41; Murray, History of Chess, pp. 764–66; Pohle, Karl Charlemagne der Grosse, cat. 236.

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Figure 2.2. Selection of glass gaming pieces (the oldest yet found in Britain) from a set of twenty-four found, together with three dice and the remains of a wooden board with ornate handles, in a furnished cremation grave, c. 10 BCe, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England. © British Museum.

Figure 2.3. Glass domed playing piece from Dundurn, Perthshire, Scotland. Photo Mark A. Hall, courtesy Hunterian Museum.

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

or Ireland. It is possible that what is invoked here are beautiful glass pieces like the Late Iron Age examples from Welwyn Garden City (Fig. 2.2) or the glass boss from excavations at the Pictish hillfort of Dundurn, Perthshire (Fig. 2.3), subsequently identified as a gaming piece by Mark Hall,22 but more likely these are references to pieces made of, or decorated with, shiny copper alloy or precious metal, whose multiplicity, regularity, and configuration on the board remind the poet of a constellation of stars. It is pieces of a more anthropomorphic form which are called to mind when Lóegaire is said to have been crushed between the palms of a giant like a fidchell piece between two millstones in the eighth-century Irish tale Fled Bricrenn (‘Bricriu’s Feast’).23 In Tóraigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (‘The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne’) Diarmaid has concealed himself in the branches of the rowan tree of the Searbhán Lochlannach but cannot resist dropping scarlet berries down onto the fidchell board below to indicate to Oisín which squares he should move to in his game against Fionn.24 Scarlet globules of another sort are evoked when Celtchar kills Blái by running him through with his sword as Blái watches Conchobar and Cú Chulainn play fidchell, and the decision as to who should avenge the murder hinges on whose square Blái’s blood has spotted.25 These images and incidents work so well because they resonate with an audience who were used to seeing and handling boards and pieces and for whom board games were an integral part of life. The range of pieces preserved in the archaeological record in Celtic Britain and Ireland in fact encompasses all these types: globular, conical, anthropomorphic, spiked, and metal-adorned, and indeed, others not described. The fidchell board made of butter in Aislinge Meic Con Glinne (‘The Vision of Mac Conglinne’), a late eleventh / early twelfth-century gluttonous parody of the ‘Vision’ genre, is pure fantasy,26 but the description of its pieces (literally ‘troop of men’) as ‘smooth, speckled, peaked’ fits surviving pieces nicely (see further below).27

22 Stead, ‘A La Tène III burial’, pp. 14–17; Driscoll, Alcock, and Alcock ‘Reconnaissance Excavations’, pp. 215–16, illus. 14.26; Hall, Playtime in Pictland, p. 51. See also the various glass sets from Birka, Sweden (Lindquist, ‘Spielsteine, Würfel und Spielbretter’, pp. 215–18: Glass: Birka 710, 750, 523, 644; Amber: Birka 524), and the amber set from Skamby in Kuddby parish, Östergötland, Sweden (see Rundkvist and Williams, ‘A Viking Boat Grave’). 23 Henderson, ed., Fled Bricrend, p. 172 (based on Lebor na hUidre and Edinburgh MSS); Gantz, Early Irish Myths and Sagas, p. 247 (based on Edinburgh and Leiden MSS). See below for further discussion of anthropomorphic pieces. 24 Ní Shéaghdha, Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne. The earliest surviving version is sixteenth century but draws on material dating back to the tenth. 25 In Aided Cheltchair meic Uthechair, Meyer, ‘The Death of Celtchar mac Uthecair’, pp. 24–31. 26 Jackson, ed., Aislinge Meic Con Glinne, p. 27, lines 829–30. Preston-Matto, trans., Aislinge Meic Conglinne. 27 ‘fidchell imme cona foirind | blaith bricc bendaig’ (A butter fidchell-board with its men | smooth, speckled, peaked). (Blaith ‘polished smooth’ eDIL s.v. bláith or dil.ie/6057; brecc, ‘speckled, spotted; variegated; patterned, ornamented, sparkling’ eDIL s.v. 1 brecc or dil. ie/6620; bennach, ‘pointed, peaked; horned’ eDIL s.v. 2 bennach or dil.ie/5657).

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Board Games in Celtic Britain and Ireland: Origins Board gaming first reached Britain in the generation before the Roman Conquest (43 ce) as part of a package of Continental innovations, including coinage, wine-drinking, and literacy.28 From the outset board games were present in the context of feasting, lavish hospitality, and status display. One of the most spectacular of these early finds is the so-called ‘Doctor’s Grave’ from Stanway which dates to around the time of the Conquest (40–50 ce).29 It includes a hinged wooden board (of which only the metal fittings have survived) on which the pieces had been set out ready to play. There were two sides, each of thirteen playing pieces, and no dice. It appears closely similar to the very popular Roman game of ludus latrunculorum, ‘the game of little soldiers’, a strategy game of opposing armies, though apparently it is not an exact copy but rather a local adaptation. This grave also contained medical instruments and a set of what have been interpreted as divination rods. A close link between divination and gaming is attested from the earliest days of such play in Late Iron Age/early medieval Europe and is particularly prominent in the Scandinavian tradition. It appears to receive less emphasis in the Celtic tradition, although this needs further analysis. There are about half-a-dozen sets of gaming equipment in Late Iron Age cemeteries of the Catuvellauni in south-east England, where the local vogue for furnished burials provided a means by which this material could be preserved. The lack of such a tradition elsewhere in Britain makes it hard to track the speed and extent of the spread of board gaming. Certainly, gaming equipment is ubiquitous at Roman sites, especially military ones, and features both specially made and improvised pieces and boards.30 Already by the second or third century ce such material was reaching far beyond the imperial frontier (e.g. the beautiful group of Roman glass gaming counters from Tarland, Aberdeenshire, roughly 250 miles north of Hadrian’s Wall)31 and inspiring local imitations (such as the striking third or fourth century ce polished horse-tooth gaming piece from Howe, Sanday, Orkney).32 It is perhaps from north Britain that board gaming reached Ireland.33 Another spectacular find comes from the small group of late Iron Age burials inserted

28 Hall and Forsyth, ‘Roman Rules’, p. 1335. 29 Crummy and others, Stanway, pp. 352–59; Hall and Forsyth, ‘Roman Rules’, pp. 1327–28. 30 Hall, Playtime in Pictland. 31 Cool and Hall, ‘The Gaming Counters’, pp. 47–52. 32 Smith, Howe, p. 177. This multi-period site also yielded a group of stone disc gaming pieces (p. 188), two stone gaming boards (p. 188) likely to be for gwyddbwyll / fidchell (given probable sxith/seventh century date), and several items identified as bone pin heads and a jet pin head that are likely to be gaming pieces (p. 177 and p. 191). 33 Hall and Forsyth, ‘Roman Rules’, pp. 1330–31.

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

into the great Neolithic passage tomb at Knowth,34 which in their burial rites and material culture, and from isotype analysis of dental remains, point to origins in Britain. The grave in question, the so-called ‘Gambler’s Grave’, is multiply ‘special’. For a start it is a double burial, of two close male relatives (probably twins) aged about thirty. They have been decapitated (though it is not clear if that was before or after death) and buried nose-to-tail, yin and yang-style. The only grave goods are two sets of equipment for different games. To the left were thirteen pegged playing pieces laid out on a board which has not survived. Note the correspondence in the number of pieces with the Colchester ‘Doctor’s Grave’ (where there were two sides, each of thirteen pieces, differentiated by colour). Here at Knowth there appears to be only one side, a phenomenon known from Scandinavian burials, where the deceased was furnished with their own set of pieces ready to play in the afterlife against an opponent who was expected to supply their own pieces.35 The other game at Knowth is represented by a set of beautifully matched beach pebbles, apparently contained in a bag which has not survived, and a set of the standard three dice needed to play the immensely popular Roman game of alea, an ancestor of backgammon.36 Thus we appear to have evidence of the adoption in first century Ireland of versions of the two great Roman games — the thinking man’s battle game ludus latrunculorum, and the thrillsand-spills race-game alea.

Identifying the Games Played Although it is not until the eighth century ce that we first have textual evidence for board games in either Brittonic or Goidelic texts, the archaeological evidence shows that already by then, board games had been thoroughly integrated into native life for centuries.37 The two principal games mentioned are, respectively: Brittonic (Welsh, Breton) gwyddbwll and Goidelic (Irish/Scottish Gaelic) fidchell,38 which both mean ‘wood sense/intelligence’, a reference to the wooden board on which, and the mental agility with which, they were played. It has long been recognized that these two terms are cognate,39 and likely to reflect a linguistic connection which predates the shift to neo-Celtic, i.e. pre-sixth century ce. The archaeological evidence helps triangulate the likely date

34 Eogan, ed., Excavations at Knowth 5, pp. 23 and 419–22. 35 For a full discussion of these ideas see, Hall, ‘Board Games in Boat Burials’. 36 Murray, A History of Board Games, pp. 31–33; Parlett, Oxford History of Board Games, Oxford, p. 72. 37 Hall, Playtime in Pictland; Hall and Forsyth, ‘Roman Rules’. 38 Pronounced /gwið-booɬ/ and /fið-χel/. See Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru () s.v. gwyddbwyll; Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language electronic version (= eDIL) () s.v. fidchell (dil.ie/22014). 39 From Common Celtic *widu-kweillā. See Hall and Forsyth, ‘Roman Rules’, pp. 1331–33.

