The Lewis Chessmen (8 page)

26. CHESS KING
Made from the tooth of a sperm whale in the late 15th or early 16th century, this piece was discovered at Dunstaffnage Castle near Oban, Argyll. From an early 19th-century drawing
.

All this reinforces our contention that the presence of the Lewis chessmen on Lewis should not be seen as some aberration, resulting from their loss in transit elsewhere.

Their loss must be viewed as accidental, but not unreasonably a matter involving an owner who lived on or frequented Lewis, failing to recover this treasure which he had temporarily hidden for safekeeping.

The Legacy

A
S works of art, the Lewis chessmen tell us a great deal about the Scandinavian world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, what people valued and the quality of life. They are a useful source of information on how royalty, clerics, knights and warriors dressed. They have fascinated hundreds of thousands of people worldwide since their discovery and their popularity appears to be going from strength to strength. The replica chessmen and images of them that are widely available are a testimony to this, as is their use in advertising. Indeed, they often crop up in the most surprising and unusual situations. Here we draw attention to some of their appearances in literature, films and on televisions.

Two films set in the twelfth century – ‘Becket' (United Kingdom 1964) and ‘The Lion in Winter' (UK 1968) – feature Lewis-style chess sets being played, in the former by King Louis of France and one of his noblemen, and in the latter by King Philip II of France and Geoffrey, the son of King Henry II of England. More recently they are the inspiration for the chessmen in the film of J. K. Rowling ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' (United States 2001).

That doyen of children's literature, Rosemary Sutcliff, wrote her
Chess-Dream in a Garden
around the Lewis chessmen, and
on television, and subsequently in book form, they inspired the classic children's animation, ‘The Saga of Noggin the Nog', as described by one of its creators, Oliver Postgate:
*

At different times both Peter Firmin and I had visited the … Museum, where we had both noticed a set of Norse chessmen from the island of Lewis. What had impressed us was that, far from being fierce and warlike, it was clear that these were essentially kindly, non-belligerent characters, who were thoroughly dismayed by the prospect of contest. … it occurred to Peter that the chessmen … could well have been called Nogs, that their prince was a Noggin and that the wicked baron … could be their … uncle, perhaps a Nogbad.

The creators of Noggin the Nog realised that there was a lot to be made of the faces of the Lewis chessmen, that children as well as adults could empathise with them. As we hope that this account has shown, it is the faces, the individuality of the pieces, that continue to fascinate, and which probably still have a lot to tell us.

*
O. Postgate:
Seeing Things, An Autobiography
(London: Methuen, 2000), pp. 219-20. Used with the kind permission of Daniel Postgate.

References and Research

T
HE research on which this book is based has already been published as:

Caldwell, D. H., Hall, M. A. and C. M. Wilkinson (2009): ‘The Lewis Hoard of Gaming Pieces; A Re-examination of their Context, Meanings, Discovery and Manufacture',
Medieval Archaeology
53 (2009), 155-203. More detailed arguments are presented there for our conclusions, and also sources for our information and assertions.

Readers may also like to read the following:

Hall, M. A. (2007):
Playtime in Pictland: The Material Culture of Gaming in Early Medieval Scotland
(Rosemarkie: Groam House).

Hamilton, J. R. C. (1956):
Excavations at Jarlshof, Shetland
(Edinburgh: HMSO), 76, and pl. XIIIb.

Macdonald, N. (1975):
The Morrison Manuscript. Traditions of the Western Isles by Donald Morrison, Cooper
(Stornoway: Public Library).

McDonald, R. A. (1997):
The Kingdom of the Isles. Scotland's Western Seaboard, c.1100-c.1336
(East Linton: Tuckwell Press).

McLees, C. (2009): ‘A carved medieval chess king found on the island of Hitra, near Trondheim, Norway',
Medieval Archaeology
53, 315-21.

Murray, H. J. R. (1913):
A History of Chess
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Postgate, O. (2000):
Seeing Things, An Autobiography
(London: Methuen), 219-20.

Robinson, J. (2007):
The Lewis Chessmen
(London: The British Museum Press).

About the Authors

Dr David H Caldwell
is Keeper of Scotland and Europe for National Museums Scotland. He has been privileged to be the curator responsible for the eleven chessmen in Edinburgh for the last 37 years and has long been fascinated by them. His other research interests include the history and archaeology of the Western Isles in medieval times, and in the 1990s he directed major excavations at Finlaggan, in the Island of Islay. He has recently had published a history of Islay –
Islay The Land of the Lordship
(Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008).

Mark A. Hall
is History Officer at Perth Museum & Art Gallery, where he curates the archaeology collection. He has long-standing interests in medieval material culture (in which the recognised collections of Perth are very rich), including Pictish sculpture, the cult of saints and play, especially board and dice games, in part stemming from a long-standing fascination with the Lewis chessmen. His interest in play culture extends to research on the way the medieval period (and archaeology more generally) is portrayed in cinema.

Dr Caroline M. Wilkinson
is Senior Lecturer in Forensic Anthropology at the Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification, University of Dundee. She is an expert in faces and craniofacial identification and her research focuses on the relationship between the soft and hard tissues of the face, juvenile faces, facial recognition, anthropometry and facial image analysis. She has carried out craniofacial analysis for many archaeological investigations and her work is exhibited in museums around the world and is included on television programmes such as ‘History Cold Case' (BBC), ‘Meet the Ancestors' (BBC), ‘Secrets of the Dead' (C4) and ‘Mummies Unwrapped' (Discovery).