Wednesday, September 30, 2015

What is the Lewis Chess Queen Thinking? (Reprise)

As I was writing Ivory Vikings, my new book about the Lewis chessmen, I commented on this blog (here) that "One reason they are so popular is the expressiveness of their faces--and how hard those expressions are to interpret. The queens, particularly, mesmerize me. All have one hand pressed to their cheeks."

I pointed you, my readers, to the 360-degree interactive video from the British Museum in which you can turn the chess queen all the way around as if holding her in your hand. (See it again here)

The caption calls her expression sad or gloomy. When I used a photograph of a different one of the eight Lewis queens as an illustration in my earlier book, Song of the Vikings, I called her expression "aghast."

So I asked you to tell me, "What is the queen thinking?" Your answers were very creative--and some of them were very helpful--but they were also widely varied.

You described her as concerned, surprised, taken aback, wretched, perplexed, pensive—or perhaps suffering a toothache. "Do I really have fifteen kids who fight all the time?" said one of you; another described her state-of-mind as "weary of war and fools."

Icelandic author Fridrik Erlingsson responded most fully: "I think the expression on the Queen's face is an intimidating one; an expression of cold calculation, focus and determination: She is planning the next move!"


As I conclude in Ivory Vikings, no one agrees on what emotion the artist or artists intended to present. Here's what I found out when researching the gesture:

Actors in classical Roman theater, I learned, held a hand to the cheek to express grief, and Anglo-Saxon artists picked up on this gesture. In eleventh-century manuscripts from Canterbury, Adam and Eve cast out from Eden, a psalmist whose "spirit has failed," and a female personification of Unrighteousness all lament their fates with their hands on their cheeks. Yet there's a subtle difference between these images and the Lewis queens: In the Canterbury manuscripts, the hands are cupped and the fingers spread almost like claws. They hide the eye, sometimes even the nose and mouth. And rather than glaring at the observer, as the Lewis queens do, these grievers are hunched and cowed.

A twelfth-century life of Saint Alexis, made for the hermitess Christina of Markyate, depicts the saint's virgin bride standing stoically at the door, a hand to her cheek, as Alexis abandons her to become a holy beggar. Following Christian law, she would not be able to remarry while he lived. (See  it here) Still, her grief is hardly commensurate with that of the Virgin Mary who, in some twelfth-century Crucifixion scenes, likewise holds her hand to her cheek.

Comparing these contemporaneous images to the Lewis queens, James Robinson in a 2004 British Museum booklet explained that "There is an element of despair or grieving, but the emotional focus is really on contemplation." According to Neil Stratford in an earlier museum publication, "the queens adopt the traditional pose of composure and patience."

In a children’s book by British Museum curator Irving Finkel, they are "careworn and anxious," "disapproving," "imperious," and "not amused." Author Rosemary Sutcliff, in her children's book Chess-Dream in a Garden, imagines the queen feeling hurt and angry, having been accused, unfairly, of smiling "too sweetly" on one of the knights. A columnist for The Guardian found them "looking so wise (or so bored)." A New York Times reporter compared the gesture to Homer Simpson's "D'oh!"

Often your interpretation depends on which of the eight queens you look at--and how you turn her to the light. To poet Robert Peake, "She is worry cut from walrus tusk / … One hand on her face in disbelief." (Read more at www.robertpeake.com.) To singer Dougie MacLean, "She holds her weary head."

Francesca Simon visited the British Museum's collection to publicize her book, The Sleeping Army, in which the Lewis chessmen wake to take a little girl on an adventure. In a 2011 video (see it on YouTube here), she said, "What I wasn't expecting was that they would seem so alive. ... The more you look at them the more you see, like the fact that the queen is always looking a little bit to the side. It's very difficult to get her to look at you. ... She's probably the most beautiful of all the pieces. She's got this wonderful expressive face and these kind of odd staring eyes, and to me what they always looked like was not only unhappy but almost shell-shocked, as if something pretty terrible has happened."

I think I'll stick with "aghast."

Read more about Ivory Vikings on my website, http://nancymariebrown.com, or meet me at these upcoming events:

October 13, 2015: Fletcher Memorial Library, 88 Main Street,  Ludlow, VT, at 7 pm. Sponsored by The Book Nook, Ludlow, VT.

