Crossing Frontiers – board games, the players, and their instruments of play in Late Iron Age and early medieval Ireland
Bernadette Sharkey
Abstract:
Board games have been played in Ireland for at least two thousand years, almost three millennia after they were invented in Egypt and the Near East. During the early medieval period, board games appear to have been played mostly by the elite, as attested by both material and literary evidence. A variety of gaming objects, including gaming pieces, dice and gaming boards, have survived in a variety of materials in many different contexts, including crannógs, rivers, gardens, burials, burial mounds, houses and raths. The Norse, in particular, produced very fine gaming pieces made from a range of materials, including whale bone and walrus tusk, which have survived in various archaeological contexts. In early Irish narrative literature, board games are mentioned frequently in tales from the Mythological Cycle, the King’s Cycle, the Ulster Cycle and the Fenian Cycle, as well as in the early Irish law tracts. Knowledge of the rules of play, however, is scant, and relies on literary references, which can be rather vague.
The aim of this project is ultimately to seek out the nature of evidence for the playing of board games in Late Iron Age and early medieval Ireland. It will consider the circuitous route taken by board games before reaching Ireland around the turn of the last Millennium BC, aided undoubtedly by contact with the Roman world and the flow of new ideas into the country. It will consider in what way the adoption of board games in Ireland was facilitated by direct links with Britain and Scandinavia and how styles, materials, and playing strategies may have been part of the cultural transfer. It then aims to contextualise the playing of board games in Iron Age and early medieval Irish society and to consider how the functioning of society facilitated the emergence of board games as an activity for the elite. It will examine how literary references reveal significant details about the rules of play, who the players were, what gaming pieces looked like, and the importance of board games as an elite pursuit in early medieval Ireland. The final sections will survey and discuss the materiality, influences and biographical trajectories of a selection of gaming objects found in various archaeological contexts in Ireland, followed by a comprehensive catalogue of early medieval Irish gaming pieces, dice and gaming boards.