Did the Anglo-Saxons Play Games of Chance? Some Thoughts on Old English Board Games
Keyword(s):
H J R Murray, the distinguished board games historian, stated categorically in 1952 that the popular Germanic game of tæfl (more specifically referred to in a ninth- to twelfth-century Norse context as hnefatafl), a game entirely of skill, was the only board game played in Anglo-Saxon England. But Old English literary evidence might pose a challenge to Murray's thesis, and could be taken to suggest that the English also played games of chance (perhaps even tabula, an ancestor of backgammon) in the first millennium AD.