The Immortal Game (33 page)

For chess analysis of the Immortal Game, I relied on
Lionel Kieseritzky, firsthand annotation of the game in his journal
La Régence
, July 1851; Hübner, “The Immortal Game,” pp. 14–35; Irving Chernev,
1000 Best Short Games of Chess
(Fireside, 1955); Chernev,
The Chess Companion
(Simon & Schuster, 1973); Graham Burgess, John Nunn, and John Emms,
The Mammoth Book of the World’s Greatest Chess Games
(Carroll and Graf, 1998); Lubomir Kavalek, chess column,
Washington Post
, July 2003; David Hayes, “The Immortal Game,” online at
logicalchess.com/resources/bestgames/traditional/game13parent.htm
; David A. Wheeler, analysis, online at
dwheeler.com/misc/immortal.txt
; S. Tartakower and J. Du Mont,
500 Master Games of Chess
(Dover Publications, 1975); David Levy and Kevin O’Connoll,
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Chess Games
(Oxford University Press, 1981); Ron Burnett and Sid Pickard,
The Chess Games of Adolph Anderssen, Master of Attack
(Pickard and Son, 1996); Reuben Fine,
The World’s Great Chess Games
(Dover, 1983); A. J. Goldsby, analysis, online at
geocities.com/lifemasteraj/a ander.htm
; “Anderssen, A-Kieseritzky, L,
London, 1851: Mate the Uncastled King-Part I,” online at
brainsturgeon.com/iversen/000415a.htm
; and Stephen Hubbell, in a reenactment of the game, spring 2005.

They anticipated a caliber of chess:
Andy Soltis,
The Great Chess Tournaments and Their Stories
(Chilton Book Co., 1975), p. 3.

C
HAPTER 2

“Acquire knowledge”:
Sir Abdullah Suhrawardy,
The Sayings of Muhammad
(Citadel Press, 1990), p. 94.

“The [board] is placed between two friends of known friendship”:
Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 184.

“The skilled player places his pieces”:
Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 184.

A list of prominent players:
Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib, of Medina, an Arab who played in public; Sa’id ibn Jubair, a Negro, who excelled in blindfold play; Az-Zuhri, the great lawyer of the Umayyad period; Hisham ibn Urwa, another blindfold player, whose three granddaughters Safi’a, A’isha, and ’Ubaida also played chess; and Al-Qasim ibn Muhammad, grandson of the Caliph Abu-Bakr. Murray,
History of Chess
, pp. 191, 192.

“I keep you from your inheritance”:
Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 194. “The chess allusion is perfectly certain,” he writes, “for
baidaq
has no other meaning than that of chess [Pawn].” The poet’s allusion also refers to the phenomenon of Pawn promotion.

allowable under Islamic law:
Murray,
History of Chess
pp. 187–91. “Images” and “lots”: the respective Arabic terms are
ansab
and
maisir
.

A Guide to
Shatranj
:
Information and some direct text taken from
chess variants.org/historic.dir/shatranj.htm
. Another excellent resource is
history.chess.free.fr/shatranj.htm
.

The image of two players is from
Shahnameh
(The epic of kings), by the great Persian poet Ferdowsi Tousi (935–1020). Scanned from Strouhal,
Acht X Acht
, p. 195.

Ceramic chess set from twelfth-century Iran:
Anna Contadini, “Islamic Ivory Chess Pieces, Draughtsmen and Dice,”
Islamic Art in the Ashmolean Museum
, Part One, edited by James Allan (Oxford University Press, 1995),p. 111, online at
goddesschess.com/chessays/contadinil.htm
.

“The empress into whose place”:
Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 164.

the first true Islamic Renaissance:
Husain F. Nagamia, “Islamic Medicine: History and Current Practice,” online at
iiim.org/islamed3.htm
; Ted
Thornton, “The Abbasid Golden Age,” online at
nmhschool.org/tthornton/mehistorydatabase/abbasid golden age.htm
; “Islam and Islamic History in Arabia and The Middle East,” online at
islamicity.com/mosque/ihame/Sec7.htm
; Jens Høyrup, “Sub-Scientific Mathematics: Observations on a Pre-Modern Phenomenon,”
Measure, Number, and Weight: Studies in Mathematics and Culture
(State University of New York Press, 1994).

there were just five
aliyat
:
Jabir al-Khufi, Rabrab, Abu’n-Na’am, al-Adli, and ar-Razi. Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 197.