October 15, 2015: Kroch Library 2B48, home of the Fiske Icelandic Collection at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, at 4:30 pm. See Book Talk: Ivory Vikings for more details.

October 17, 2015: the Sixth Annual Iceland Affair, Winchester Center Grange Hall, Winchester Center, CT, at noon. See http://icelandaffair.com for more details.

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

The Story of the Lewis Chessmen

One book leads to the next. It's a truism among writers, and particularly apt for explaining how my latest book, Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them, published by St Martin's press in September, came to be.

Ivory Vikings is a biography of the Lewis chessmen, the famous walrus-ivory chessmen found on the Isle of Lewis in far western Scotland in 1831. While gathering illustrations for my previous book about medieval Iceland, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, I was surprised to learn that these chessmen, long considered icons of the Viking Age, had actually been carved over a hundred years later, between 1150 and 1250, during the lifetime of Snorri Sturluson.

According to one theory I read, they may even have been carved by a woman in Iceland whom Snorri knew, Margaret the Adroit, who worked for Bishop Pall of Skalholt, Snorri's foster brother.

In Song of the Vikings, I argued that Snorri was responsible for most of what we know about Norse mythology. I argued that he invented the genre of "saga," which his countrymen in the 13th and 14th centuries developed into the masterpieces of world literature they are now universally acknowledged to be. I included an image of one of the Lewis queens in that book, referring to the theory of their Icelandic origin in a caption. But there was no room in Song of the Vikings to develop the idea that medieval Icelanders may also have been exceptional visual artists as well as world-class writers.

That idea nagged at the back of my mind. I wondered why I'd never heard anything like it before. Was the author of this Iceland theory of the Lewis chessmen a crackpot? I did some basic research and learned that the theory was, in fact, a very old one: Frederic Madden of the British Museum, who was the first person to write about the Lewis chessmen, the year after their discovery on the Isle of Lewis in 1831, concluded that they had been made in Iceland in the 12th century.

And yet, when Icelandic civil engineer and chess aficionado Gudmundur Thorarinsson reintroduced the Iceland theory, he was ridiculed. Alexander Woolf, a professor of medieval studies from the University of St Andrews, was particularly dismissive. Responding to a reporter from the New York Times, he said that Iceland was too poor and backward a place to produce such stunning works of art. "A hell of a lot of walrus ivory went into making those chessmen, and Iceland was a bit of a scrappy place full of farmers," he said, adding, "You don't get the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Iowa."

(Woolf has since retracted his statement. The reporter had caught him off guard. Since meeting Gudmundur and visiting Skalholt in Iceland, Woolf has become a supporter of the Iceland theory.)

Woolf’s comment stung me. Having just spent several years researching and writing about the Iceland of that period, I knew he was wrong. Iceland in the late 12th and early 13th century was at the peak of its Golden Age: rich, independent, and in a frenzy of artistic creation.

Margret the Adroit by Svala Soleyg
The man Gudmundur believed had commissioned the Lewis chessmen, Bishop Pall of Skalholt, was not only the foster brother of Snorri Sturluson, he was the great-grandson of King Magnus Bare-Legs of Norway (1093-1103), who conquered northern Scotland and the islands and took his nickname from his fondness for wearing kilts. Magnus's line ruled the Norwegian empire without interruption from 1103 to 1264, when northern Scotland and the islands were ceded to the Scottish crown. During that century and a half, King Magnus's Icelandic kinsmen routinely visited Norway, where they were recognized as royalty. Many were knighted; Snorri Sturluson became the first Icelandic baron of Norway; his son-in-law became the first Icelandic earl of Norway.

Bishop Pall himself was a well-educated, well-traveled nobleman--hardly a "scrappy farmer." As a youth he became a retainer of Earl Harald, who ruled the Orkney islands and Caithness in northern Scotland. Later, Pall traveled to England to attend school at a cathedral university, probably Lincoln, where his uncle and predecessor at the see of Skalholt, Bishop Thorlak, had studied. Pall returned to Iceland and became a wealthy chieftain, marrying and having several children. He was famous for the breadth of his book-learning and his excellent Latin, the extravagance of his banquets, the beauty of his singing voice, and his love of fine things. He was known to have in his employ several artists, including Margaret the Adroit, known as the best ivory carver in Iceland.

