The forms of play are many and various. Take a look around a contemporary playground and you’ll see all sorts of play: physical, active play; imaginary play; conversational play amongst the children and adults; play with sticks, pinecones, wood chips, and other found objects; daydreaming; and the list might go on. What is true now has always been true in human history, and so when we look at almost any historical source we can find in there evidences of play past.
This thought struck me recently when I was reading Hallfred the Troublesome Scald, a 14th-century Icelandic saga written about a mischievous poet and adventurer who lived around the year 1,000 A.D. Despite being 600 years old, it’s still a delightful text, full of life, fun, trouble, sorrow, and—of course—play.
The incident that first sent my mind wandering in this direction was its description of a simple ball game at an autumn harvest. Iceland was—and is—an inhospitable land, where people must work hard to provide a living. Therefore, when the harvest came in, people gathered to celebrate, as happens all over the world. Let’s look at the text:
In those days Thorstein Ingimundarson was chieftain in Vatnsdal. He lived at Hof and was considered the foremost man in that part of the country. He was popular and had many friends. His sons were Ingolf and Gudbrand. Ingolf was the most handsome man in the north, and it was of him that the following verse was made:
All the maids were eager
To walk out with Ingolf
—they that were of age;
All-Too-Small was wretched.
“I too,” quoth the carline, [an old woman]
“Will walk out with Ingolf,”
While I still have hanging two teeth in my gum.”
An autumn feast was held at Grimstungur with ball-games, and Ingolf went to the games, and many others with him from down the valley.
The weather was fine, and the women sat outside and watched the play. Valgerd Ottarsdottir was sitting apart on the slope, and some women with her. Ingolf was playing, and the ball flew that way; whereupon Valgerd caught it and hid it under her cloak, saying that the one who had thrown should fetch it. It was Ingolf who had thrown that time, and he told the others to play on, while he sat down besides Valgerd and talked with her the rest of the day.
So here, in this excerpt, we have two examples of play already. The first is obvious—there were ball games held in conjunction with the autumn festival. Anyone who has been to a picnic or a gathering can relate—games almost inevitably form, whether that’s a contest of ladder ball or corn hole or a spirited match of football or baseball. That sort of competitive sports play is universal across cultures, and so it is not surprising that it happens here. In this case it was probably knattleikr, the particularly violent stick-and-ball game loved by the Vikings, that most closely resembles the Irish sport of hurling.
And yet there’s a second moment of play that happens, an interchange of flirtatious play. Valgerd is sitting with other women to watch the play and when the ball rolls to her she grabs it, hides it under her cloak, and says she’ll only give it to the one who threw it. We can imagine the scene. She likely had her eyes on Ingolf—he was, after all, according to the text, supremely good looking—and she then seizes her chance to get him to talk to her by saying she’ll only give it to him. He comes over, decides he’d rather talk to her than play with the guys, and they spend the rest of the day in conversation, which leads to courtship.
And yet can we say this is definitively play? On the one hand, one might argue that what Valgerd did is purely instrumental, a device to get Ingolf to talk to her. One of the characteristics of play is usually that it is done for its own sake, not to achieve something. Yet anyone who has ever dated or been in a relationship recognizes in that moment the playful act, the little element of mischievous fun, that sends sparks flying between potential partners. Studies, including one we published in our American Journal of Play, indicate that a spirit of playfulness is among the most desired characteristics for people looking for a mate, and so one can easily imagine the sparkle in Valgerd’s eye as she kept the ball, the mischievous teasing tone as she addressed the other ball players and then Ingolf, and Ingolf’s willingness to leave one form of play for another.
(In the end, however, Ingolf is never willing to commit to marriage, and Valgerd’s father, undoubtedly feeling Ingolf was “playing” with her—another use of the word—moved the family away and made her marry someone else.)
That this ancient scene still resonates is evidence of the eternal relevance of play. It also is a good reminder to us as a museum that as we attempt to collect and preserve the history of play, we have to collect the story where possible, not just the artifact that remains. We might take the ball into the collection (like a 500 year-old ball we have in our collections that was recovered from the Thames River in England), but without the story to go with it, it would simply be a ball, nothing else. Accompanied by the story we can imagine it as truly a plaything, whether it was being tossed about on the field of play or used as a flirtatious prop in the game of love.
