The Viking Ball Game

Knattleikr, literally “ball game,” is mentioned several times in the Icelandic sagas, but the references are generally brief and provide few details of how the game was played. During the last years of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, there was a great deal of interest in knattleikr. This resulted in several articles on the game, including those by Ebbe Hertzberg (1904) and Björn Bjarnason (1905, 1950).¹ Hertzberg suggested that knattleikr was related to lacrosse, an idea that has recently been brought to the attention of sports enthusiasts by George Fosty’s 2010 article, “Is Lacrosse Proof the Norse Reached the Great Lakes?” Björn Bjarnason’s book (1950), which includes his view of the game, has become the standard work on sports and games played by the Norse.²

Hertzberg wrote at a time in the history of lacrosse when Europeans may have been attracted to the idea that they were the original owners of that game. Although there is no strong evidence for a historical connection between the two games, recent research into lacrosse as it was played by Native Americans, provides parallels that help clarify some of the passages depicting knattleikr games in the Icelandic sagas. The resulting description of the game is slightly closer to Björn Bjarnason’s than to Hertzberg’s.

The impression one gets of knattleikr from the descriptions in the sagas, particularly Egils saga, Gísla saga, Grettis saga, and Eyrbyggja saga, is that it was violent and individualistic. Playing scenes focus on two to four players, and it is not unusual for someone to get hurt. John D. Martin accepts that these descriptions reflect real rules of play, arguing that “the saga compilers were writing as close to life as they could” (Martin 2003, 26). A brief knattleikr episode in ĺslendinga saga, thought to narrate contemporary events, suggests that the descriptions in the sagas represent play in the Middle Ages, when the sagas that include it were written down. Whether, and, if so, how, the game was played between c. 930 and c. 1030, the period depicted in most of the sagas that include knattleikr, is difficult to answer. Taken at face value, the sagas imply that the game was played during this period, but another source of evidence is needed for verification because these episodes could have been used for reasons other than historical accuracy, such as the creation of literary tension.

Martin goes on to compare the roles of sports and games in the sagas to the roles of Native American games and finds “striking parallels” between the two cultures (2003, 42). This comparison reflects Hertzberg’s earlier suggestion that lacrosse had its origin in knattleikr. According to Hertzberg, early Norse visitors taught the game to the people they came into contact with in Vinland, and those people continued to play it long after the Norse had left (1904, 210–20). This idea had an impact on Norse studies at the time. Fridtjof Nansen writes: “If Hertzberg is right in his supposition that the Indians may have got this game from the Norsemen, this would lend strong support to the view that the latter had considerable intercourse with America and its natives” (1911, 38).

Hertzberg’s idea is a product of his time. In the early twentieth century, Europeans were in the process of formalizing the rules of lacrosse and making the game their own. Attributing the game’s origin to Norse explorers allowed them a kind of justification for taking the game from the Native Americans. This fits in well with the recent work of Annette Kolodny (2012), which examines the importance of the idea that the Norse were the first Europeans in North America in the nineteenth century. Specifically, Kolodny describes how the popularity of the Vinland sagas and interest in the Norse discovery of North America influenced people in the northeastern United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In her view, the idea that the Norse had arrived in North America centuries earlier than Columbus allowed European settlers to justify the American Indian removals of...