-Poul Anderson, War Of The Gods (New York, 1999), I, p. 10.
Did the Aesir also play chess? I have read elsewhere that they did and Neil Gaiman presents an elaborate account of the finding of golden chess pieces, modeled on the gods themselves, after the Ragnarok. However, Gaiman's source, the Gylfaginning, says only:
They find in the grass those golden tables which the asas once had.
-copied from here.
(An "as" is a god. "Aesir" is the plural.)
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I seriously and strongly doubt any Scandinavians had any knowledge of the game of chess before the early to mid eleventh century. Unless some members of the Varangian Guard came across the game before then. HJR Murray, in his A HISTORY OF CHESS (1913) does not think chess reached the British Isles (and by extension, Scandinavia) before about AD 1050. His arguments seems convincing to me, altho I can imagine chess reaching these regions a bit earlier.
Sean
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