From The New York Times Arts Beat:
August 16, 2011, 12:30 pm
They’re Chess Pieces. They’re Old. O.K. They’re From Norway. Oh, Yeah?
By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN
Scholars have long thought that the Lewis Chessmen — eight-century-old chess pieces carved mostly out of walrus tusk that were found on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, in 1831 — were made in Trondheim, Norway.
Last year two chess aficionados in Iceland, Gudmundur G. Thorarinsson and Einar S. Einarsson, set out to prove that the pieces were actually from their country.
Though the two men are not scholars — Mr. Thorarinsson is a civil engineer and a former member of the Icelandic Parliament and Mr. Einarsson is a former president of Visa Iceland — they put up a web site expounding their theory and attended a conference at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh to present their case before leading authorities.
Their quest might have seemed like a knight’s errand (or perhaps a fool’s, which was the original name for the bishop chess piece in much of Europe), but their perseverance may be paying off.
On Friday there will be a symposium in Skalholt, Iceland, where two of the world’s foremost scholars on the pieces, James Robinson of the British Museum and David H. Caldwell of the National Museums of Scotland, will lecture on their possible origin. The Icelandic theory is on their minds. A chess piece made of fish bone that seems to be from roughly the same period as the Lewis Chessmen and resembles the berserkers (or rooks) of the Lewis sets was found recently in Siglunes, Iceland.
In an e-mail on Monday, Dr. Caldwell wrote: “I have an open mind about where the chessmen were made. We said Trondheim when we did our exhibition, but that was really just a guess. Now some colleagues are saying Iceland, and maybe that is the case.” Or maybe not. “I have still to hear incontrovertible evidence for it,” he added.
August 16, 2011, 12:30 pm
They’re Chess Pieces. They’re Old. O.K. They’re From Norway. Oh, Yeah?
By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN
 |
| Icelandic piece - the fore-runner of the Lewis chess pieces? |
Last year two chess aficionados in Iceland, Gudmundur G. Thorarinsson and Einar S. Einarsson, set out to prove that the pieces were actually from their country.
Though the two men are not scholars — Mr. Thorarinsson is a civil engineer and a former member of the Icelandic Parliament and Mr. Einarsson is a former president of Visa Iceland — they put up a web site expounding their theory and attended a conference at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh to present their case before leading authorities.
Their quest might have seemed like a knight’s errand (or perhaps a fool’s, which was the original name for the bishop chess piece in much of Europe), but their perseverance may be paying off.
On Friday there will be a symposium in Skalholt, Iceland, where two of the world’s foremost scholars on the pieces, James Robinson of the British Museum and David H. Caldwell of the National Museums of Scotland, will lecture on their possible origin. The Icelandic theory is on their minds. A chess piece made of fish bone that seems to be from roughly the same period as the Lewis Chessmen and resembles the berserkers (or rooks) of the Lewis sets was found recently in Siglunes, Iceland.
In an e-mail on Monday, Dr. Caldwell wrote: “I have an open mind about where the chessmen were made. We said Trondheim when we did our exhibition, but that was really just a guess. Now some colleagues are saying Iceland, and maybe that is the case.” Or maybe not. “I have still to hear incontrovertible evidence for it,” he added.
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