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and direction of this borrowing.40 From literary descriptions, fidchell and to a lesser extent gwyddbwll can be partially reconstructed: they appear to be battle strategy games derived from the Roman ludus latrunculorum, itself the ancestor of tabula.41 The invention of native Celtic names for what are, at least in origin, Roman games is in striking contrast to other European languages which tended to borrow the Latin name tabula.42 Although gwyddbwyll and fidchell are mentioned in the earliest texts, and appear to retain the highest status, other games are also mentioned: in Welsh tawlbwrdd (from Latin tabula + Germanic bord ‘board, plank, table’, via either Anglo-Saxon taeflbord or Old Norse taflborð),43 and in Irish, brandub (‘raven black’), buanfach (‘lasting victory’), and others.44 The introduction of chess, attested archaeologically from probably the twelfth century,45 is hard to detect in the literary record as in the Celtic-speaking areas existing native names came to be applied to the new game. The shifting terminology of Celtic board games is a knot which has yet to be fully untangled, although we hope to contribute to that process in due course.

Playing for Status Games are about play — they are fun — but they are also about what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls ‘deep play’: extremely high stakes activities which engage central cultural values such as ‘esteem, honor, dignity and respect — in a word, status’.46 This is why the cultural insights they provide are of such value: games matter. Although gaming was widespread in Medieval Ireland and Celtic Britain, it was nonetheless socially differentiated, as we might expect in these highly stratified and status-conscious societies. One of the ways to assert status through board games was simply to beat people. Skill at the game was a reflection not only of one’s worth as a person but also reflected the fact that one had the leisure

40 Hall and Forsyth, ‘Roman Rules’, p. 1333. 41 MacWhite, ‘Early Irish Board Games’; Lewis Gwerin ffristial a thawlbwrdd; Hall and Forsyth, ‘Roman Rules’. 42 Harding, ‘A Fenian Pastime?’; Bayless, ‘Alea, Taefl, and Related Games’. 43 See Geiriadur Prifysgol s.v. tawlbwrdd; Lewis, ‘Gwerin ffristial’, p. 187. 44 eDIL s.v. brandub (or dil.ie/6550); s.v. búanbach (or dil.ie/7276). 45 Hall, ‘Board of the Kings’. Certainly, in Britain and Ireland the notion that a piece was for chess or for hnefatafl when the two games overlapped in time is hard to substantiate. The wooden (yew) ‘chess’ piece from Waterford, of twelfth-century date stratigraphically, could readily have been used in either game and from the same place and date comes the wooden (oak) hnefatafl board. See Hurley, Scully, and McCutcheon, Late Viking Age and Medieval Waterford Excavations, pp. 592–94 and fig. 16:14.1 (board); p. 592 and fig. 16:11.28 (playing piece). The inter-operability of pieces across both games is discussed in Caldwell and Hall, ‘The Hoard of Gaming Pieces’. 46 Geertz, ‘Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, p. 433.

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

to dedicate oneself to practice — the key determinant of success at board games.47 In both Irish and Welsh tradition, when we come across kings at leisure, typically they are playing board games — in Táin Bó Cúailnge (‘The Cattle-Raid of Cooley’), Conchobar, king of Ulster, is said to spend a third of his day playing brandub and fidchell.48 From the Hiberno-Latin tradition we have, for example, the Vita of St Lugaid (Moluae) (late eighth or early ninth cent. ce) in which it is mentioned in passing that: ‘In ipse autem hora rex ille ludo regali aleam suam sua manu componebat, sicut regibus mos est’ (At that time of the day the king was setting up his alea with his own hands for the royal game, as is the custom for kings).49 Although Latin alea means ‘dice’ and is the standard term for backgammon-type dice-games, these do not require initial set-up. Indeed, the placing of the counters on the board is a key element of play. The fact that the king in the Life of St Lugaid is said to set up the pieces before play started (componere ‘to set in opposition’) allows us to deduce that in this text ‘alea’ is being used only in a generic sense to mean ‘board game’, as it is with alea evangelii (discussed above) which is a hnefatafl variant, not a dice-game. It is clear from other sources, however, that fidchell did require initial set up, and it is likely that it is this high-status game, rather than low-status dicing, which is being signalled here. Similarly, in the Welsh material: in the twelfth century Life of St Cadog, Kings Arthur and Rhun are separately depicted passing time by playing alea with their attendants, whereas even from boyhood Cadog exhibits saintliness by resisting invitations to join the game.50 Although no details of the game are given, it is possible, indeed likely that here too alea is not being used in the narrow sense of ‘dice’ but rather more generically as ‘board game’ (probably gwyddbwll in this instance). Although it may seem a fine point, precision in translating the various terms for games is important as the different character of battle, hunt, and chase games, lends each a different set of connotations. This can make as big a difference as that between asserting that Her Majesty the Queen likes to spend the evening playing bridge or playing poker! Some are games of pure skill and considerable intellectual sophistication, some are fast games of pure chance, others lie in between, combining skill and chance in varying measure. Archaeological evidence shows the popularity of dice games in Celtic Britain and Ireland, yet the literary dominance of the strategy games fidchell and gwyddbwll confirms that these enjoyed higher status. 47 With success at board games often seen as determinant of wider success, if its inclusion in various etiquette codes of social accomplishment is anything to go by (see n. 53). 48 O’Rahilly, ed. and trans., Táin Bó Cúailnge, at line 745. Manuscript c. 1160. Text is Old and Middle Irish. 49 Heist, Vitae sanctorum Hiberniae, p. 137. 50 Lifris, ‘Vita sancti Cadoci’ in Wade-Evans Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae (references to the playing of dice: Prologue, § 5 and § 24).

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It is not just kings who are depicted in the frequent incidental references to board games in which we come across characters who happen to be playing. Queens too, and others of their household, spent their leisure hours gaming. Clearly to participate fully in elite society, facility at boardgames was essential. While the Romans disapproved of gaming and saw skill at alea as a sign of a mis-spent youth,51 the tenth-century commentary on the early Irish law-text Mellbretha (‘Judgements on Games’), on the contrary, stipulates that a noble foster-son ought to be taught to play the board games fidchell and brannuigecht. Noble foster-daughters however should learn needlework.52 Despite this gendered curriculum, girls apparently did acquire ability at board games as reflected in the numerous examples in the literature of women playing fidchell, both with each other and with men, whom they are able to match in skill.53 Alongside the numerous examples of one player beating another, we note two interesting cases of board games as a metaphor for parity of status — with opponents depicted as able to win an equal number of games off each other. The matching of players in terms of ability is presented as highly desirable within the late Old Irish, c. ninth-century, Serglige Con Culainn (‘The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn’). Fand has been abandoned by her husband Manannán and reflects wistfully on the happier days of their early marriage when separation was unthinkable. She defends herself as having been a ‘proper wife’ in two ways. The first is sexual: she recalls the gift given to her by Manannán ‘as the price of making her blush’. The second invokes their games of fidchell together: Dánam thuc Manannán mass | robam céle comadas: | noco bérad orm ria lind | cluchi eráil ar fhidchill. (When handsome Manannán took me (as his wife), I was a proper spouse: he never in his life won from me an extra game of fidchell).54 In other words, she and Manannán were evenly matched, winning an equal number of games from each other. Far from it being ‘bad form’ for a wife 51 Purcell, ‘Literate Games’, p. 13. 52 Binchy, ‘Mellbretha’; Kelly, Guide to Early Irish law, p. 87. 53 Forsyth and Parsons, ‘Battles of the Sexes’. Ability at board games is a skill lauded in various etiquette codes throughout the medieval period and into the seventeenth century. Petrus Alfonsi, in his Disciplina Clericalis (c. 1100–1125), lists chess as one of the seven skills of a good knight and in the Chanson Huon of Bordeaux (c. 1200) the knight-hero (disguised as a minstrel) intones nine attributes, including unsurpassed skill at chess and tables. For the élites of the North Sea world, the Orkneyinga Saga lists board games as the first of nine key skills or attributes of a nobleman. The idea of playing of games as one of the marks of a great man became an aspect of the panegyric code found in Gaelic poetry, although texts surviving from the seventeenth century onwards cite the games as tables (i.e. backgammon), dice, and cards. Caldwell, Hall, and Wilkinson, ‘The Lewis Hoard of Gaming Pieces’, pp. 177 and pp. 180–81; Hall, ‘To you he Left’, p. 233; Hall, ‘Gaming, Material Culture and Hybridity’, pp. 61–64. 54 Dillon, ed., Serglige Con Culainn, lines 779–82.

