The 1,000-year-old “king” piece from a Viking board game is one of the few depictions of a ruler from the Viking era, according to a new analysis.
“The figure is depicting a late tenth-century king,” Peter Pentz, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark, told Live Science. The piece dates to the reign of one of the most famous Viking kings, Harald Bluetooth (circa A.D. 958 to 986); and it was found within his realm, which included parts of southern Norway and Sweden.
But although it is from the right time and place, Pentz is careful not to claim that it depicts Harald Bluetooth himself. “I don’t say that this is a portrait of Harald,” he said in an email.
Harald was the son of the early Danish king Gorm “the Old” and was nicknamed “Bluetooth” because he may have had a discolored tooth, although the actual reason is unknown. His nickname is now used for a networking standard that unites different digital devices, just as he united parts of Scandinavia during his reign.
One of the figure’s most notable features is its intricate hairstyle — a middle part with a side wave that left the ears visible, and the hair cropped short at the back. It also has a large mustache, sideburns, and a long and braided goatee, according to a statement from the museum.
Most art from the Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066) featured intricate designs based on fantastical animals, like dragons, and the figure is one of the few known human depictions from that time, Pentz said.
“He is extremely detailed and he is so very expressive, displaying a mischievous — or even malicious — facial expression,” Pentz said.
Forgotten figurine
The figurine is just over 1 inch (3 centimeters) tall and carved from walrus ivory.
It was one of the first objects ever cataloged by the museum, in 1798, after it was discovered during excavations in the Viken region of southern Norway, a few miles west of Oslo. But it was placed in storage and forgotten until Pentz rediscovered it more than 200 years later.
“When I came across him in one of our storage rooms a few years ago, I was really surprised — he just sat there, looking directly at me, and I had never before seen such a Viking, not in the many years I’ve been at the museum,” Pentz said in the statement.
Image 1 of 2
Pentz determined that the figurine is the “king” piece from a game of Hnefatafl — sometimes called “Viking chess” — which was popular in Northern Europe before it was displaced by actual chess (which may have come from India or Iran) after the 12th century.
Several button-shaped game pieces made of bone were also found during the excavations, Pentz said. (No “board” was found, but a Hnefatafl board might have been carved on stone.)
Fashionable hair
The figurine is badly damaged, but its facial features and strange haircut are still clearly visible. Pentz suggested that such a hairstyle must have been fashionable among the elite during the Viking Age.
“It is exceptional that we have such a vivid depiction of a Viking,” he said in the statement. “This is a miniature bust and as close as we will ever get to a portrait of a Viking.”
The term “Viking” is an exonym (meaning something like “pirate”) first used by the English to describe Norse raiders along their coasts.
But only the Norse who lived near their own coasts may have engaged in such raids over the summer, so Norse people farther inland — including farmers, traders and artisans — should not be considered Vikings, archaeologist Neil Price wrote in his book “Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings” (Basic Books, 2020).
The Norse culture seems to have branched off from the Germanic culture as early as the fourth century, but archaeologists consider the “Viking Age” to have started with the raid on Lindisfarne in England in 793 and ended with the defeat of a Viking army at Stamford Bridge in England in 1066, just a few weeks before the Norman Conquest.