if you or any of your latin students are interested, there is a lovely manuscript depicting a poorly understood version of hnefatafl called alea evangelii. I have been unable to find a complete translation of all the annotations on and around the very enigmatic diagram of the board, and I have a hope that they may shed some light onto the hnefatafl game in general, and its links to Ludus latrunculorum in particular. The full manuscript can be viewed in high resolution here:

MS. 122 'The Corpus Irish Gospels', 12th century.

http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=corpus&manuscript=ms122

The page showing the game board is about 5 pages in.

I have read that it is an esoteric text using the game as a metaphor for the gospels. However, I suspect that with some clever reverse engineering we who have played the game for many years might find some hints for game play and rules.[/quote]

Hello everybody,I subscribed to this forum mainly because I have an interested in the Alea Evangelii game. I am certainly interested in the subject proposed by Adam!

First of all, I must say that I am not a game expert and I am completely new to tafl games. I have an interest in ancient allegories and in particular in allegorical games, above all games with Christian symbolic meaning. I have read what I have found online about the Alea. Of course, the best resources are the [url=http://image.ox.ac.uk/show-all-openings?collection=corpus&manuscript=ms122]manuscript[/url] and its [url=http://tafl.cyningstan.org.uk/page/188/alea-evangelii-latin-text]transcription[/url] and [url=http://tafl.cyningstan.org.uk/page/167/alea-evangelii-text]translation[/url]. Another resource that I greatly appreciated is “The greatest hnefatafl”, a 2010 paper by Andrew Perkis published in the bulletin of the British Chess Variant Society:[url=http://www.mayhematics.com/v/vol8/vc63.pdf]3Variant Chess issue 6[/url], pag.5 (numbered 145).

A few notes confirmed by Perkis' paper:• the manuscript has been forced into a standard tafl game, which is only partly justified by

the text and the diagram in the manuscript;• the manuscript provides a very detailed description of how the pieces on the board are to be

assigned to the four evangelists, but attackers and defenders are mentioned only briefly ([i]Ifany one would know this game  fully, before all the lessons of this teaching he must thoroughly know these seven: to wit, dukes and counts, defenders and attackers, city and citadel, and nine steps twice over[/i]);

• the assignment of the pieces to the four evangelists is also detailed in the diagram by the complex but detailed notation of one, two, three, four dots associate to each piece;

• the diagram in the manuscript contains some minor errors with respect to the content of the written text.

It is possible to reconstruct the logic by which 67 pieces are associated to each of the four evangelists through the Eusebian canons (or Eusebian tables). The elegance of this design is noteworthy (at least for my interest in weird ecclesiastic speculations) but the most important effect

of it is reproduced in the dot patterns on the manuscript board. To these 67 pieces, four more pieces are added (the “varios viros” or “variegated men”, which an inscription at the left of the board labels as related to the passion of Christ ([i]significat haec figura in alea passionem christi[i]): they are assigned to Mark and John (two pieces each). A last piece (which I marked in white) is not assigned to any of the evangelists. Each corner and each side of the board is assigned to one of the evangelists.

I am very interested in reading more on the subject and your opinions of this wonderful ancient document.

Here I have colored the pieces according to the assignment to the evangelist as described in the text and labeled by the dot patterns in the diagram.