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

to beat her husband, what is prized here is the ability of a woman to give a man a good game. Thus, in this poem, fidchell ‘functions as the intellectual counterpart to the sexual intimacy of this idealised marital relationship’.55 A related example, encoding both intimacy and intellectual parity across social difference, is the clutch of references in Táin Bó Cuailgne to the great Ulster hero Cú Chulainn playing with his charioteer Lóeg. Although not matched in social status, they are nonetheless equally matched in board-gaming, able to win alternate games off each other: dobered [Lóeg] leth brandaigechta fi[d] chillachta fora thigerna (‘he [Lóeg] used to win every other game of brandub and fidchell from his master’).56 In both these examples, it is the very emphasis on parity which highlights the fact that the inverse was the norm and beating opponents at board games was an important way of demonstrating one’s worth as a person, as it is, for example, with Lug, who on arriving at Tara signals his superior skill by beating the Dagda at fidchell in Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Battle of Moyturra’).57 So firmly entrenched is this notion of asserting status through victory at board games that it is the subject of satire in the late Old Irish tale Scéla Guairi meic Colmáin agus Meic Teléne (‘The Trial of Mac Teléne’) which culminates in a battle at the fidchell board. The cleric Cummíne Fota demonstrates his superiority over King Guaire by holding him to play throughout an entire day during which not a single piece is captured (literally, ‘wounded/slain’), despite the cleric never having played the game before. The king concedes, telling Cummíne, ‘That is champion-like, o cleric’.58 The notion that one’s character is revealed through one’s ability at board games appears to underlie a comment by the prophetess Fedelm, in an obscure passage in the tale known as ‘Cú Chulainn and Fedelm’ (or Ces Ulad, ‘The debility of the Ulstermen’). Cú Chulainn and Lóeg are travelling by chariot, with the former at the reins: ‘He had fidchell and buanfach [an unidentified board game] with him in his chariot, and it was full of stones for casting; and he had a spear in his hand with a strap attached to it for killing fish’. The pair are spotted by Fedelm and her husband Elcmaire who try to overtake them. She says, ‘Let me see whether the man on the bench competes with his companion. Something is discovered between two men [?], with fidchell and with buanfach, with hunting birds on every slope’.59 Although it is not explicitly stated, the implication appears to be that the pair are playing board games as they travel along. The notion of play in transit is perhaps not as far-fetched as it might appear. The Emperor Claudius (10 bce–54 ce), conqueror of Britain, was so avid a player of alea that he wrote a book on the subject, and, according to Suetonius, had his ‘chariot’

55 Forsyth and Parsons, ‘Battle of the Sexes’. 56 O’Rahilly, Táin Bó Cuailgne (recension II), line 2327. 57 Gray, Cath Maige Tuired. eleventh or twelfth-century redaction of ninth-century material. 58 Clancy, ‘The Trial of Mac Teléne’, pp. 24–25 and pp. 40–41. 59 Meyer, ‘Die Ursache von Noinden Ulad’, p. 120; Carey, ‘Cú Chulainn and Fedelm’.

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(Gallo-Latin essedum) and board modified so he could play while travelling.60 A small number of perforated boards survive from early medieval Ireland and Britain, and a larger number of pegged pieces: gaming equipment that could be used during travel (by chariot or boat) and in ‘lively’ social settings.61 A previously overlooked literary reference to perforated boards comes in the eighth-century Reicne Fothaid Canainne (‘The “reicne”-poem of Fothad Canainne’) which has some claim to being our oldest description of a fidchell set.62 The poem refers to the board’s deircinnech, which Meyer, the original translator, interpreted as ‘crimson woof ’. The word indech does indeed mean ‘woof, weft, interweaving’.63 It is used again two verses later in an extended sense to mean ‘inlay’, when it is stated of the board that, a hindech do margarét, ‘its inlay was of pearl’. This later information appears to contradict Meyer’s interpretation of deirc as derc/derg ‘red’,64 and knowledge of the popularity of perforated boards (which Meyer, writing in 1910, was likely unaware of) suggests that the word is instead the homonym derc / deirc, meaning ‘hole, cavity, hollow’ referring to the board’s parallel rows of perforations.65

Gaming Equipment as Display While the heroes and heroines of Celtic literature could best their rivals through praeternaturally skillful play, the more reliable way to assert superior status, and one open to merely averagely talented players, was to own fancy kit. Roman gaming equipment so far found in Wales and Scotland is generally unostentatious — pieces were typically simple glass counters, bone discs (often inscribed), or found stones.66 In Celtic literature, however, there is a consistent emphasis on the sumptuous physical nature of the sets which reflects the high status of game playing and people’s pride in owning and displaying these possessions. This is not a uniquely Celtic trait, of course. References to luxurious gaming kit are known from antiquity: when Pompey defeated Mithridates VI of Pontus in the Third Mithridatic War (73–63 bce) his victory parade in Rome included the life-size golden playing pieces and board of Mithridates.67 Medieval royal inventories 60 ‘Aleam studiosissime lusit, de cuius arte librum quoque emisit, solitus etiam in gestatione ludere, ita essedo alueoque adaptatis ne lusus confunderetur’ (He played alea most avidly, and published a book upon the subject. He even used to play as he was driven about, his chariot [essedum] and hollowed gaming-board [alveus] so fitted, that the game was not disturbed [i.e. by the motion of the carriage]). Suetonius, Claudius, ch. 33. 61 Hall, Playtime in Pictland, pp. 10–13. 62 Meyer, ‘Reicne Fothaid Canainne’, stanza 30. 63 eDIL s.v. indech or dil.ie/28356. 64 eDIL s.v. derg or dil.ie/15626. 65 eDIL s.v. 1 derc or dil.ie/15580. 66 Hall, Playtime in Pictland, pp. 7–13; Hall, ‘Waulkmill Gaming Counters’, pp. 49–52. 67 Hall, Playtime in Pictland, endnote 31, following Pliny, Historia Naturalis, ch. 37, line 13 as quoted in Purcell, ‘Literate Games’, p. 25.

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include numerous examples of chess sets made of precious metals, gemstones, crystals, and exotic woods. The prosaic function of the use of these materials is to distinguish opposing sides of the board but much more significant was their performative signalling of wealth and status. Such luxury was accessible only to those at the apex of society, but even the lower, financially stretched, echelons of the European nobility invested in quality gaming sets as a means of asserting status: for one French gentleman a chessboard was his only item of luxury furniture.68 These detailed medieval inventories document the physical trappings of board-gaming among contemporary European elites, providing a benchmark for the sets evoked by Irish and Welsh literary imagination.

Heirlooms and Identity It is clear that sets of gaming equipment — boards, pieces, and the bag to keep them in — were valued and highly personal possessions which took on associations from their owner. In both Goidelic and Brittonic tradition, remarkable sets are named for their famous owners: e.g. the fidchell set of Crimthann Nia Náir (discussed below) and the legendary gwyddbwll set of Gwenddoleu son of Ceidio, renowned as one of the ‘Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain (that were in the North)’ in the Welsh Triads, of which it was said: ‘if the pieces were set they would play by themselves’.69 There are a number of references to bequests of gaming sets, from fathers to sons, and husbands to wives. The thirteenth-century Gaelic poem in praise of Aonghus Mór Mac Domhnaill (d. 1296), Hebridean king of the Isles, Ceannaigh duain t’athar, a Aonghas (‘Purchase your father’s poem, Angus’), lists gaming equipment among the many valuables bequeathed to Aonghus by his father c. 1250: To you he left his position, | yours each mail shirt, each treasure, [gach séad] | His hats, his staves, his slender swords, | Yours, his sets [lit. ‘troops, companies’] of reddish-brown ivory gaming pieces [dhuit ’s a fhoirne donna déad].70

68 An inventory of Edward I’s plate and jewels (1295–1296) refers to an ivory chess set (‘une familie de ebore ad scaccarius’), and a box or chest containing a chess set (familia) of jasper and crystal. The latter is perhaps the same set listed in 1300 as belonging to his second wife, Margaret of France, described as ‘a chess board of jasper and crystal with crystal images bound with silver and with pieces of jasper and crystal’. Also listed among her possessions are ‘a chess board of red and green jasper bound with silver gilt with the pieces of jasper and crystal … A set of tables [i.e. a hinged board for playing the game tables] of nutmeg with metal stems and the pieces of the same [made] of ginger and nutmeg bound with silver tallies’. Perroy, ‘Social Mobility among the French Noblesse’, p. 29. 69 Bromwich, ed., Trioedd Ynys Prydein, pp. 46–47, cxxx. Fifteenth-century manuscript, drawing on much older traditional material. 70 Bergin, ‘An Address to Aonghus of Islay’, pp. 170–74, lines 5–8; McLeod and Bateman Duanaire na Sracaire, pp. 82–91.

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Figure 2.4. Selection of items from hoard of walrus-ivory gaming pieces from Lewis, Scotland, twelfth century. © National Museums of Scotland.

