Alea evangelii
Alea evangelii
- Alea evangelii (Game of the Gospels** where it is given a Christian scriptural context, the game is played on the intersections of an 18 by 18 squares game board (i.e. a board identical to a standard 19 × 19 grid board for playing [[go-(game)|Go]]). This is larger than that of most *tafl* games.
The manuscript, Corpus Christi College ms. 122 (folio 5 verso), attempts to give scriptural meaning to a hnefatafl variant, and, though the layout is unwieldy, its proportions are also found in a game board fragment unearthed at Wimose on the Danish island of Funen.
The manuscript is written in an Irish hand and is commonly dated to the eleventh century. The description of the game states that it was invented at the court of King Æthelstan of England (924–939) by two learned men: an anonymous Frank and Israel the Grammarian, one of the leading European scholars of his time. The diagram and its explanation were brought to Ireland by Dub Innse, bishop of Bangor (d. 953).
A photograph of the game is the frontispiece of The Times of St Dunstan by J. Armitage Robinson, who also reproduces and discusses the text. The captions that label the different sides of the diagram are in Latin with a note partly in Irish. Robinson copied an error by the eleventh-century scribe describing one of the inventors as a Jewish scholar at Æthelstan's court, and the error has been copied by modern scholars. The medieval Latinist Michael Lapidge pointed out that "Israel" is not a descriptive phrase but a reference to Israel the Grammarian.
[[File:AleaEvangelii.svg|frame|right|''Starting position in Murray's reconstruction: One of the black pieces (E13) is referenced in the manuscript as "the primary man" and "belongs to none of the evangelists"; it represents "the Unity of the Trinity", the one purpose of the four evangelists. Finally, "the figure 1 in the middle of the alea signifies the indivisible substance of the Trinity, or the supremacy of the first canon".}}
As a tafl game Scholars agree on the fact that the Christian allegory presented in MS 122 is a "moralization" of a pre-existing game: i.e. a Christian meaning has been superimposed on a game which originally was not related with religion. This is made clear by a short passage at the beginning of the manuscript, which suggests that the original game represented a siege:
{{quote|If any 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. notes that CCC MS 122 "mentions dukes and knights, presumably pieces, which is rather puzzling". According to Bayless, "there is no precedent for such an elaborate distinction of pieces in other games played in Anglo-Saxon England, and the archaeological record shows no evidence of such pieces. It is tempting to suggest that on his travels, perhaps in Rome, Israel may have heard of the new game just beginning to circulate in Europe, chess, with its comites, milites, and other pieces, and borrowed the idea of different ranks from that game".
While all other scholars have assumed that the game is played on a 19×19 board, Barbet-Massin's opinion is that the external lines of the board do not make part of the playing area, so that the actual size of the board is 17×17.