Lewis chessmen

The Lewis chessmen are a hoard of small carved game pieces, most cut from walrus ivory and a few from whale teeth, dated to 1200 in the structured record. The 79 chess pieces comprise 8 kings, 8 queens, 16 bishops, 15 knights, 13 warders and 19 pawns. Kings sit crowned on thrones gripping swords. Queens, also enthroned, press a right hand to the face. Bishops, some seated and some standing, carry croziers and sometimes books. Knights ride undersized horses with spear and shield, and the warders, which play the part of rooks, stand armed; four of them gnaw the tops of their shields like berserkers. The pawns are plain cylinders and slab shapes rather than figures. They measure 3.5 to 5.8 cm, the other pieces 7 to 10.2 cm, and faint red staining once seen on some suggests the two sides were red and white.

The set was probably carved between 1150 and 1200, a span fixed mainly by the form of the bishops' mitres. Trondheim in Norway is the usual attribution; in 2010 Gudmundur G. Thórarinsson argued for Iceland, a case Morten Lilleøren rejected. Caldwell, Hall and Wilkinson sorted the faces into five groups they assign to five carvers. The hoard surfaced on Lewis in 1831, and Roderick Ririe presented it to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland on 11 April that year. Frederic Madden, a manuscripts keeper and keen chess player, arranged the British Museum's purchase of 82 objects for 80 guineas and published a study in 1832. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe acquired eleven pieces, which passed to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1888. A warder lost since the find resurfaced in an Edinburgh family and fetched £735,000 at Sotheby's in July 2019.

Two objects sharpen the picture of the workshop. A queen excavated at the archbishop's palace in Trondheim, now known only from a drawing, repeats the Lewis queens' hand raised to the face. A bishop from the Marquet de Vasselot collection, auctioned at Christie's in Paris in 2011, wears its mitre sideways and so looks stylistically earlier. The Charlemagne chessmen are the other medieval survivor usually named beside them. Later borrowings are specific: the red queen in the wizard chess game of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) is modelled on a Lewis queen, the carvings' style shaped the animated series Noggin the Nog, and in Peter May's novel The Chessmen a character carves replicas of the pieces.