Building a Leather Hnefatafl Board on Commission

11 minutes ago

2 min read

The client already owned the pieces. He only wanted the board, in leather, big enough to actually play on. That is the whole brief, and it is a better brief than most.

Why leather and not wood

A wooden hnefatafl board of this size is furniture. It has to be stored flat, it takes a corner of a room, and it does not travel. A leather board rolls up.

This one is roughly 80 cm on a side, cut from a single piece of vegetable-tanned hide. One piece, no seams, no panels glued together. At that size you are working with most of a hide, and the grain changes across it, which matters later when the dye goes on.

The edges are the hide's own

I did not cut the board square. The outline follows the natural edge of the skin, wavy and irregular, exactly as it came off the animal.

That is a deliberate decision and the one people notice first. A straight cut edge would have made it look like a product. The raw edge makes it look like something that was made before rulers were common, which is the point of a game this old.

The grid is cut by hand

Every line on the board is hand-tooled. The squares, the diagonals, the crosses in the marked squares, all of it laid out from a template I drew in Illustrator, then transferred and cut into damp leather.

Hand-cut lines on an 80 cm board are unforgiving. There is no undo, the line has to keep its depth over a long run, and a wobble in the middle of a grid is visible from across the room. This is the part that took the time.

The laser does one job only

Five knotwork medallions, four in the corners and one at the centre, marking the squares the game treats as special. Those are laser engraved.

That is not laziness, it is division of labour. Five identical interlaced medallions, cut by hand, would not be identical. They would be five cousins. The laser gives me repeatability on the one element where repeatability is the whole point, and I keep the hand work for everything that benefits from a human line.

It is the same logic I used on the Middle-Earth map: design in Illustrator, engrave what has to be exact, tool by hand what has to feel made.

Dye and finish

The colour is a mottled antique brown, applied by hand and worked unevenly on purpose. A flat, even brown across 80 cm would look printed. The blotching lets the tooled lines catch the light and gives the board the look of something that has already been played on for years.