Ivory Vikings: Mystery of the Lewis Chessmen

 

 

 

 

 Ivory Vikings (2015)

By Nancy Marie Brown

St. Martin’s Press, 236 pages +  back matter

★★★

 

The first thing to know is encapsulated in this book’s long subtitle: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them. Those game pieces would be the Lewis Chessmen discovered on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis in1831, but were probably carved in the 12^th century. In all, 78 pieces were found; 67 reside in the British Museum and 11 in the Scottish National Museum in Edinburgh. There are enough for two complete sets, with the extras indicating missing pieces. For those who’ve never played chess, there are 32 pieces in a set; the designs on the Lewis Chessmen suggest as many as four sets once existed. 

 

Two bishops, Edinburgh

King and queen, Edinburgh

Rook and knight, London

 

 

The second thing to know is that when I commented on Facebook I had seen the pieces in both London and Edinburgh, three different people told me I should read Ivory Vikings by Nancy Marie Brown. When I made the further confession that I took an MA in medieval history and once read a lot of Norse mythology and sagas, several more friends said I had to read it. I can now say without fear of contradiction that it has been a long, long time between what I once studied and now! 

 

Brown’s book is well-researched and comes at the chess pieces from four major vantage points: her command of Norse and Icelandic languages, archaeological and art history perspectives, feminism, and playing chess. My three-star rating is partly a warning that this is undoubtedly an academic book, albeit an impressive one. I once read translated sagas from famed Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) and even visited his home in Reykholt, but Icelandic is allegedly one of the world’s most difficult languages to learn. Brown knows it so well she can cite ways in which it has been mistranslated. In other words, I take Brown’s word on such matters.

 

Ivory Vikings shook a few cobwebs of names of Scandinavian heroes, scoundrels, explorers, holy men, and usurpers whose very names once thrilled me: Canute, Eirik Bloodaxe, Haakon the Old, Ethelred the Unready, Saint Thorlak, Harald Hardrada…. Brown reminds readers that Vikings were from the mythologized figures of Wagner operas. To be sure, Norsemen raided coastal towns and often took no quarter doing so. Yet, by 1100 most were so thoroughly Christianized that they could be bought off instead of looting, Iceland had a bishop, and one Svein Asleisfarson was considered the “last” Viking when he died in 1171. 

 

 

 

If you try wading through Ivory Vikings it’s helpful to acknowledge that your geography skills have been skewed by looking at flat Mercator projection maps. Despite what a few loonies might tell you, our planet is a 3D sphere, not a flat map. Not to lessen the scale of Viking voyages, but if a crew sailed from Norway, Scotland was closer than England, Iceland was closer than Ireland, and from Iceland was a hop to Greenland, and a skip to Newfoundland where the 11^th century settlement of L’Anse aux meadows once stood. Who thinks of Greenland? Answer: Norsemen, Icelanders, Scots, and Picts. The Lewis chess pieces were carved from walrus ivory and Greenland was a good place get it.

 

Celts, Norwegians, and Icelanders all claim to have carved the Lewis chessmen. Brown comes down on the side of Iceland and a skilled carver known as Margaret the Adroit, around 1200 AD. She was married to Thorir, a priest who assisted Bishop Páll Jónsson in Skálholt, the center of Icelandic Christianity. Wait! Did I say married priest? Yes, Icelandic Catholic priests married until 1139, and thereafter the practice continued on the sly. The relative power of Scandinavian women explains how Margaret acquired artisanal skills and renown. Her work on bishop’s croziers and other religious objects makes her the prime candidate for chess pieces, some of which might have been intended as a gift to an archbishop. It remains a mystery how they ended up on Lewis, who put them there, or why.  

 

 

Not every scholar agrees the pieces were made in Iceland or that Margaret carved them. Maybe that’s ex post facto sexism. You’ll learn a lot about the game of chess in Brown’s book, including the fact that the queen was once the weakest piece on the board and could only move slantwise.* The strongest? Bishops! The coolest? My vote goes to the shield-biting rooks who were surely berserkers.

 

Rob Weir

 

* Queens gained chess power courtesy of Isabella of Castille.