The Lewis chessmen are the most famous chess pieces in the world. They are considered masterpieces of Romanesque art, among the most important archaeological finds from Scotland and the most popular exhibits at the British Museum. If there was a chance they could indeed have been made by a woman in Iceland around the year 1200, that was a story I needed to tell.

(This story is based on an interview with the Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið, published on September 4; an English version was published on Medievalists.net on September 13.)

Read more about Ivory Vikings on my website, http://nancymariebrown.com, or check out these reviews:

"Bones of Contention," The Economist (August 29): http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21662487-bones-contention

"Review: Ivory Vikings," Minneapolis Star Tribune (August 29): http://www.startribune.com/review-ivory-vikings-by-nancy-marie-brown-the-mystery-of-the-lewis-chessmen/323230441/

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

The Iceland Theory of the Lewis Chessmen

Where were the famous Lewis chessmen carved? Art historians usually assume, in the absence of other evidence, that an object was made close to where it was found. But while these chessmen found on Lewis are universally known as "the Lewis chessmen," few experts today have championed the Isle of Lewis as the home of an ivory carver of such sophistication. They consider medieval Lewis too "marginal" and "out of the way" to produce great art.

As I explain in my book Ivory Vikings, the same prejudice applies to medieval Iceland.

Frederic Madden of the British Museum published the first scholarly account of the chessmen in 1832. At the end of this nearly 100-page treatise he confidently concludes that they were made in Iceland.

This theory was accepted until 1874, when the Norwegian chess historian Antonius Van der Linde belittled Madden's suggestion that Iceland could produce anything approaching the sophistication of the Lewis chessmen. Icelanders, he scoffed, were too backward to even play chess.

Since then, although chess historians like Willard Fiske and H.J.R. Murray thought the chessmen came from Iceland, art historians have favored the Norway (or Trondheim) theory. This theory was strengthened between 1965 and 1999 by a series of studies of Romanesque sculpture by Norwegian art historians and archaeologists. But mostly the Norway theory has been strengthened by repetition—what one scholar has called "the snowball effect."

In 2010 David Caldwell of the National Museum of Scotland and his colleagues wrote that "the limited evidence favors Trondheim." Their main argument was that "most scholars would at present expect to locate the manufacture of such pieces in a town or large trading center. The craftsmen who made such prestigious items were, perhaps, more likely to thrive in such a setting."

When civil engineer and chess aficionado Gudmundur Thorarinsson posted his discussion of the Iceland theory on the internet, he was attacked. Said one critic, "The content is literally filled with faults and oversights. … This whole argument seems far-fetched."

Yet as I traced Gudmundur's path through libraries, cathedrals, and museums, from Reykjavik to Skalholt, from Edinburgh to Trondheim, Lund, and Lewis, I found very few "faults and oversights." Fewer, in fact, than I found exploring the Norwegian theory, which seems mostly to be based on that grand medieval concept of authority.

Building on Madden and Murray, Gudmundur added the insights of scholars who wrote in Icelandic and whose voices had not entered the international debate on the origins of the Lewis chessmen, such as art historian Bera Nordal, archaeologist Kristjan Eldjarn and his colleagues, and historians Helgi Gudmundsson and Helgi Thorlaksson.

Before Gudmundur wrote his paper, no one discussing the Lewis chessmen connected them with the extraordinarily rich 12th-century bishopric at Skalholt, its wooden church larger than any in Norway. No one mentioned the art-loving Bishop Pall Jonsson, who surrounded himself with the finest artists in the land, four of whom are named in his saga: Amundi the Smith, Atli the Scribe, Thorstein the Shrine-Smith, and Margret the Adroit, who was the most skillful ivory carver in Iceland.

Did Margret the Adroit carve the Lewis chessmen under a commission from Bishop Pall? Unless proof of an ivory workshop is found at Skalholt, we cannot say yes or no. But "the limited evidence," I believe, places Iceland on equal footing with Trondheim as the site of their creation. Someone else will need to argue the case for Lewis.

