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Hnefatafl, The Viking Game

Hnefatafl is an ancient board game that we date to the Vikings. It is like chess but different. Chess is symmetrical in pieces and in aim whilst this game is asymmetrical with each player attempting to achieve a different goal.

White represents a king and his bodyguard who are ambushed by black. White must escape whilst black wants to capture him. If black can surround him on four sides he is captured. If he escapes to the corner square he escapes. The kings side has warriors and a king whilst the ambushers are only represented by warriors.

Pictured is myself and a friend playing in the War Memorial Park in Coventry. We had several games and it was all fun because I won.

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The Phil Silvers Archival Museum, Coventry

One of the best museums in Coventry is the Phil Silvers Archival Museum situated in Fargo Village. Fargo is home to a number of great shows, a fantastic barber shop and one of the smallest museums in the world. Size really has very little to do with the success of a museum. I have been to some huge, famous and well funded museums that have left me cold. The Phil Silvers museum is clearly a labour of love that rewards a visit and return visits.

If you are anything like me you grew up watching Bilko on the tv or remember Silvers from his appearance in Carry on “Follow that Camel”. He was a fantastic comic actor whose Phil Silvers show ran for a record breaking forty nine years. Modern admirers include Mark Hamill, Phil Jupiters and many others.

The collection itself is donated largely by the Silvers family and contains personal and professional objects associated with Silvers. These are lovingly displayed in a professional but not cold modern style allowing the visitor to discover them personally making visiting an intimate experience. It’s this personal, intimate and authentic experience that makes the display so effective putting it on a par with the Blitz museum and maybe even the Lunt.

Opening hours are 11am to 5pm Wednesday to Sunday.

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Just how much of my life have I forgotten…

Daily writing prompt
What details of your life could you pay more attention to?
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I often chide myself for my lack of mindfulness. Last month I was on holiday in Sorento and now I can only remember snippets of my week. I think to myself, did I really just wander around one of the most attractive places in the world not paying attention?

As most of you know I teach the Stone Age in schools and I pretty sure that our hunter gatherer ancestors were far more observant and in the moment than we are. I can hardly remember which schools I was at last week, hunter gatherers in contrast must have held enormous and complicated maps in their heads remembering where useful and fruitful trees were, where the animals went and where the dangers lay. It makes me ashamed to be wandering around like a mindless fool compared to them.

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Having nothing and losing nothing…

Daily writing prompt
What would you do if you lost all your possessions?
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Archaeology is the science (sic) of things. It is a science of material that is lost, thrown away or placed on purpose in an inaccessible place. From the thing and its context a narrative can be created that sheds light on the past. I have done archaeology but prefer the historical activity of creating the narrative more.

Archaeology works best when you are dealing with a materialistic society. It is easier to draw conclusions when there is a lot of material to work with such as the grave of an Anglo-Saxon king or even a Anglo-Saxon peasants burial. These contain the remains and grave goods. Societies that don’t bury their dead with grave goods are far more tricky not least if you draw the conclusion that more grave goods means that the person was richer. Consider the grave of Medieval Christian knight verses the grave of the afore mentioned peasant.

If I lost all my possessions today I would be on a par with our earliest ancestors in the Palaeolithic era. These people were nomadic hunter gatherers who followed the seasons and the herds through the landscape. They pose a significant challenge to archaeology because they were a non-materialistic throw away society. First they were non-materialistic because they were nomadic. They needed to travel light and could not be encumbered with material possessions. Second they were a throw away society in that if they needed a flint tool they could pick up a nodule of flint, knapp a tool and then after it had been used throw it away. In fact at Boxgrove we can see where they knapped a handaxe, where it was used and where it was discarded afterwards. They were a throw away society to such an extent that stone tools are regularly found and in such numbers that museums are not interested in collecting them!