One particular al-Adli problem:
Bill Wall, online at
geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/aladli.htm
.

T
HE
I
MMORTAL
G
AME
: M
OVE
2

from the Italian
gambetto
:
First introduced by Ruy Lopez, according to G. T. Chesney, encyclopedia entry, 1911, online at
http://21.1911encyclopedia.org/C/CH/CHESS.htm
.

colorful names to various opening sequences:
Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 39.

C
HAPTER 3

Despite appearances to the contrary:
Principal sources are Neil Stratford,
The Lewis Chessmen and the Enigma of the Hoard
(British Museum Press, 1997); and Michael Taylor,
The Lewis Chessmen
(British Museum Press, 1978). Also useful was J. L. Cazaux’s history site:
http://history.chess.free.fr/lewis.htm
. The description of dune formation was informed by a personal communication with Hans Herrmann, University of Stuttgart. Additional facts on the Isle of Lewis come from Patti Smith at the Stornoway Tourist Information Center.
Uig
is pronounced
oo-eeg
. Irving Finkel quote from BBC website:
news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/entertainment/03/british_museum_treasures/html/9.stm
.

Fortunately, such doggedness was second nature to Harold Murray:
Obituary of Harold Murray in
British Chess Magazine
, August 1955; Harold Murray, unpublished “Autobiography of Chess Play” (Bodleian Library, Oxford University, H. J. R. Murray Papers, Volume 73, p. 216, SC49132–3); “Dictionary milestones: A chronology of events relevant to the history of the OED,” online at
oed.com//files/18/43/63/f184363/public/inside/timeline.htm
; Marilyn Yalom,
Birth of the Chess Queen: A History
(HarperCollins, 2004).

More on H. J. R. Murray

A History of Chess
, by Harold James Ruthven Murray, was published by Oxford University Press in 1913. Murray covered the first 1,400 years of the game’s history in crystallized, definitive detail. It was Murray who chronicled the role of Harun ar-Rashid, the
Chatrang-namak
, and the tale of Indian King Balhait. It was Murray who relentlessly tracked down the problems of al-Adli, who translated the romantic poetry of Marie de France, who exhaustively collected and interpreted virtually everything there was to know about the game at that time. Murray’s book is, in fact, in some ways too complete. At nine hundred pages of small (and even smaller) print, with large sections in Latin, German, and French (with smatterings of Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Greek), innumerable chess diagrams and annotated games, pages and pages of ur-text romantic medieval poetry, hundreds of chess problems (and their solutions), a river of footnotes, and extensive catalogues of ancient manuscripts,
A History of Chess
is truly not a book for casual consumption. It provides historians with an exhaustive catalogue of chess’s more than twelve million hours of existence, but for the lay reader it does not effectively tell chess’s story or convey its meaning.

Reading through it for the first time, poring through its footnotes and bottomless index, was for me at once a thrill and a vexing frustration, like suddenly being able to see a gigantic photograph of the planet earth in unprecedented detail—but only from one inch away, through a magnifying glass. The assemblage of facts was magnificent, leaving me desperate to back up a few steps and view them in more meaningful components. The irony was that this clearly definitive book was inadvertently obscuring much about chess’s history—and human history. In logging the voluminous facts of the game, it left out much of the context, and in so doing concealed chess’s majesty and true importance. And yet no one could seriously imagine chess history without it, or easily conceive of what its pioneer author went through to compile it. As he began his work at the end of the nineteenth century, Murray had no specialized chess libraries at his disposal as we do today in Cleveland, Princeton, and The Hague. There was no central game database. Source material was scattered, hidden, and/or recorded in forgotten languages. Even at Oxford, the center of the academic universe, compiling a serious chess history was a career-long undertaking. We should all be grateful for Murray’s perseverance. Imagine
piecing together the trail of a Red Knot Sandpiper from Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, to the Arctic Circle by following its droppings. You could do it, but only if it meant that much to you; only if you were willing to devote much of your life to the task.