(This story is based on an interview with the Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið, published on September 4.)

Read more about Ivory Vikings on my website, http://nancymariebrown.com, or hear me speak about the book at these events:

September 19: Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, Vermont at 7:00 p.m.

September 21: Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue, New York at 6:30 p.m.

October 15: The Fiske Icelandic Collection at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY at 4:30 p.m.

October 17: The Sixth Annual Iceland Affair, Winchester Center, CT, time to be announced.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Meeting the Lewis Chessmen--In Person

"If you knew what they were valued at ..."

During a research trip to Edinburgh for my book Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them, I had hoped to meet James Robinson, who wrote an excellent guidebook on the Lewis chessmen for the British Museum. Robinson is now a curator at the National Museum of Scotland (NMS), where 11 of the chessmen reside. I received no answer to my initial query, so I planned my research trip to Edinburgh without him.

A week before I left for Scotland, I tried again. Robinson immediately responded, apologizing that my email had been buried under a deluge of others while he'd been traveling. He would be away again while I was visiting Edinburgh, so we could not meet, but "I will forward your message to request access to the pieces for you," he said.

Until that moment, it had not occurred to me that I might "request access," that is, to see and handle the chessmen outside of their display case. And yet, because of Robinson's generous reading of my letter, that is exactly what happened. My request made its way to curator George Dalgleish, who asked which ones I wanted to see. He passed that information on to curator Jackie Moran, who cheerfully wrote to tell me that "I will get the chessmen off display at 08:00, as long as I can get the gallery lights switched on."


By 08:30 I was set up in Jackie's office at the NMS, with my computer, my notes, my camera, a borrowed magnifying glass, and the four chessmen I had chosen in a padded carrying case on the table in front of me. Jackie spread tissue on the tabletop and handed me a set of bright purple latex gloves, then returned to her own work at the desk behind me, leaving me face to face with these exquisite little 800-year-old works of art: a warder-rook, biting his shield like a Viking berserk; a bishop, raising his hand in blessing; and a king and queen pair.



The most interesting to me was the queen, whom I had thought at first had been broken and repaired. Now I could tell, studying her up close, that the patch had been applied (with four tiny ivory pegs) before the artist had finished her carving, in order to cover over a weak spot in the original walrus tusk. The workmanship was so fine and the materials so poor, compared to the other pieces, that I really had to wonder what was going through the artist's mind to have even tried to make a chess piece out of this defective lump of tusk.


Seated on her richly decorated throne, she has terrible posture. Her spine is hunched, her head juts forward; she looks old and almost all done in. Her hair is braided and looped up under a veil that is clipped in back. She wears a pleated skirt, a short gown, a robe with embroidered or fur-trimmed edges, a jewel at her throat, her wrists ringed with bangles. She is brooding, her jaw clenched. She claps her right hand to her cheek, cradles her elbow with the left.

Such love went into the making of that queen, I thought, marveling over her tiny fingers. Her left thumb curves back like mine does.


I was concentrating so hard on this little queen in my hand, turning her to take photos from all angles, that at one point my camera slipped out of my grasp. Thunk. I heard Jackie gasp. "It was the camera," I mumbled, and kept on with my work.

It wasn't until the next day, as I was having tea with former NMS curator David Caldwell in the museum cafe, that I realized how shocked Jackie must have been to have heard that thunk—and how completely the beauty of these pieces had made me forget everything but the desire to understand them. Said David, “If you knew what they were valued at, you wouldn’t want to pick one up.”


Read more about Ivory Vikings on my website, http://nancymariebrown.com, or check out these reviews:

"Bones of Contention," The Economist (August 29): http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21662487-bones-contention

"Review: Ivory Vikings," Minneapolis Star Tribune (August 29): http://www.startribune.com/review-ivory-vikings-by-nancy-marie-brown-the-mystery-of-the-lewis-chessmen/323230441/

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Ivory Vikings Published Today!

Today is the official publication day of Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them.

As a writer I live for such days, when the book that's been my world and work for the past three years finally meets you, the readers.

