Linguistics & Board Games
Back in 2016, the publisher Feuerland Spiele released one of Uwe Rosenberg’s most acclaimed board games to date: A Feast for Odin, a somewhat complex game about a Viking community that hunts, farms, crafts weapons and tools, and explores. A saga in board game form and an extraordinary game, a pleasure to play.
And although it’s just (?!?) a board game, I’ve learned a lot of interesting things from it—like the following. In the picture, you see a player board where they collect resources and other bits and pieces. Those blue wooden pieces near the tree are the blue player’s “workers,” which they use to perform actions in the game. The photo was most likely taken at the beginning of a round, when players gather all their workers in that spot on the board, called in the game a "Thing Square".
So what’s up with that? The workers being in a THING. Although it may seem so at first, this word "thing" isn’t the result of an indecisive designer who couldn’t think of a simple name for a meeting place for some game pieces… In fact, it’s the most accurate name for that gathering: THING.
Before playing A Feast for Odin, I had no idea about this, but as I later found out, while today the word "thing" means “object, stuff, matter,” in the Middle Ages, when the theme of the game is set, it actually meant “council, assembly, gathering.” So yes… the Vikings are in a THING, they are in the Thing Square—that is, they are in a medieval council, in the square where assemblies are held.
It turns out that this word "þing" or "thing" appears (among others) in Old English, Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old Dutch. The term meaning “council, assembly, gathering” was used by the English as early as 685–686 AD. The place where a thing was held was called a "thingstead" or "thingstow". However, by the year 1300, it had already lost this meaning, shifting in Middle English to refer to personal possessions, eventually evolving into the modern sense of “object.”
Even in modern Icelandic, Norwegian, and Danish, the term still carries its original meaning in official names, such as Folketing (“People’s Thing,” or “People’s Assembly”) in Denmark, Storting (“Great Thing,” or “Great Assembly”) in Norway, or Alþingi (“General Thing,” or “General Assembly”) in Iceland.
