A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [155]
I believe that they come from Norway and probably came from somewhere around Trondheim; they look like so much that’s produced there. But if we think of Great Britain not as very much connected to the central and southern European sphere, as it is now, but instead of the North Sea as a sort of ‘connector’ of regions, there is that whole North Sea region – that’s where the Vikings came from, that’s where the predecessors of the Normans who ultimately conquered England came from. So if we think of that as a sort of Commonwealth, a northern Commonwealth, that became rich because it had these amazing raw materials of wood and amber and fur and metals, then we can imagine better how something produced in Norway could end up on the west coast of Scotland.
The Lewis Chessmen were discovered in 1831, at Uig Bay on Lewis, in a small stone chamber concealed in a sandbank. By far the most likely explanation for their being there is that they were hidden for safety by a merchant, who may have been intending to sell them on Lewis itself. A thirteenth-century poem, for example, names a powerful figure, Angus Mór of Islay, as king of Lewis, and has him inheriting his father’s set of ivory chess pieces:
To you he left his position, yours his breastplate, each treasure … his slender swords, his brown ivory chessmen.
By playing chess, a ruler like Angus Mór indicated that although his power base was on the extreme outer edge of the continent, he was nonetheless part of an elite high culture that embraced all the courts of Europe. And the figure on the board which represents these European courts more than any other is the queen.
Unlike in Islamic society, where the rulers’ wives would generally have remained hidden from public view, the European queen enjoyed a public role and the high status of adviser to the king. In Europe, land and power could sometimes pass through the female line. So, whereas on the Islamic chessboard the king is accompanied by his male adviser, the vizier, on the European board the king sits beside his queen. In the Lewis chess pieces, the queens all sit staring into the distance, holding their chin in their right hand – permanently suggesting to their contemporaries intense thought and wise counsel, but looking to us comically glum.
Perhaps, though, these queens had something to be glum about. In medieval chess, the queen didn’t actually have much power – she could move only one diagonal space at a time. Her modern sister, on the other hand, is the most powerful piece on the board. Apart from the queen, surprisingly little has actually changed in chess since medieval times, least of all the formidable mathematics of the possible moves. This sedentary, cerebral game has always aroused passionate emotion. The writer Martin Amis has long been fascinated by both aspects:
The maths of chess is very interesting, in that after four moves each the possibilities are already in the billions. It is the supreme board game. Very occasionally you glimpse a combination that a great player would be seeing all the time; and suddenly the board looks tremendously rich – it seems to bristle with possibilities. And combative will is what you see in all the great players – they’ve all got the killer instinct.
Sometimes, it is literally the killer instinct: an English court record from 1279 tells us that when one David de Bristol was playing chess against a certain Juliana le Cordwaner, they quarrelled so violently that he struck her in the thigh with a sword and she died immediately.
There’s one piece I have not mentioned yet, but which is perhaps the most fascinating figure of all the Lewis Chessmen, one that gives a crucial insight into the society that made it. It is the bishop, who in medieval Europe was one of the great powers of the state, not only controlling