This plea-poem seeks for a lord’s debts to be paid by his heir and eloquently demonstrates the value placed upon board games as a facet of play and status. The language of the poem, as text and as oral performance, expresses the sensory values of a significant set or sets of gaming pieces — it communicates their appeal as both memory aids and as functioning heirlooms in the present. Aonghus’s poem may be referring to chess or hnefatafl gaming pieces but given that equipment for these games could be interchangeable, and given that the poem refers to Aonghus as ‘king of Lewis’, it is hard to resist the temptation to link the poem’s reference to deluxe Hebridean gaming equipment to the spectacular hoard of twelfth–thirteenth-century walrus-ivory gaming pieces discovered on the Isle of Lewis, probably at Mealasta or possibly at Camas Uig, in 1831. Now known as the ‘Lewis Chessmen’, the hoard of ninety-three items also includes counters suitable for tables (ancestor of backgammon) and other games (Fig. 2.4).71 When first discovered, many of the Lewis pieces were stated to be coloured red, giving a possible match with the donn of Aonghus’s poem,72 and recent analysis of the pieces in the National Museums of Scotland have revealed the presence of trace amounts of the mineral cinnabar (mercury sulphide), used as a red pigment in the medieval period.73 Applied new, the colourant would

71 Caldwell, Hall, and Wilkinson, ‘The Lewis Hoard of Gaming Pieces’. 72 eDIL s.v. 1 donn (dil.ie/18205): ‘dun, brown, apparently a light brown inclining to yellow or red’. 73 Madden, ‘Historical Remarks’; Tate, Reiche, and Pinzari, ‘The Lewis Chessmen’, pp. 20–23; Hall, ‘To you he Left’, pp. 222–23.

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have been bright and vivid, but after many years of handling and heirloom transfer the Lewis gaming pieces might well be very aptly described as ivory pieces that are light brown with a hint of red. The medieval reality was that unadorned ivory pieces were probably more unusual than painted ones, but the latter only survive with faint traces of their colouration.74 Although the date of deposition of the hoard is not known, the pieces were created over a period spanning the late-twelfth to early-thirteenth century, i.e. fractionally earlier than the dating of the poem but of course, not inconsistent with their being the accumulated possessions of a man who died in c. 1250, inherited by his descendants, and subsequently buried by them or others in the turbulent times which followed. The poet is perhaps referring generically to the kind of possessions a man of Aonghus’s rank would be expected to own, rather than to a specific set. However, pieces as fine as some of those in the Lewis hoard, imported from Norway, may well have attracted fame. Examples of sets named for famous owners were noted above. To these may be added the fidchell set of King Conchobar which had its own name: cennchaom.75 Had Aonghus inherited a famous gaming set? The poem highlights Aonghus’s illustrious Norse ancestry. His own power-base appears to have been in the southern Hebrides but his rule extended over the entire Western Isles, including Lewis. There were, of course, other magnates in the region and there are other gaming pieces known, including some very fine walrus-ivory chess-pieces such as the knight probably from Skye (now in the National Museums of Scotland) and the now lost king-piece from Dunstaffnage, Argyll.76 Whether or not there is any actual relationship between the pieces referred to in the poem and the ones discovered in Lewis in 1831, both still sit comfortably within the same cultural milieu and spanning the Western Isles transition from Norse hegemony back to Gaelic.77 The accumulation of the hoard over several decades is consistent with gift-giving practices as recorded, for example, in the Middle Irish (i.e. tenth–twelfth-century) Lebor na Cert (‘Book of Rights’),78 which frequently lists the giving of multiple sets of gaming pieces (as does Aonghus’s poem), along with other items, to Irish sub-kings. Such cultural and visual value attaching to sets of gaming pieces — helping to reinforce a family’s sense

74 For discussions of colour see Hall, ‘To you he Left’, pp. 222–29, and Hall, ‘Playing the Dark Side’. 75 Referred to in Oided mac nUisnig (The deaths of the sons of Uisnech) in the Glenmasan manuscript ‘in Cennchaom Conchobair … i. fithchell in righ’. ‘The “fair head” of Conchobar … i.e. the king’s fidchell set’. Cenn means ‘head, end, chief ’, caom has a range of positive meanings ‘dear, precious, lovely, fair, noble’. eDIL s.v. 1 cáem or dil.ie/7590; eDIL s.v. 1 cenn or dil.ie/8622. Oided mac nUisnig (The deaths of the sons of Uisnech) in the Glenmasan manuscript: Mackinnon, ‘The Glenmasan Manuscript’ vol. 1, pp. 105–06. 76 Hall, ‘Board of the Kings’, p. 169. 77 Hall, ‘Gaming, Material Culture and Hybridity’. 78 Dillon, ed., Lebor na Cert.

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of itself and the performance of its status and inter-family ties — would almost inevitably lead to their becoming heirlooms. References to the giving of sets plural signifies that quantity and multiplicity were important factors in elite status demonstration. A literary reflex of this is the reference to the fifty fidchell boards which left Scotland strapped to the backs of fifty lads in the description of the goods taken into exile by Cano’s entourage in the ninth-century Irish tale Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin (‘The Story of Cano Son of Gartnán’).79 While the latter example is clearly hyperbolic, and follows a very common pattern of intensification through fifty-fold multiplication, a key element of the hospitality provided by the later medieval Gaelic lord in his hall was the facilities for board-games, for which multiple sets could well be required.80 The Lewis hoard’s visual culture repertoire is rooted in high status and gift-giving. Its owners’ wealth is demonstrated though the use of luxury materials (ivory and whale bone), the application of colour (a luxury imported material), and the form the pieces took. In reality, this goes beyond visual culture and brings the totality of sensory engagement with materiality into play. A recent analysis has labelled the medieval model of perception and the senses (particularly with respect to the holy) the ‘hypersensorium’81 and reminds us of the need to think not just in terms of visuality but also of touch, taste, smell, and sound, and how they worked together, not least in the evocation of memory and acts of commemoration. Gaming pieces can readily speak to these issues. In the Early Modern Irish (i.e. thirteenth-century or later) tale, Altromh Tighi Da Medar (‘The nurturing of the house of the two (milk) vessels’), when Manannan enters Ealcmar’s hall he hears a number of noises, including foghar na ficheall aga fath-imirt, ‘the sound of fidchell being played’.82

Men and Birds: The Nature of the Pieces Pulliam has emphasized how unusual the Lewis pieces are within the European figural chess-piece tradition in lacking the typical attendant figures and architecture which impede physical contact between player and piece. Instead their minimalist design means the player touches each figure’s head or face ‘in an intimate and direct manner’ enhancing the identification between the player and their avatar on the board.83 The same could equally be said of 79 Binchy, Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin, at lines 35–36. 80 See, for example the stock motif of the hall of the absent Lord being Gun tàileasg, gun cheòl, ‘without (the game of) tables, without music’ in the poetry of Màiri Nic Leòid (c. 1615–1707), Watson, ed., Gaelic Songs of Mary MacLeod. 81 Jorgensen, Laugerud, and Skinnebach, The Saturated Sensorium. 82 Dobbs, ed., ‘Altromh Tighi da Medar’, pp. 194–95. 83 Pulliam ‘Avatars and Identity’.

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

Figure 2.5. Anthropomorphic stone gaming pieces, Shetland, fifth–seventh centuries. Left: Mail. Right: Scalloway. © National Museums of Scotland.

two much earlier gaming pieces from domestic sites in Pictish Shetland (at Scalloway and Mail, see Fig. 2.5) which date to the fifth–seventh century ce and a third, very similar, though unprovenanced and undated example now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, presumed, by comparison with the others, also to be Pictish.84 All three are conical stone pieces carved to represent a hooded figure who stares out impassively. The Oxford and Scalloway pieces each have three holes in the forehead/ scalp as if to receive a small metal plaque which may have served to mark the piece out as a ‘king’ (the piece from Mail lacks this feature). The Scalloway piece, which bears dark staining that may indicate a red colouration, is part of a diverse assemblage of gaming pieces which in addition to various flat and globular pieces includes three plain conical ones and a fourth cone decorated with a geometric design. Slightly earlier are the plain conical stone pieces from Tara, Co. Meath, and Dunbell Big, Co. Kilkenny, which date to the fourth–fifth centuries ce.85 Although the plain cones lack faces, or any other distinguishing marks, their tall, slim proportions are evocative of a human form, so they may perhaps be considered minimally anthropomorphic.

84 Mail – Cunningsburgh, Anonymous ‘Donations to the Museum’, p. 17; Scalloway – Wilson, and Watson ‘Conical Gaming Pieces’, pp. 174–75; both these and the Ashmolean piece (which is otherwise unpublished) are discussed in Hall, Playtime in Pictland, pp. 17–19. 85 Raftery, Catalogue of Irish Iron Age Antiquities, fig. 185, no. 614, 617.