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Just to be productive…

Daily writing prompt
What’s your #1 priority tomorrow?
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Jesus said “do not worry about tomorrow because it has its own problems…” and that is sound advice. Tomorrow like today will have a leaky boiler, a car to charge up, clothes to wash and food to make so Ill take the Lords advice and not worry about it.

All I want from tomorrow is that I won’t doom scroll on my phone, waste time watching nonsense tv or sit around doing nothing. I hate wasting time, I’ve wasted enough time in my life and now I don’t want to waste another minute.

So to square the advice and embrace my ambition my number one priority for tomorrow is to be productive. To leave the world a little bit better tomorrow night than I found it tomorrow morning.

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If I could learn anything…

Daily writing prompt
What skill would you like to learn?
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My great regret from my school days is not paying attention in school. I do not know where it came from but the idea of paying attention, doing homework and trying hard was lame and though I was never a bad boy I was one who did not engage with my education.

Undiagnosed dyslexia certainly had something to do with it but I had certain blocks and barriers that prevented me from taking my work seriously. I hated maths, disliked English and was uninterested and unmoved by geography and languages which I now heartily regret.

I regret not engaging with my German lessons, not doing my homework or practicing. Somewhere along the line I got the idea that it wasn’t interesting or important. Not least that any German who I met spoke English much better than I an English speaker could. Now in my forties I recognise that my life is lesser because I can only speak one language fluently. I see now the value of other languages and have started very tentatively to work on my German, Latin and Old English.

This is obviously a professional decision because one of the topics I study is Old English and both Latin and Old English will support that.

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An odd old story about the Old Grammar School

As you all know I am a historian. Part of this involves going to archives and researching. Long before the pandemic I was interested in the Black Death in Coventry.

So I went to the Coventry archives to see what documents they held and discovered that others had done the work for me. The documents relating to the Black Death were well known and commented on.

One set really caught my eye. They were legal documents from 1347 detailing two cases. The first was squatters in houses rented by Eleanor of Aquitaine (yes her, she lived in Coventry) who refused to pay their rent. The second related to the Master of the Hospital (yes those Knights) which was housed in the building where the Old Grammar School is now. One day the Master had been bringing supplies into the city when he was accosted by Richard Prior of the Cathedral and certain Council members who assaulted the Master and stole his supplies.

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The Sea Peoples

The Bronze Age was a good time to be alive, it comes after the Neolithic Stone Age and the invention of farming. Populations increased and monuments that amaze us to this day such as Stone Henge were created.

Meanwhile in the Middle East we see the first great civilisations. On Crete we see the Minoans, mainland Greece the Mycenaean civilisation, we further east we see the Hittites, Canaanites and the powerful kingdom of Egypt. These civilisations throve in an atmosphere of peace and war. They traded together, cross pollinated each others culture and arts and regularly engaged in warfare. This is the age of the chariot, the heroic champion and the famous Trojan war.

This state of affairs continued and must have seemed like normal life. Harvests were collected, kings and queens ruled and wars rumbled on until a series of catastrophes caused what is known as the Bronze Age Collapse during the 12th century BC. First there was a super volcano explosion on the island of Santorini and Helka III on Iceland caused a volcanic winter that brought famine to Egypt and by extension to the rest of the northern hemisphere. Failing crops caused unrest and social collapse as well as greater conflict amongst the civilised states. Furthermore we see migrations of the Dorians in Greece and the infamous Sea Peoples from the ‘west’.

When I teach the Bronze Age Collapse I joke that the Sea Peoples are a little bit like ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ we don’t know where they come from and we don’t know where they go. They are mysterious and sweep in from the west and plunder the east. The eastern powers already under strain from climate catastrophe and earthquakes are destroyed. The Sea Peoples then continue to move west and potentially pick up collaborators from amongst the Greeks. The Hittites send pleading messages to the Egyptians for help but they and the Canaanites fall to the pressure. It is only the Egyptians who are able to stand against them, resist them and even defeat them. Never one to let an opportunity pass the Egyptians then may have settled the survivors in Israel as a client state to protect the Egyptians trade routes to the Red Sea and onto the Indian subcontinent.

