Playing ball games is an activity played by children around the
world. While today’s parents might worry that their sons and daughters
might get scrapes and bruises, in the Viking world such a game could end
with an axe being driven into an opponent’s head.
This detail comes from a new article, ‘What the Vikings did for fun?
Sports and pastimes in medieval northern Europe’, which was published
last month in the journal World Archaeology. In it Leszek
Gardeła of the University of Aberdeen uses saga accounts and
archaeological evidence to see what men, women and children from
Scandinavia and Iceland amused themselves with during the Viking-era,
and found that their were several popular pastimes.
For example, a ball game called knattleikr was played, which
involved at least four men throwing a ball, chasing and running, and
sometimes also involved a bat. Gardeła relates that in the saga of Egill
Skallagrimsson, a game was arranged that brought people from around the
district to watch. The story goes that “Egill, who must have been under
12 years old, was competing against an 11-year-old boy named Grımr, who
seems to have been much stronger. At some point Egill lost his temper
and struck his opponent with a bat, but was immediately seized and
dashed to the ground. After complaining about these events to his friend
Þorðr Granason, Egill took an axe and drove it into Grimr’s head.”