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Conical pieces are otherwise rare in Europe, though a pottery piece of similar size and shape to the plain stone cones from Ireland and Scotland was found as part of an extensive assemblage of gaming equipment from Roman Barcelona (first–fourth century ce).86 The Scalloway, Mail, and Ashmolean figures stand out as precociously anthropomorphic, pre-dating figural chess-pieces and anthropomorphic Norse hnefi pieces by some three centuries. This is of note, given the strength of the anthropomorphism in both the Irish/Gaelic and Welsh literary traditions. Playing pieces are never referred to impersonally, or even inanimately, but are invariably referred to as ‘men’ (Irish/Gaelic fir), ‘people’ (Welsh gwerin), or an equivalent collective. The biological metaphor extends to other terminology: pieces are not ‘captured’ they are ‘wounded/slain’ (the verb is Old Irish gonaid).87 The most common Old Irish / Early Gaelic term for a set of playing pieces is foirenn, plural foirne, ‘group of people (often, though not necessarily, military), a crew, a troop’88 which is cognate with the usual Welsh term, gwerin, ‘a people’.89 There are also instances of sets of pieces being referred to in Early Irish/Gaelic as a muintir ‘family, household’,90 a usage exactly paralleled in the later use of Latin familia and vernacular maisnie or mesnie to describe chessmen in thirteenth-century French texts. The terms familia and maisnie were primarily used to describe the domestic household or permanent establishment of a ruler or noble, and their application to chess-sets supplies overtones of rank and hierarchy.91 Although pieces are never referred to in the Celtic texts by anything other than human terms there are hints of an alternative, or additional, avian, symbolism. In the late twelfth- or thirteenth-century Welsh Breuddwyd Rhonabwy the fate of the ‘men’ on the gwyddbwll board is supernaturally linked to the behaviour of Arthur’s squires towards Owain’s ‘ravens’. Bran, ‘raven’, is a frequent epithet or metaphor for ‘warrior’ in Brittonic tradition, but here the troops are literally ravens, attacking from the air. The interplay of metaphors here is complex but the name of the important Irish game brandub (‘raven black’) hints that in the Goidelic gaming tradition there were also corvinid associations, even if the precise reason for this name is opaque. A clue comes from the reference to fid … arggatbrain (wood(en board) of silver raven) in the ninth-century Rheichenau Schulheft charm Adgúisiu fid nallabrach, an obscure and imperfectly understood verse which McCone has

86 87 88 89 90 91

De Heredia Bercero From Barcino to Barcinoa, figs 15 and 16, p. 187. eDIL s.v. gonaid (or dil.ie/26387). eDIL s.v. foirenn (= dil.ie/22968), see further below. Geiriadur Prifysgol, s.v. gwerin. As in the Trial of Mac Teléne, see n. 58. eDIL s.v. muinter (= dil.ie/32754). Hence an inventory such as that of the goods of Beatrice, lady of Kortrijk (d. 1288) listed an ‘eschalier qui est dou testament monseigneur Rogier [de Mortagne, d. 1275] et est li maisnie aveuc’ (A chess board which is from the testament of my lord Rogier and the chessmen that come with it), Hall, ‘To you he Left’, p. 226; Vale, The Princely Court, p. 173, n. 37.

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

plausibly interpreted as referring to a board game.92 Here arggatbran appears to be an allusion to a playing piece, a ‘silver raven’. In later texts we find the derivative word branán as both a laudatory epithet for a chief and the name of the principle piece in hnefatafl and chess.93 Corroboration for the notion that gaming pieces might be ‘ravens’ comes from the recent recognition that a small wooden pin in the shape of a bird with raven-like characteristics, from Braughing, Hertfordshire, is, in fact, a pegged gaming piece (Fig. 2.6).94 This unique object was dredged from the river Rib and is thus without datable context, however, numerous late Iron Age and Roman period objects have been recovered from the area (which was the capital of the Catuvellauni in the first century ce and a Roman town following the Conquest). Given the body of finds of gaming equipment elsewhere in the territory of the Catuvellauni (discussed above), a date in the very late first century bce or the first century ce may be appropriate.95 The Shetlandic pieces, though humanoid, are so stylized as to be impersonal. In contrast, the range of figures in the Lewis hoard — kings, queens, bishops, and mounted knights — and the detail with which they are carved (especially their faces), combined with their colours and their use of proto-heraldry make them appear to be evoking real personages.96 In their imagery, they may be more representative of wider European ideas than the simply Scandinavian social hierarchies they are routinely hailed for. This seems particularly true of the seated king figures holding drawn swords across their laps. This is one of the key image poses in the cult of Charlemagne, associated with its manifestations in both Aachen and Zurich.97 It is not impossible for this reflex to have been incorporated into the Lewis figures, especially when one takes into account all of the chess sets in European church treasuries designated as ‘Charlemagne’ chess sets.98 Related imagery of the seated king piece may underlie the passage in the twelfth-century Welsh tale Breuddwyd Macsen Wledig (‘The Dream of Emperor Maxen’) in which Macsen, in a dream, first encounters Helen and her father, the king. All the trappings which Macsen sees in the king’s hall are made of the most luxurious materials, as befits a dream-vision, including a

92 McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present, p. 207. 93 eDIL s.v. branán or dil.ie/6543. 94 British Museum Reg. 1976. 0101.1. We are grateful to Julia Farley, British Museum, for tweeting about this object and thus bringing it to our attention. The peg’s catalogue details can be accessed online at: http://britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/ colection_object_details.aspx?objectId=811791&partID=searchText=Braughing&page=1 Consulted on 14/12/2017. Identification as probable gaming piece confirmed on personal inspection by Mark A. Hall. 95 These issues are explored in greater depth in Forsyth, ‘Adgúisiu fid nallabrach’. 96 Hall, ‘To you he Left’, pp. 229–33. This is one reason for their popularity and impact on modern popular culture (see Caldwell and Hall, ‘The Hoard of Gaming Pieces from Lewis’). 97 A full discussion of this theme can be found in Koldeweij, ‘Pilgrim Badges’. 98 Hall, ‘To you he Left’, pp. 233–35.

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Figure 2.6. Pegged wooden gaming piece in the shape of a bird, possibly a raven. Later Iron Age or Roman period, Braughing, Hertfordshire, England. © British Museum.

silver gwyddbwyll board with gold pieces being used by two youths. The king himself is not playing, but sits carving gwyddbwll pieces: Ac ymon colofyn y neuad y gwelei gwr gwynllwyt y mywn cadeir o ascwrn eliphant. A delw deu eryr arnei o rudeur. Breichrwyfeu eur oed am y vreicheu. A modrwyeu amyl am y dwylaw. A gordtorch eur am y vynwgwl. A ractal eur yn kynnal y wallt. Ac answad erdrym arnaw. Clawr

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

o eur a gwydbwyll rac y vronn. A llath eur yn y law. A llifeu dur. Ac yn torri gwerin gwydbwyll. (And amidst the columns of the hall he saw a grey-haired man in a chair of elephant ivory, with the images of two eagles in red gold on it. There were gold bracelets on his arms, and many gold rings on his fingers, and a golden torque around his neck, and a golden frontlet holding his hair; and a noble quality about him. There was a gwyddbwyll board in front of him and a bar of gold in his hand, and with steel files he was carving gwyddbwyll pieces from the bar).99 Using a hard file on a rod of raw material seems an unlikely method for fashioning gaming pieces if the material is gold, but it would be a natural way of creating them from cetacean bone or ivory (possibly gilded? – see below and fn. 113), a more typical material for prestige sets in Medieval Wales.100 In the Welsh Law-Codes (most texts twelfth or thirteenth century but drawing on earlier material, perhaps as early as the tenth century) kings are depicted as providers of tawlbwrdd sets. The king is required to present a tawlbwrdd to each of the three most senior royal officials on their taking office. In return, the officers are expected to keep these for the rest of their lives and never part with them ‘by sale or gift’. It is stated that the judge of court is due a tawlbwrdd made from the ‘bone of a sea-animal’ (ascurn moruyl).101 The Welsh is potentially ambiguous — this phrase could mean whale-bone (i.e. a board) or walrus ivory (i.e. a set of pieces) but the former is perhaps more likely as other Welsh legal texts in Latin refer to the king having a board made of whale-bone.102 It is possible that the description of the king himself in Breuddwyd Macsen Wledig is meant to evoke a chess-king: the fact that he is said to be sitting on an ivory chair decorated with a pair of eagles, vividly

99 Roberts, Breudwyt Maxen Wledic; Davies, Mabinogion, pp. 103–11. For comparison, see the whale-bone gaming board from Birsay, Orkney (probably for gwyddbwyll rather than hnefatafl), and note the reference to the gift of a whale-bone or walrus-ivory board made to the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada in the Icelandic Króka-Refs Saga; Hall, ‘Board of the Kings’, p. 167; Curle, Pictish and Norse, pp. 89 and 110; Caldwell, Hall and Wilkinson, ‘The Lewis Hoard of Gaming Pieces’, p. 180. 100 In the thirteenth-century Latin translation of the Welsh laws, a king’s tawlbwrdd board is said to be made of whale bone and worth fifteen times as much as a wooden one, with antler and cow-horn examples being of intermediary value: ‘Taulborth … regis dimidium libre valet, et brecchan similiter. Taulborth (abacus) de ossibus marine belue lx denarius valet; si de cervinis cornibus xxiiii denarius; si de bovinis cornibus, xii denarius; si de lignis iiii denarios legales valet. Taulbort optimatis lx denarius valet, et brecchan (teges) similiter’, translation: A king’s tawlbwrdd is worth half a pound, and a brychan coverlet similarly. A tawlbwrdd (gaming board) of whale-bone is worth 60 pennies; if of antler 24 pennies; if of cow-horn, 12 pennies; if of wood is worth 4 pennies. The most noble tawlbwrdd is worth 60 pennies, and a brychan (covering) similarly, see Emmanuel, The Latin Texts of the Welsh Laws, pp. 127–28. 101 Williams, ed., Llyfr Iorweth, pp. 92. 102 See n. 100.

