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## The Gaming Set: A Contested Interpretation
Among the objects in Bj 581, the gaming set has attracted particular attention and particular controversy.
The set consisted of twenty-eight pieces — including a king piece marked with an iron nail — three antler dice, and an iron board frame. It was recovered from a bag that, per the 2017 paper’s supplementary material, was positioned in the deceased’s lap. The board itself was propped beside the body.
The researchers’ interpretation of this assemblage invoked the use of gaming sets in high-status contexts in the Viking Age. Such games — the name *hnefatafl* is associated with one type of tactical board game played in early medieval Scandinavia — were not casual entertainment in the way modern board games might be understood. They were associated with strategic reasoning, with military planning, with the kind of decision-making that commanders were expected to demonstrate. The researchers argued that the gaming set in Bj 581, positioned specifically in the occupant’s hands or lap as if she held it, was consistent with an individual whose social role involved strategic command.
Judith Jesch criticized this interpretation as speculative. The gaming set could signal high status without indicating military command. It could reflect the preferences of those who buried the individual, the social conventions of the burial, or any number of other meanings that the material record cannot distinguish.
Both positions are defensible. The gaming set is evidence for something — it signals status, it signals participation in elite culture, it signals something about how those who buried this person wished her to be understood. Whether it signals specifically military command is an inference that the physical objects support but do not confirm.