Did Vikings Play Chess? What They Played Instead

No. During the Viking Age, usually dated 793 to 1066, the Norse strategy game was hnefatafl and its tafl relatives, played alongside dice games and Nine Men’s Morris. Chess reached Scandinavia around the twelfth century, after the Viking Age had ended, so the famous Lewis chessmen belong to the Vikings’ descendants, not to the Vikings.

The confusion is understandable. Hnefatafl gets sold as “Viking chess,” and the most photographed medieval game pieces in the North Atlantic are a chess set. But the dates don’t overlap.

What games did Vikings play?

The evidence comes mostly from graves, and it’s specific.

Hnefatafl and the tafl family. This was the Vikings’ game of skill: a king and his defenders in the middle, a larger attacking army at the edges. Grave Bj 581 at Birka in Sweden, a tenth-century burial dated by a coin to around 940 to 950, held a bag with 28 gaming pieces including a king piece, three dice, and the iron frame of a gaming board. A tenth-century grave at Baldursheimur in Iceland held a set with a carved whalebone king. The Viking board games page goes through more finds.

Nine Men’s Morris. The gaming board from the Gokstad ship burial in Norway, dated to around 900, is double-sided: a tafl grid on one face and a Nine Men’s Morris board on the other. So at least one Viking-Age owner wanted both games on the same plank.

Dice. The three dice in the Birka grave sat in the same bag as the gaming pieces, so whoever owned that set rolled as well as plotted.

Games we can’t name. Some boards and pieces match no known ruleset. Archaeologists find the equipment; the rules died with the players.

What’s missing from Viking-Age sites is chess. There is no securely dated chess piece from Scandinavia before the twelfth century.

When chess actually reached the North

Chess came to Europe from the Islamic world, most likely through Spain, in the ninth or tenth century. The earliest European text about it is a Latin poem from Einsiedeln Abbey in Switzerland, dated to around 997. From there it spread slowly north along trade and church routes.

The oldest chess piece found in the Nordic countries comes from Lund in Sweden and dates to the second half of the twelfth century, according to the Norwegian heritage institute NIKU. A carved antler knight excavated in Tønsberg, Norway, came from a thirteenth-century house. Old Norse called the new game skáktafl, and the second half of that word is tafl: the Norse filed chess as a new kind of the board game they already knew.

By the time chess pieces show up in Scandinavian ground, the Viking Age had been over for close to a century. The comparison of the two games’ ages is covered in more depth on is hnefatafl older than chess.

The Lewis chessmen aren’t Viking

The Lewis chessmen are the pieces most people picture when they hear “Viking chess.” They were found on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides in 1831. Most are walrus ivory, a few are whale tooth, and the usual view is that they were carved in Norway, probably Trondheim, between about 1150 and 1200. The hoard held 78 chess pieces, 14 plain “tablemen” for a backgammon-type game, and a belt buckle. Today 82 pieces are in the British Museum and 11 in the National Museum of Scotland.

That makes them Norse, and magnificent, but about a century later than the Viking Age. The warders biting their shields look like berserkers, which is part of why they get filed under Vikings. They were made for players in a medieval Norwegian world that had already swapped tafl for chess.

What about King Cnut’s chess game?

One story seems to put chess in Viking hands. Heimskringla, the history of the Norwegian kings written by Snorri Sturluson around 1230, says Cnut the Great quarreled with his brother-in-law Ulf Jarl over a chess game at Roskilde, after Cnut lost a knight and wanted to take the move back. Ulf was killed on Cnut’s orders at Christmas 1026.

The killing is history. The chess board is harder to trust. Snorri wrote two centuries after the event, when chess was the normal pastime of Norse nobles, and no chess find from Scandinavia comes close to 1026. Treat it as a thirteenth-century writer picturing an eleventh-century king the way he’d picture a king of his own day.

So why call hnefatafl “Viking chess”?

Because it filled the role chess fills now: the serious board game of skill, the one a nobleman could boast about. Even in the twelfth century, Earl Rögnvald Kali Kolsson of Orkney, in a verse preserved in the Orkneyinga saga, lists tafl first among his nine accomplishments. Mechanically the two games are very different, with unequal armies and a king who wins by escaping. The hnefatafl vs chess page sets them side by side, and you can play the Vikings’ actual game on the homepage.