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calls to mind the Lewis chess-kings seated on their ivory thrones, some of which have backs decorated with interlaced beasts.103 Opposing sides in the Lewis hoard were red and white. In Sanas Cormaic (‘Cormac’s Glossary’) they are black and white.104 The metalwork sets mentioned in several Irish texts employ different materials for the two sides.105 For example, a poem glossing the word Nia in the eleventh-century Commentary on the seventh-century Amra Colmcille in Lebor na hUidhre (MS late eleventh/early twelfth-century) recounts the sending of the Fianna to find the legendary fidchell set of Crimthann Nía Nár: Fidchell Cremthaind Niaid Náir Nisbeir mac bec do leitáin: Leth a foirne d’ór buide Al leith aile d’[f]indruine Oén-fer di a fairind namma Nochrenad sech lánamna. (The fidchell set of Crimthann Nia Náir A small child could not carry it with one arm: Half of its troop [i.e. the pieces of one side] were of yellow gold, The other half of tinned bronze106 One man of its troop alone [i.e. a single piece] Would purchase six couples [i.e. six pairs from another set]).107 See also the description of the gaming set used by Medb in her game with Fráech in Táin Bó Fraích: Ba caín ind fidchell. Clár findruine and co cethéoraib auaib 7 uilneib óir. Caindel de líc lógmair oc fursunnud dóib. Ór 7 arggat ind fuirend boí forsin chlár. (Beautiful his fidchell set: the board was of tinned bronze, and the four ‘lugs’ and corners were of gold. A candle of precious stone provided light. Gold and silver were the pieces [lit. ‘troops’] on that board).108

103 Cf. the ivory chess-queen, from Clonard, Co. Meath, very similar in style to the Lewis examples, though with an iron spike for a pegged board, who is seated on an ivory throne decorated with a pair of intertwined lions, Ryan, ed., Treasures of Ireland, p. 189, cat. 91. 104 dub 7 find forri ‘black and white (are) on it’. Russell, Arbuthnot, and Moran, Early Irish Glossaries Database, Online: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge. URL: . 105 The Welsh descriptions, which tend to be less detailed than the Irish, sometimes state that the board is of gold and the pieces of silver (or vice-versa), losing the colour distinction between the sides. 106 A convincing argument that findruine is tinned bronze, rather than other possibilities (e.g. electrum) is set out by Whitfield, ‘Findruine’. 107 Stokes, Three Irish Glossaries, pp. liii–liv, and xxxvii–xxviii. 108 Meid, Táin Bó Fraích, lines 82–127 (translation slightly modified).

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

The set comprises two sides of pieces made or decorated with the two most precious metals (gold and silver), playing on a board made of the third most precious (findruine ‘tinned bronze’) which is itself embellished with projections (literally ‘ears’, cf. Scottish English ‘lugs’) and corners (literally ‘elbows’) of gold. The whole is illuminated by the light emitted from a candle made of precious stone, which is so bright that the players cannot tell night from day and scandalously continue playing non-stop for three days and nights. Fráech has received his fidchell set, like the rest of his equipment, from his maternal aunt Bóand, who is one of the síd (Otherworld, or ‘fairy’) people. For this reason the audience would expect it to be superlative, which it is, but informed analysis shows the detailed description to be grounded in the reality of a material culture of gaming with which the audience would be intimately familiar.109 Details described in the Táin Bó Fraích passage have parallels in extant examples of gaming equipment rendered in humbler materials. References to gold and silver playing pieces are indeed implausible if this is taken to imply solid gold and silver, however, there is nothing far-fetched in the notion of pieces decorated in these materials. The author may have had in mind deluxe versions of the kind of pieces recovered from Swallow Island, Lough Sewdy, Co. Westmeath, now on display in the National Museum of Ireland, which are made of bone but decorated with substantial bands and knobs (and lethal looking pegs!) of copper alloy (Fig. 2.7).110 The great Irish antiquarian George Petrie (1790–1866) describes in a letter what appears to be two early medieval pegged playing pieces (‘ancient chessman’) which he had been gifted by a fellow antiquarian, both sadly now lost. He states that one of them is ‘silver-headed’,111 (cf. Margaret of France’s pieces of exotic woods ‘bound with silver tallies’, discussed above, note 68). Gold is indeed rare from early medieval Ireland, but literary characters such as Medb and Fráech are at the apex of the social system. Their historical counterparts were the people who wore the silver-gilt ‘Tara’ brooch and received mass from the equally spectacular Ardagh chalice or Derrnaflan paten.112 Surely, members of this layer of society are likely to have played fidchell with pieces equally as lavish as these masterpieces of Irish metalwork. Parallels can be cited from neighbouring, contemporary polities in Anglo-Saxon England

109 As has been demonstrated in the case of the description of decorated lyres which immediately follows the fidchell scene, Whitfield, ‘Lyres Decorated with Snakes’. 110 NMI 1982. 6.1–6.21. The 21 items were found during illegal metal-detecting and remain unpublished. In the absence of scientific analysis, it is not possible to say whether the bronze was tinned (i.e. findruine) or indeed gilded. The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies for the specially commissioned photograph reproduced here. 111 Stokes, The Life and Labours, p. 304. 112 Moss, ed., Art and Architecture in Ireland; ‘The “Tara” Brooch’, pp. 415–17; ‘Ardagh Chalice’, pp. 261–62; ‘Derrynaflan Hoard: The Paten’, p. 263.

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Figure 2.7. Bone playing pieces with decorative copper alloy fittings, including pins for use on a perforated board. Viking Age, Lough Sewdy, Co. Westmeath, Ireland. With kind permission of the National Museum of Ireland.

Figure 2.8. Two of the gilt ivory gaming pieces from mound grave 1, Fyrislund, Uppland, Sweden. © Arkeologikonsult.

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

and Vendel Sweden. In both instances there are pieces of gilded bone and ivory from elite burials — the former, a princely mound at Taplow, Bucks., and the latter a recently excavated nobleman’s mound at Fyrislund, Uppland (south of Gamla Uppsala: Fig. 2.8).113

Other Gaming Equipment Surviving boards are very few. The most famous is, of course, the tenth-century carved yew board from Ballinderry crannog, Co. Offaly, which features two projecting handles: one plain, the other, larger, in the form of a human head (Fig. 2.9).114 A matched pair of projections decorated with a cruciform/floral motif, featured on the now lost wooden board from Knocknaboy, Co. Antrim, and a flat, wedge-shaped handle, with a single perforation survives on the fragmentary twelfth-century board from Waterford.115 It is not clear whether these lugs were for carrying, suspension during storage, indicating the turn of play, or for holding pieces temporarily removed from play. Contemporary wooden boards from Scandinavia, like the Iron Age British examples referred to above, were typically bound with metal strips,116 which may be what the author means by four golden ‘corners’ (literally ‘elbows’), though note that the wooden corners of the Knocknaboy board are decorated with a simple lentoid motif, so perhaps an ornamental mount is implied. Scientific measurement of light levels within modern round-house reconstructions has shown that people sitting on the floor by the fire at the centre of an early medieval Irish round-house could have sufficient light from it to carry out quite intricate craft activities, such as the threading of a needle. The best light available is at c. 1 m above the floor, just the level of a seated person’s eyes.117 Thus sitting round the fire was an optimum location to get good light for playing board games. That this was typical is further suggested by the reference in the

113 The Taplow mound was excavated in 1883 and Webster’s more recent evaluation of the whole wealthy assemblage suggests the incumbent may have been a Kentish sub-king. The pieces were initially recorded as being laid out on a board but nothing of this survives. For the excavation see Stevens, ‘On the Remains’. For the gaming pieces see Youngs, ‘The GamingPieces’, pp. 853–74. For the re-evaluation see Webster, ‘Taplow Burial’. The Fyrislund mound was excavated in 2016 and contained the cremated remains of a man and a child. Of fifty gaming pieces, twenty retained traces of gilding. It has been initially published in Jakobsson, Lindbolm, and Lindwall, Husfruar, bönder och Odenkrigare, pp. 126–27. 114 Hencken, ‘A Gaming Board; Wallace and Ó Floinn, Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland, p. 231 and pl. 6: 22; Graham-Campbell, Viking Artefacts, p. 23. 115 Hurley, Scully, and McCutcheon, Late Viking Age and Medieval Waterford, pp. 592–94 and fig. 16:14.1. 116 Hall, ‘Board Games in Boat Burials’, Table 1. 117 O’Sullivan and Nicholl, ‘Early Medieval Settlement Enclosures’, p. 78 n. 81, citing Nicholl, ‘The use of domestic space in early medieval roundhouses’, p. 29.

