The Lewis Chessmen

Early in 1831 a cache of small carved figures turned up on the west coast of Lewis, in the parish of Uig. How exactly it was found was never properly recorded. Early accounts spoke of an unnamed local man; only in 1863 was the finder named as Malcolm MacLeod of Pennydonald. Most writers have placed the find at Uig Bay, but researchers at National Museums Scotland have argued that a site a few miles down the coast at Mealista is more likely. What is certain is that on 11 April 1831 a Stornoway dealer, Roderick Ririe, exhibited the pieces at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in Edinburgh.

There were 93 objects: 78 chessmen, 14 plain discs used as tablemen in games like backgammon, and an ivory buckle. Almost all are of walrus ivory, a few of whale tooth. The chessmen include eight kings and eight queens, sixteen bishops, fifteen knights, twelve warders standing in for rooks, and nineteen pawns, enough for at least four sets. The major pieces are small figure sculptures between 7 and 10 centimetres tall: kings with swords across their knees, queens resting a cheek on one hand, bishops with croziers, knights on stocky ponies, and warders with shields, four of them biting the rims in berserk fury.

Their wide-eyed, glum expressions strike modern viewers as comic, and they have become some of the most loved objects in British museums. To their makers they probably conveyed dignity, ferocity or, in the queens' case, contemplation. Close study of the faces suggests the work of several carvers. Traces of red colour, and of mercury from the pigment cinnabar, hint that one side was originally red rather than black.

The pieces were probably made in the second half of the 12th century, perhaps into the early 13th. Most scholars point to Trondheim in Norway, though Iceland and even the Hebrides have been proposed. Lewis was then part of the Norse kingdom of the Isles, under the Norwegian crown, and the usual explanation is that the hoard was a merchant's stock in transit, hidden and never recovered. The unfinished-looking tablemen and the lack of wear on the chessmen fit that idea, though it cannot be proved.

The hoard was split almost at once. Ririe sold ten pieces, and later an eleventh, to the Edinburgh collector Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and the remaining 82 to a dealer from whom the British Museum bought them, at the urging of Frederic Madden, a manuscripts curator and chess enthusiast. Sharpe's eleven passed to Lord Londesborough and were bought for the National Museum in Edinburgh in 1888. Where the pieces belong is still argued over, and the British Museum now lends groups to Scottish museums, including six on long-term loan to Lewis itself. The sets were never complete when found: a knight and four warders are missing. In 2019 one of those warders, unrecognised in an Edinburgh family's possession for decades, sold at auction for £735,000.