A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [154]
Sixty-seven of the pieces are now in the British Museum; eleven are in the National Museums of Scotland. Between them, these much-loved pieces take us into the heart of the medieval world.
People have been playing board games for more than 5,000 years, but chess is a relative newcomer – it seems to have been invented in India at some point after the year 500. Over the next few hundred years, the game spread through the Middle East and on into Christian Europe, and in every place the chess pieces changed to reflect the society that played it. So, in India there are pieces named ‘war elephants’, while in the Middle East, Islamic reservations about the human image ensured that all the pieces were virtually abstract. European pieces, by contrast, are often intensely human, and the Lewis Chessmen not only seem to show us particular kinds of characters, but strikingly reflect the structures of the great medieval power game as it was fought out across northern Europe, from Iceland and Ireland to Scandinavia and the Baltic.
They are much bigger than the figures that most of us play with today; the king, for instance, is about 8 centimetres (3 inches) high, and he comfortably fills a clenched fist. Most of them are carved out of walrus tusks, although a few are made out of whales’ teeth. Some of the pieces would originally have been coloured red rather than the black that is more common today, but all of them are now a pale creamy brown.
Let’s begin with the pawns. One of the puzzles of the Lewis Chessmen is that there are lots of major pieces and very few pawns. We have pieces from several incomplete sets, but only nineteen pawns among them. The pawns are the only pieces that aren’t human; they’re simply small ivory slabs that stand upright like gravestones. In medieval society, these represent the peasants brutally conscripted on to the battlefield. All societies tend to think of the people at the bottom of the heap as interchangeably identical, and the foot soldiers here are shown with no individuality at all.
The main pieces, on the other hand, are full of personality: elite guards, knights on horseback, commanding kings and meditative queens. Pride of place goes to the ultimate source of legitimate power: the king – capture him, and all fighting stops. All the Lewis kings sit on ornate thrones, a sword across their knees. Guarding the kings are two kinds of specialist warrior. One is immediately familiar to us – the knight, fast-moving, versatile and mounted on horseback. From the very beginnings of chess in India, the mounted warrior is a constant: he is in every age and in every country and is largely unchanged today. But these familiar knights are flanked by something much more sinister. At the edges of the board where we now have castles are the ultimate shock troops of the Scandinavian world. They stand menacingly, some of them working themselves into a frenzy of bloodlust by chewing the tops of their shields.
These are the fighters called berserkers. Berserker is an Icelandic word for a soldier wearing a shirt made of bearskin, and the word ‘berserk’ even today is synonymous with wild, destructive violence. More than any piece on this board, the berserkers take us to the terrifying world of Norse warfare.
Around 1200, the Isle of Lewis, on the north-west edge of what is now Scotland, was at the heart of this Norse world. It was part of the kingdom of Norway. The language was Norwegian and its archbishop had his cathedral in Trondheim, 250 miles north of Oslo. Trondheim was one of the great centres for carving walrus ivory, and the style of the Lewis