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Figure 2.9. Carved yew gaming board from Ballinderry crannog, Co. Offaly, Ireland, tenth century. With kind permission of the National Museum of Ireland.

Reichenau Schulheft charm to playing idir teine agus balla, ‘between fire and wall’.118 The archaeological record of the Western Isles affords several mid-first millennium ad examples of gaming kit found in the hearth areas of house interiors, notably the five dice found in the ashy deposits of the hearth at Dun Cuier, Barra, conjuring up for the excavator long winter nights of entertainment

118 McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present, p. 207. Though note there are also references in other texts to the playing of board games in the daylight, either in tents, or in the open.

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

by the fire.119 The ability to withdraw to a more private part of the house to play, as Medb and Fráech do, is a mark of status, not least because that requires an alternative, potentially expensive, source of light. In their case, their board is self-illuminating because it is fitted with líic logmair ‘precious stones’, which not only reflect light, but actually emit it in the dark. The same is said of the board in Tochmarc Étaíne, every angle (cacha hairdi) of which is illuminated with líic logmair.120 As Whitfield has shown, the literary motif of líic logmair is of ultimately classical origin (from lapis pretiosa) and probably refers to settings of glass, amber, or quartz. Of course, decorative studs of this sort could not really emit light, but they would certainly reflect it, and deluxe boards would sparkle in the firelight.121 So well-known was the motif of the self-illuminated fidchell board that it was satirized in the much later Siabhradh Sídhe agus Innéirghe Mhic na Míchomhairle (‘The Fairy Enchantment and the “Risings” of the Ill-Counselled Youth’), a late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century ‘burlesque of the Irish heroic tradition’. The giant’s táifleasc (‘backgammon table’) is described as follows: ‘it had two tinned bronze boards, an emerald cover, and points of beautiful ivory, with a carbuncle stone so that a blind man without eyes would (be able to) play on the night of a new moon because of the amount of light coming from it’.122 The importance of good light for play, is further reflected in a third instance of a board fitted with its own light source, albeit of a different sort, mentioned in Reicne Fothaid Canainne. While still wondrous, the description of the board is again nonetheless grounded in reality: Leath a foirne ór buidhe | alaile is fiondruine, | a hindech do margarét, | brecht la certa cía rét. || Ceitheroir coinnle, soillsi bán | ní meirv forosnat a clár, | beuil inna tein, scél nád gó | ní randath na roidh meth au. (Half its pieces [lit. troops] are of yellow gold, | the others are tinned bronze; | its woof [i.e. inlay] | is of pearl. | It is a wonder of smiths how it was wrought. Four candles, a white light, | Not feebly do they illumine its board. | Grease in their fire (no false story!) | The colour in their fat rú123 does not stain red a ‘lug’).124 119 Hall, ‘Gaming, Material Culture and Hybridity’, p. 54; Youngs, ‘Excavations at Dun Cuier’, p. 304. 120 ‘clar n-airgid 7 fir óir | 7 fuursundadh cacha | airdo furri di líc logmair’, (A board of silver and men of gold | and every angle was illuminated with precious stones), Bergin and Best, ‘Tochmarc Étaíne’, p. 176. 121 Whitfield, ‘Lia logmar’, where she argues that the idea of gemstones that emit light comes from Pliny’s description of the carbunculus. 122 Lines 243–46. Cited by Doan, ‘Erotics of Backgammon’, pp. 36–37. 123 rú ‘a plant cultivated for red dye =?madder (Rubia)’, eDIL s.v. rú. Alternatively, perhaps lady’s bedstraw (Galium verum = Scottish Gaelic rù-Mhoire ‘St Mary’s rú’), the traditional red colouring agent in Double Gloucester cheese. 124 Meyer, ‘Reicne Fothaid Canainne’, stanzas 32–33. For the observation that it is the staining not the candles which is miraculous, see Nieheus ‘All the King’s Men?’

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What is miraculous about this board is not that it is self-illuminated with built-in candles, nor that these are very fancy candles dyed red, but rather that the normally messy candle-wax, does not in this case, cause the usual staining. The implication of this is that some boards may indeed have been designed to accommodate candles. The next verse of the Reicne refers to what was clearly a standard element of the gaming set: the ferbolg (literally, ‘man bag’) in which the pieces were kept together, ready for play, in an easily transportable form. Although no examples have survived archaeologically, the clustering of playing pieces within graves such as the Knowth ‘Gamblers’ Grave’, and the ninth-century Norse child grave at Balnakeil, Sutherland,125 suggests they had been contained in a bag made of an organic material, whether textile or leather, which had not survived. If one owned lavish pieces, it would make no sense to hide them away in a plain cloth bag, and so it is not surprising that the extant descriptions of the ferbolg suggest it could be lavishly decorated. According to the Reicne the ferbolg of this wondrous set, had an ‘opening [lit. “mouth”] adorned with gold’.126 This reference helps clarify another reference to an elaborate ferbolg which is said, in Tochmarc Étaíne, to be ‘fighi rond credumae’ which the text’s editor translated as ‘a man-bag of woven brass wire’.127 Scott argues that credumae actually means bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) rather than brass (an alloy of copper and zinc),128 and it is highly unlikely that the whole bag would have been made of metal wire.129 In fact, a rond is some kind of ornamental chain, specifically one ‘knitted or interwoven’ of metal and fighe is the normal term used to describe the action of a cerd (smith) making a chain, as in the legal triad which states that ability at interweaving a rond is one of the diagnostic skills which qualifies a cerd.130 In other contexts this word means ‘weaving’ or ‘plaiting’, but here it appears to refer to chainwork (perhaps ‘knitted’ by the so-called Trichinopoly technique, alternatively, formed by threading together individual links in the so-called loop-in-loop technique).131 Thus, a more accurate translation would be ‘with a knitted (or interwoven) chain of bronze’. Another reference to the rond comes in the list of the lawful contents of an iadach (‘jewellery bag’) which is identified in the twelfth-century glosses to the law-code 125 Batey and Paterson, ‘A Viking Burial at Balnakeil’, pp. 650–51. 126 ‘de ór imdernta a beúil’. 127 Bergin and Best, ‘Tochmarc Étaíne’, p. 176. 128 Scott, ‘Early Irish caér, iarn aithlegtha and crédumae’. 129 Niamh Whitfield, pers. com. 130 Meyer, The Triads of Ireland, Triad 121. Ó Corráin, Clavis Litterarum Hibernensium: Trecheng Breth Féni, no. 912, 1195–6. eDIL s.v. rond, ronn (or dil.ie/35532). 131 The two can be difficult to distinguish by eye although they are formed by quite different techniques. Trichinopoly involves ‘knitting’ a continuous wire into a chain (often in the form of a hollow tube). As the name suggests, loop-in-loop chain is formed from individual loops threaded together. These can form a flat panel, or, if multiple loops are used (e.g. three loops crossed over each other), then a solid tube is formed.

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

Bretha im Fhuillemu Gell (‘Judgments Regarding Pledge-Interests’) as a suitable object for a Queen or Lord’s wife to pledge.132 Further research is required to establish what exactly is referred to here. While a carrying chain is possible in both cases, Whitfield considers this less likely than the kind of fine chainwork evidenced on contemporary (i.e. eighth-century) Irish metalwork: e.g. the decorative panels on the Derrynaflan paten and the base of the Ardagh chalice, and the silver ‘plaited’ fastening chain attached by a hinge to the ‘Tara’ brooch.133 Whatever the precise form of the ferbolg’s rond, whether functional, decorative, or a combination of both, what should be envisioned is something very fine. The description of the ferbolg in Reicne Fothaid Canainne concludes with a striking reference to a special lock used to fasten it: A ferbolc, is amra sceúil | de ór imdernta a beúil, | glas forfácoibh fair in súi | náchun ursloicce nach dúi. (The bag for its pieces [lit. ‘its man bag’] (’tis a marvel of a story) | its opening [lit. ‘mouth’] is adorned with gold | the master [súi] has left a lock [glas] on it | which no ignorant person [dúi] can open).134 There are several archaeological examples of what appear to be simple closures for a ferbolg: the small bronze buckle from the Tarland hoard (see note 31), two small bronze rings from the Knowth burial (see note 34), and a beautiful walrus-ivory buckle from the Lewis gaming hoard (see note 71). None of these, however, fit this very specific description as they are not lockable. The word used in the Reicne is glas, the normal term for ‘lock, fetter, clasp, bolt’,135 however, this is no ordinary lock which could be opened by anyone in possession of the key. On the contrary, the opening of this lock requires a high level of special knowledge. The singular lock described in Reicne Fothaid Canainne is not a fantasy. On the contrary, it is paralleled in a class of objects known as Romano-Celtic mask puzzle locks, recently catalogued by Slocom and Sonneveld, which were used in the early centuries ce to provide re-usable tamper-evident seals on leather coin pouches (Fig. 2.10). These locks, many of which could be worn as rings when not in use, deployed three complex puzzles within a single padlock to provide what was a high level of security because ‘very few people — primarily owners of the padlocks — would have had any idea what to look for or how to find and solve the puzzles or even locate the miniature key needed to open the

132 Binchy, Corpus Iuris Hibernicii, 462. 19–477. 30; Hancock, O’ Mahony, Richey, and Atkinson, Ancient Laws of Ireland, v: Uraicecht Becc, pp. 377–423. We are grateful to Niamh Whitfield for this reference. 133 We owe these examples to Niamh Whitfield, to whom we are most grateful for generously sharing her unpublished research on rond fighe. 134 Meyer, Reicne, stanza 34. 135 eDIL s.v. 1 glas (or dil.ie/25995).