By 900, Muslim armies controlled:
W. C. Brice,
An Historical Atlas of Islam
, as found on
princeton.edu/~humcomp/dimensions.htm
; map at
ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~rs143/map5.jpg
.

In 1005 the Egyptian ruler al-Hakim:
Murray,
History of Chess,
p. 203.

Persian Muslim nicknamed Ziriab:
Ricardo Calvo, “
The Oldest Chess Pieces in Europe
,” presentation to the Initiative Group Königstein (Amsterdam, December 2001), online at
goddesschess.com/chessays/calvopieces.htm
; Hans Ree,
The Human Comedy of Chess: A Grandmaster’s Chronicles
(Russell Enterprises, 2001) (Ree notes that in the twenty-first century Ziriab is still a well-known figure in the Andalusian region of southern Spain); Yalom,
Birth of the Chess Queen,
p. 11.

Not long after this:
This is apocryphal, from Jerzy Gizycki,
A History of Chess
(Abbey Library, 1972), p. 15.

“It is a paradoxical but well-established fact”:
Eales,
Chess
, p. 42.

The medieval French historian Robert de St. Remi:
Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 419.

Tracking chess’s migration…to a Swiss monastery by 997:
Yalom,
Birth of the Chess Queen
, p. 16.

to northern, Christian-controlled Spain by 1008:
Eales,
Chess,
p. 43; Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 405. (Murray says perhaps 1010.)

to southern Germany by 1050; and to central Italy by 1061:
Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 418.

By the early twelfth century…ensconced in the culture of medieval chivalry:
Yalom,
Birth of the Chess Queen
, p. 52; Eales,
Chess
, p. 53.

The very first mention of the chess Queen:
Yalom,
Birth of the Chess Queen
, pp. 19–26.

the introduction of dark and light checkered squares:
first mentioned in Einsiedeln manuscripts, according to Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 452.

Finally, the game’s name shifted:
Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 400.

The medieval historian Alexander Neckam:
Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 502.

“There was a
demand
for a game like chess”:
Eales,
Chess
, p. 48 (italics mine).

In the twelfth century:
W. L. Tronzo, “Moral Hieroglyphs: Chess and Dice at San Savino in Piacenza,”
Gesta
16, no. 2, pp. 15–26.

Liber de moribus
:
This is one of the early titles appended to a translation of Cessolis’s work, which probably had no formal title to begin with. Source: Jenny Adams, personal communication.

the twelfth century had seen an “early Renaissance”:
“In the early 12th Century,” writes historian Norman Cantor, “it was becoming more apparent every day that knowledge was power…many of the most brilliant minds of the new generation that came to maturity about 1100 set off for the new cathedral schools to participate in the intellectual revolution.” Cantor,
The Civilization of the Middle Ages
(HarperCollins, 1994).

Liber de moribus
used the chess metaphor:
“Language normally grows by a process of metaphorical extension; we extend old names to new objects. (In fact, someone has happily called metaphors ‘new namings.’)” C. Brooks and R. P. Warren,
Modern Rhetoric
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).

“Before the
Liber
”:
Jenny Adams,
Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Thus chess, now with many different names:
Murray,
History of Chess
, pp. 455–56.

“The wearingness which players experienced”:
Eales,
Chess
, p. 69.

If it landed on “1”:
Anne Sunnucks,
The Encyclopaedia of Chess
(St. Martin’s Press, 1976), p. 97. “The use of the dice reduces the necessity for thought and the formation of a plan of campaign, but it destroys the liberty of play which is so closely associated with the differentiation of each piece, and ruins the real entity of chess.” Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 454.

T
HE
I
MMORTAL
G
AME
: M
OVE
3

For one shilling and sixpence:
Personal visit to Simpson’s Divan, and personal correspondence with Robin Easton, general manager of Simpson’s. “£4.84 in the year 2002 has the same ‘purchase power’ as £0, 1s, 6d in the year 1851.” John J. McCusker, “Comparing the Purchasing Power of Money in Great Britain from 1264 to Any Other Year Including the Present” (Economic History Services, 2001), online at
eh.net/hmit/ppowerbp
.