'Corner Win' Hnefatafl

[dashstofsk]

I am curious to know what historical evidence there is to say that games of 11x11 Hnefatafl were ever played with a 'corner win' objective for the King. My own reading of the pages and forum of this and other web sites suggests that 'corner win' is a recent introduction from 1980. Am I correct, or is there some evidence?

[Abbas Agraphicus]

As far as I know there is no archaeological evidence for of 11x11 boards with marked corners.
I might be wrong, but I think the corner markings were borrowed from the 7x7 boards.
Is anyone aware of something else?

[dashstofsk]

I suppose we will never get to find out. 'Corner win' appears to have been the objective only in Alea Evangelii and the 7x7 game from Ireland. But why then has 'corner win' become the dominant variant that people like to play today?

[Abbas Agraphicus]

I think the corner-escape diffusion in the modern era mostly happened as the consequence of a long series of reconstruction tentatives, which tried to solve imbalances due to bad translations of the tablut rules.
So in very simple terms, the 11x11 corner variants we play today are basically the perfected versions of those older misinterpretations. The biggest popularity happened since the Fetlar variant was made and institutionalized, and even more since the Copenhagen variant enriched it with new features (last 15 years more or less).