So why did the Sea Peoples destroy Bronze Age Greece its because their descendants would be known as the Philistines of Biblical fame and archaeology of the earliest Philistines does show Greek pottery. Its fun to imagine that Golliath of Gath might have been the Great, great grandson of a Greek hero like Agamemnon.

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When you roll into bed aching and exhausted having given everything and think… that was awesome!

Daily writing prompt
In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled?
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One of the questions on Alpha Course is ‘what makes you happy?’ It is a very important question and one that we should ponder. Happiness, since the 19th century, has been seen as a primary good in itself. Happiness and the pursuit of happiness appears in the US constitution. It is fundamental to the modern concept of the good life.

This is not the first time I have blogged about private experiences but I think that this topic is too important to avoid. What makes me happy? The alternative is unhappiness and in my life I have been unhappy and know what that feels like. Its not good and I would say that it is not the intended human condition. In fact the feelings associated with unhappiness are intended to get you out of the situation that is making you unhappy. In contrast the feelings associated with happiness make you want to wallow in it, delight in it and be the proverbial pig in it. When I am happy I feel smooth, quick and clever. I am more myself (EDIT: My wife would like me to add that I am also much easier to live with!)

So what makes me happy. Lets look at literature for an example. I think the happiest people in literature are the Hobbits. A profound creation by JRR Tolkien. The Hobbits contrast with the Ratlings from Warhammer 40K in that they do not live hedonistic promiscuous lives but contented lives that focus on ‘growing food and eating it’, they keep the law because its the law and as Thorin says at the end of The Hobbit if more people loved cheer than horded gold the world would be a merrier place. This is not to say that the Hobbits are merely drunken, gluttons obsessed with food they are also strong and resilient.

My take away from this is that to be happy the individual should enjoy their work and the benefits of their work. The Hobbits liked the view of a well cultivated field not just, I suspect, for the eating later on but out of an appreciation of the hard work that had gone into taking a field, harrowing it, seeding it, cultivating, weeding and watering it until that barren land becomes fertile. And that is what makes me happy, I love hard work and a good solid result. I remember making my wife’s wedding ring as part of a workshop on the Valentines day before our wedding. It took all day and transformed scrap gold into a shiny new ring by my effort (and the jewellers skill).

So I admit it, what makes me happy is being like a Hobbit. I want to be strong enough to maintain my little hill of beans and strong enough to keep it. That involves hard work and determination in everything I do. From chopping wood for the fire, battling the brambles and ivy that threatens to take over my garden to working hard during the day and coming back to a meal with my family.

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The tyranny of Money

Daily writing prompt
List three jobs you’d consider pursuing if money didn’t matter.
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In Babylon 5 there is an amazing line. I do not know the character but he’s played by the same actor who played Chekov from Star Trek and he is a baddy. He says “being a freedom fighter is great, but it doesn’t pay” or words to that effect. This is one of the great laws of the universe. If playing Fortnight, lego or writing blogs paid the bills we could do it forty hours a week or more. Alas they do not but lets imagine a world where the bills are paid and I can do whatever I like.

One unpaid job that would be lots of fun would be a professional “church crawler”. Sounds odd doesn’t it? But in fact it would involve visiting old building and looking at them. I could look at the stained glass, the carvings and all the other ancient and interesting features of the church. In real life this is something that I do. One day I discovered that a church near where I grew up had meisercords that were unknown to scholarship. I hightailed it back to Cheshire and went to see them and found that the cheap Warborton family had installed blank meisercords.

Another fun job would be hotel inspector. I am sure that they do have quality assurance people who check the quality of hotels but I bet they are a subspecies of the spreadsheet people. In my world these hotel inspectors would go on holiday to hotels and would rank hotels in the same way people rank wines.

The ultimate job would be a blog writer. If I could spend my time just researching and writing blogs I would be a very happy man.