Tablut, a Sami game

[ughaibu]

I am writing an article about Tablut for Abstract Games magazine. The game is most recently mentioned as a "living" game in the non-Sami literature in 1884. This is very recent and makes me hopeful that the game is not wholly extinct. The game is generally supposed to have evolved from a Roman game and to have reached the Sami via the Vikings. There is no evidence for this and I have a suspicion that the game concept may in fact have originated with the Arctic rim tribes and been passed from them to the Vikings and then spread throughout North-Western Europe by the Vikings in the form of Tafl. From the initial layout I am hypothesising that the game originally represented light and dark with the king being the sun and the Muscovites occupying the Earth's four corners, this is, I think, a typical Sami cosmological motif. The puzzling thing is why the black pieces should have two heads? I`m wondering if there are two-headed entities traditionally associated with darkness? If anyone has any ideas about these questions I would be very interested to hear them.