The Lewis Chessmen

Judged on the set, the subtractive test fails as it must for a set: the game requires every rank, and without the bishops the board has no diagonal, without the pawns no front. The stronger question is whether the figuration within each piece is required, and here the carving is economical. The king’s sword across the knees, the queen’s hand at the cheek, the bishop’s crozier and mitre, the warder’s shield: each is a single attribute that names the rank in the hand. What ornament there is sits on the throne-backs. What is permitted rather than compelled is the multiplication of near-identical figures across several sets, and the necessity is the game’s, borrowed, as much as the carver’s.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Something can be stated, and it holds: a twelfth-century northern society shown to itself as ranks, king, queen, bishop, knight, warrior and the faceless pawn, each with its office and posture, the whole made a game of war across a table. The church stands inside that order as a fighting piece, which is a true picture of the church of its time and region. The faces disclose a further gravity, close to anxiety, in figures meant for play. But much of the disclosure is carried by the convention of chess rather than uncovered by these carvings, and the famous humour is a mood more than a meaning. The pawns, the many, have no face: the one sharp disclosure, and possibly the game’s.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Elevation is not the register of these objects, and the axis is held among the two lowest of the twelve for it. They are small, squat and handled, and the queens’ doleful faces and the warders’ bulging eyes are met as often with a smile as with awe. There is grimness in some: the shield-biters above all, a fury made a figure a few centimetres high, and the kings with drawn swords across their knees in a stern, hieratic stillness. Seen in a case as a company, rows of stern faces, the set reaches a quiet gravity. But the height is low and of one kind, and it does not recur with force: most bishops, knights and pawns stir nothing beyond pleasure in the making.

Score: 6.6 / 10

Partly built, more often evoked. The built place is the shield-biting warder: the warrior of northern saga in battle frenzy, who bites his shield, is not alluded to but made a rank of the game, so that a figure of myth stands in the line of battle at the corner of the board. The second built structure is the game itself, the world’s order of king, queen, church and arms set out as pieces moved by a player, the old image of fortune and rule as play. The kings with swords across their knees summon the enthroned judge; the queens with hand to cheek summon the mourning woman. These are evoked by posture, not carried by a story, and the archetypes are the game’s and the age’s more than the work’s.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The inheritance is the chess set as it came into Europe from the Islamic world, whose pieces were abstract: a king a block with a cleft, a knight a stub with a projection. The European turn to figurative chessmen was under way in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and these are among its fullest and earliest surviving instances. The departure is real: abstract counters made into a population of persons, each with a face, and the church given its place on the board in Christian form. The stake was modest. These were workshop products made in numbers for a wealthy market, in a carving tradition of walrus ivory already practised and already figural, and the turn belonged to a broad European movement, not to this workshop’s wager.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Substitute a different form and much goes. These are pieces to be held and moved. Every figure is kept within the section of the tusk or tooth, with no projecting limb to break: the form of a thing made for the hand, so that the society shown is a society one can pick up and move against another. The seated king and queen are blocks, the standing warder a column, the pawn a stone with no figure at all, and rank is drawn by form as much as by attribute, descending from throne to horse to foot to faceless block. As statuettes on a shelf they would be small sculptures of social types; as chessmen they are an order in play. Held below the eights because the form is the game’s, inherited and filled.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Evidence over promise: nearly two centuries of attention since the find, and a field of questions sustained throughout. Where were they made, Trondheim, Iceland or elsewhere; why were they on Lewis, a merchant’s stock hidden, a trader’s loss, a burial; how many sets, and how many hands carved them; what the queens’ gesture means, grief, thought or a convention of enthroned women; whether the shield-biters are berserkers in the saga’s sense; how the two sides were told apart. The faces yield on return, the variations from king to king and queen to queen rewarding comparison, and scholarship has used them to group the carvers. But much of the return is to the history of the North rather than to the carvings as images.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The field is Romanesque ivory carving and the European chess set of the twelfth century, and force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: these are the most complete surviving statement of the figurative chess set of the High Middle Ages, a whole population of ranks in one manner, but they reorganised neither carving nor the game, since the turn to figures was general and abstract and figurative sets went on side by side. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it is small, since the pieces were lost to sight and unknown until 1831 and redirected nothing in medieval carving. Later reach is very wide, as the image of a chess set for the modern world, in replicas and in film; it is popular and delayed, and discounted.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at some eight and a half centuries. Form: the pieces survive whole in nearly every case, faces, attributes and carving legible; the ivory has cracked and darkened in places and a few pieces are damaged, but no rank is lost from the set as the hoard preserves it. Some pieces are reported to have been coloured to tell the two armies apart; that colour is gone but for traces, so that the sides are no longer visible as two, and the sets were incomplete as found. Presence: interrupted, unknown for centuries until 1831, then continuously on view in London and Edinburgh and widely reproduced; the division between two museums is presence, not loss. Fabric: walrus ivory is durable and stable. Held below the usual figure for the lost colour, the incomplete sets and the centuries out of sight.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged as command of carving in walrus ivory and whale tooth at small scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the figures are designed in the round to the section of the material, compact and unbroken, with no part the hand or the board would snap. The faces are cut with great economy, the eyes drilled and ringed, the brows heavy, the mouths set; the drapery falls in straight, shallow parallel folds; the thrones carry interlace, beasts and arcading cut to a depth and fineness that hold at a few centimetres. The variety of expression within one manner is the sign of a practised workshop. The costs are charged: the carving is uneven across the hoard, some pieces stiff and summary, the horses small and wooden, the pawns unworked.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the enthroned king, with carved throne and drawn sword, and the pawn, an unfigured block. One law governs both: rank is legibility. The more a piece is, the more it is figured; the king is a person, the pawn a stone, and every rank between takes its place on that scale by face, attribute and posture. The manner is one across the hoard, the same eyes, the same stocky proportion, the same compact silhouette, though the pieces come from several sets and probably several hands; the shield-biters, the wildest figures, are made in the same squat column as the calmest warders. Held at its figure because the territory is narrow, one manner and one set of types repeated, and because the mixed sets are less whole than any one set once was.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The orders held: the state, in the king and queen; the church, in the bishop; arms and the knightly order, in knight and warder; the common many, in the faceless pawn; the sacred, in crozier and mitre; war and its frenzy, in the shield-biter; and play, which holds them all, since the whole order of society is made a game. They are integrated: the board is the structure in which they meet, and their relation is the game’s rule. What holds the axis among the two lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no family beyond the royal pair, no nature, no consciousness beyond a fixed expression, no history but the history the hoard carries. It is a set of small figures of rank. The figure describes the form.

Score: 6.6 / 10