The Lewis Chessmen Read Online Free PDF

Galloway) in Scotland, provides evidence that the game continued to be played at that time.
    The 14 plain ivory disks [ Fig. 4.61 ] found with the Lewis chessmen are often forgotten about, but they are important evidence that the hoard was notjust for playing chess. These disks are best interpreted as tables-men. Many other medieval tables men are known from Europe, mostly decorated and of smaller size. There is an eleventh-century bone and antler set with a board from Gloucester Castle in England, and others of eleventh to twelfth-century date from St Margaret’s Inch (Angus) [ Fig. 22 ] and St Andrews (Fife), both in Scotland.
    These tables-men were for playing a board game – tables – a forerunner of modern backgammon. Tables already had a long history, extending back for hundreds of years, by the time the pieces in the Lewis hoard were carved. Board games were widely played in the ancient world and there is evidence for them in Scotland from the Iron Age onwards.
    It is possible that the Lewis hoard represents the remains of a games compendium designed for playing chess, hnefatafl and tables. What we regard as chess kings could have doubled for use in hnefatafl, along with either some pawns or warders. Indeed, it is an intriguing possibility that the craftsmen who made these pieces may deliberately have chosen warders to substitute the chariots prevalent in earlier sets precisely because they could more conveniently double for the pawns or guards of hnefatafl. Early game-boards that are two-sided – one for hnefatafl, the other for another game like tables or merels – are reasonably common in the Scandinavian world. Double-sided game boards have been with us ever since and there would no doubt have been many in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that combined chess and hnefatafl, like apparently the board from Greenland, made of walrus ivory or whales’ teeth, given as a present to Harald Hardrada, an eleventh-century King of Norway. The source for this is the Icelandic Króka-Refs Saga, an early fourteenth-century story of doubtful historicity. There are no clues as to whether or not the Lewis hoard was buried with one or more board. If, as would have been likely, such boards were of wood, they would not have survived in the ground for hundreds of years.

    22. TABLES-MAN A tables-man of 11th to 12th-century date from St Margaret’s Inch, a crannog in the Loch of Forfar, Angus .
    The playing of board games was popular in both medieval Scandinavian and Gaelic society. Kali Kolsson, prior to becoming Earl of Orkney in 1129 and changing his name to Rognvald, made a poem listing the nine key skills or attributes of a nobleman. The one that headed his list was ability at playing ‘tafl’,which may have been understood to include a variety of games like chess and hnefatafl. This idea that playing games well was a mark of a great man crops up in Gaelic poetry as late as the eighteenth century. And women clearly played as well from early days. That the game was not just the preserve of nobles is demonstrated by the legend of Tristan, in a version recorded as early as 1200. It has Tristan taking ship with Norwegian merchants who have a chess-board on which Tristan plays.
    The continuing interest in playing board games in the Western Isles can be demonstrated by the discovery of other tables-men dating to medieval times. From Iona Abbey there is a fifteenth-century bone piece carved with a crowned mermaid grasping her tail with one hand, and holding a fish with the other [ Fig. 23 ]. Another bone tablesman found in a cave on the Isle of Rúm is decorated all over with an interlace design [ Fig. 24 ]. Two decorated bone tables-men, as well as about 50 plain counters or tables-men of stone, have been recovered from the excavations at Finlaggan, the home of the MacDonalds on Islay.
    In 1782 Lord MacDonald gave the museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland the handle of an ancient dirk.