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Figure 2.10. Romano-Celtic mask puzzle padlock (working replica): open; securing a leather pouch; closed shackle. © The Slocom Puzzle Foundation.

padlock’.136 It is worth stressing how unusual the technology of RomanoCeltic mask puzzle-locks is, with their puzzle integrated into the decoration of the padlock, specifically the trick that the keyhole is concealed by a cover which can only be released by a hidden bronze latch. An ‘ignorant person’ would not know that such a latch existed, far less be able to locate it, and know that, to release it, one had to rotate it out of the housing in order to access the tiny bronze key. This ‘new and clever trick’ of the hidden latch is a Gaulish invention and is only ever found on mask-padlocks.137 According to Slocom and Sonneveld, Romano-Celtic mask-padlocks ‘predate the earliest previously known secret opening puzzle padlocks by more than 1200 years’.138 Forsyth has argued that it is likely that the author of the reicne knew of such an object, a remarkable heirloom survival of contact between early Ireland and the Roman Empire.139 To conclude the discussion of the ferbolg, we turn to a ‘man bag’ of a rather more literal sort which features in a remarkable tale preserved in The Annals of Clonmacnoise,140 an Early Modern English translation made in 1627 of a lost

136 137 138 139 140

Slocum and Sonneveld, Romano-Celtic Mask Puzzle Padlocks, p. 32. Slocum and Sonneveld, Romano-Celtic Mask Puzzle Padlocks, p. 25. Slocum and Sonneveld, Romano-Celtic Mask Puzzle Padlocks, p. 8. Forsyth, ‘Handpins and Puzzle-Locks’. Dumville and Grabowski, Chronicles and Annals of Mediaeval Ireland and Wales.

Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games

Irish chronicle which ends in 1408.141 The story relates to Gormflaith (d. 947), daughter of the Uí Néill high-king Flann Sinna, a historical person around whom a later literary persona was formed.142 It depicts the macabre fall-out of a fateful game of tables which Gormflaith played with her third husband Cerball mac Muirecáin, king of Leinster, murderer of her previous husband, Niall Glundub.143 Having killed Niall in battle, Cerball insults his memory by having the corpse’s testicles removed and the skin of the scrotum made into a ‘bagge’ ‘to keep tablemen in’ (i.e. a ferbolg). Having compelled Niall’s widow to marry him, Cerball compounds the insult during a game of tables by tricking her into unsuspectingly putting the ferbolg into her mouth when she loses a game to him. The king compounds the sexual insult by quipping that, ‘that now shee carried in her mouth, that shee received below diverse times before’ and reveals the truth, ‘whereupon she begot somewhat interiorly

141 Ní Dhonnchadha, O’Dowd, and Wills, Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol. 5, pp. 308–09; Annals of Clonmacnoise sub anno 936: ‘After that king Niall [Glúndub] was slain in the battle of Dublin by Danes and Leinster men, the king of Ireland caused privily kinge Niall’s stones [i.e. testicles, cf. Scottish Gaelic clach ‘stone’, ‘testicle’, also attested in informal Irish cloch] irreverently to bee cut off, and their cover to bee fleyed and conveyghed to his house of Naase, there to be kept as a monument to keepe tablemen in. After the death of kinge Níall, Queene Gormlaith married the k. of Leinster, whose name was Cerball mac Muirecáin, and upon a time as the kinge of Leinster and Queene Gormlaith were playeinge of tables in Naase aforesaid with condition ye whomsoever should loose the game should beare this bagge of tablemen in his mouth until hee had wonne one game, which fell that Queene Gormlaith lost the game, whereupon shee was driven to putt the bagge to her mouth, little knowing what itt was or meant, save onely that it was a bagge. The king seeing her in hand with the bagg, said bawdily, that now shee carried in her mouth, that shee received below diverse times before, and revealed unto her how this bagg was king Niall’s cover of his stones that he kept as a monument in despight of all Ulstermen, whereupon she begot somewhat interiorly grieved, concealed her griefe for a time, and sent privately to Muirchertach mac Néill, who came with a company of Lusty and choice Ulstermen, who clad themselves with cowhides, and lay in the king of Lynsters parcke at Naas neare his palace in their hides like cowes, to the end that the king upon sight of them, would take them for cowes, the king after he had gotten out of his bed looked out of the window of his palace, and seeing soe many cowes lye couchant in his park, as Muirchertach brought men out Ulster or the North to be revenged, and thinking they had layne there all night, hee fell in a rage, and went himself among the cowes, and was miserably killed. Muirchertach and his Ulstermen carried his bones with them to the north, and there artificially caused them to be made a payer of tables, which for a very longe time after was kept as a monument in the king of Ulster’s house, and of these cowhides Muirchertach was ever after during his life named Muirchertach of the Leathercoates’. We are most grateful to Kate Mathis for bringing this story to our attention. 142 Ní Mhaonaigh, ‘Tales of Three Gormlaiths in Medieval Irish Literature’. 143 Famously Gormflaith was married three times and this story concerns her second and third husbands, although the sequence in which they appear in the story is not the order in which she married them and indeed, although Cerball is here said to have killed Niall, the latter is known to have outlived the former by a decade. A marginal note in most manuscripts of this text suggests this inconsistency was known to the author, cf. Sanderlin, ‘Gormlaith ind Rígain’, p. 77.

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grieved’. Gormflaith bides her time before exacting revenge which is achieved when her son by Niall, Muirchertach, king of Ailech (d. 943), brings men from the north, and hides with them in the park in front of Cerball’s palace at Naas, Co. Kildare, each one covered by a cow-hide. Cerball, on rising sees what he takes to be cattle disturbing his green, rushes out in a rage to shoo them away and is killed. In the ultimate revenge, Muirchertach turns Cerball’s bones into ‘a payer of tables [i.e. the typical hinged bi-partite board on which tables was played], which for a very longe time after was kept as a monument in the king of Ulster’s house’. The escapade earns Muirchertach the sobriquet ‘of the leather-coats’. Dumville cites this entry as an example of the insertion of a saga-narrative into the Chronicle, a practice repeated elsewhere in this text and in two other Chronicle texts, and which Dumville characterizes as a ‘peculiarly eleventh century phenomenon’.144 Sanderlin has suggested that all three of the stories relating to Gormflaith in the Annals of Clonmacnoise, might have been derived from a lost saga entitled Serc Gormlaithe do Niall (‘The Love of Gormlaith for Niall’), which is named in the list of tales that professional poets were expected to know, preserved in the twelfth century Book of Leinster.145 If our story does indeed originate in the eleventh century, then the text’s seventeenth-century translator, Connell McGeoghegan, has substituted the name of a board game familiar to his contemporary audience (tables was popular in Ireland from the fourteenth century onwards) for what in the original text was probably fidchell or perhaps brandub.146 The story is told to explain Muirchertach’s nickname but is further tied to a physical object ‘kept as a monument’, which is invoked as a token of the tale’s veracity. Whether this is a fabrication or an actual object, known, at least by repute, to the author of the eleventh-century tale, is uncertain. The finer examples of late medieval and early modern wooden tables boards were often decorated with bone or ivory inlays. As Reicne Fothad Canoine, has shown, fidchell boards too could be imagined as being inlaid, although in that case, with pearl (see above). It is tempting to imagine that a gaming-board of this sort, in the possession of the Cenél nEógain, forebears of the O’Neills, Gaelic Ireland’s leading dynasty, had by the eleventeenth century accrued a tale linking it to their eponymous founder, Niall Glundub, king of Ailech and High-King of Ireland. Knowledge of the story of this object — a gaming set fit for a queen, made from a king — would add a certain frisson to play in the hall of Niall’s descendants, linking them to the heroic exploits of their forebears and reminding their adversaries of the fate of those who crossed them. 144 Dumville, ‘A Millennium of Gaelic Chronicling’, pp. 104–05. 145 Sanderlin, ‘Gormlaith ind Rígain’, pp. 77–78; Mac Cana, Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland. 146 The two terms are used interchangeably in the late seventeenth century Eachtra Mhélora agus Orlando (The adventure of Mélora and Orlando): do-chonnuirc fithcheal [= fidchell] … ar bord áloinn … do thóguibh an taibhfleasg [= táiplesc