And the first reviews have reassured me that you're going to love it:

"Absorbing ... bristles with fascinating facts," said The Economist.

"A fascinating tale of discovery and mystery," said the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

"This book is a delight," said Booklist: "endlessly fascinating."

The New York Post included it in "This Week's Must-Read Books."

And on Amazon.com it's listed in "Best Books of the Month."

That's in addition to the wonderful blurbs it received from advance readers like Pulitzer-prize winner Geraldine Brooks, who said, "Brown's book is a true cornucopia, bursting with delicious revelations. Whether your passion is chess, art, archaeology, literature, or the uncanny and beautiful landscape of Iceland, Ivory Vikings offers rich and original insights by a writer who is as erudite as she is engaging."

To whet your appetite, here is the opening passage:

In the early 1800s, on a golden Hebridean beach, the sea exposed an ancient treasure cache: ninety-two game pieces carved of ivory and the buckle of the bag that once contained them. Seventy-eight are chessmen--the Lewis chessmen--the most famous chessmen in the world. Between one and five-eighths and four inches tall, these chessmen are Norse netsuke, each face individual, each full of quirks: the kings stout and stoic, the queens grieving or aghast, the bishops moon-faced and mild. The knights are doughty, if a bit ludicrous on their cute ponies. The rooks are not castles but warriors, some going berserk, biting their shield in battle frenzy. Only the pawns are lumps--simple octagons--and few at that, only nineteen, though the fourteen plain disks could be pawns or men for a different game, like checkers. Altogether, the hoard held almost four full chess sets--only one knight, four rooks, and forty-four pawns are missing--about three pounds of ivory treasure.
Who carved them? Where? How did they arrive in that sandbank or, as another account says, that underground cist--on the Isle of Lewis in westernmost Scotland? No one knows for sure: History, too, has many pieces missing. To play the game, we fill the empty squares with pieces of our own imagination.
Instead of facts about these chessmen, we have clues. Some come from medieval sagas; others from modern archaeology, art history, forensics, and the history of board games. The story of the Lewis chessmen encompasses the whole history of the Vikings in the North Atlantic, from 793 to 1066, when the sea road connected places we think of as far apart and culturally distinct: Norway and Scotland, Ireland and Iceland, the Orkney Islands and Greenland, the Hebrides and Newfoundland. Their story questions the economics behind the Viking voyages to the West, explores the Viking impact on Scotland, and shows how the whole North Atlantic was dominated by Norway for almost five hundred years, until the Scottish king finally claimed his islands in 1266. It reveals the struggle within Viking culture to accommodate Christianity, the ways in which Rome's rules were flouted, and how orthodoxy eventually prevailed. And finally, the story of the Lewis chessmen brings from the shadows an extraordinarily talented woman artist of the twelfth century: Margret the Adroit of Iceland.
The Lewis chessmen are the best-known Scottish archaeological treasure of all time. To David Caldwell, former curator at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where eleven of the chessmen now reside, they may also be the most valuable: "It is difficult to translate that worth into money," he and Mark Hall wrote in a museum guidebook in 2010, "and practically impossible to measure their cultural significance and the enjoyment they have given countless museum visitors over the years." Or, as Caldwell phrased it to me over tea one afternoon in the museum's cafeteria: "If you knew what they were valued at, you wouldn't want to pick one up."
Too late for that. I'd already spent an hour handling four of them. Out of their glass display case, they are impossible to resist, warm and bright, seeming not old at all, but strangely alive. They nestle in the palm, smooth and weighty, ready to play. Set on a desktop, in lieu of the thirty-two-inch-square chessboard they'd require, they make a satisfying click.

I hope you'll join me at one of these events introducing Ivory Vikings. As more dates are scheduled, I'll add them to the Events page on my website at http://nancymariebrown.com.

September 9, 2015: Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, VT at 7:00 p.m.

September 11, 2015: Book Launch Party at 7:00 p.m. For an invitation, contact Kim at Green Mountain Books and Prints in Lyndonville, VT.

September 19, 2015: Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, VT at 7:00 p.m.

September 21, 2015: Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue, New York at 6:30 p.m.

October 15, 2015: The Fiske Icelandic Collection at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY at 4:30 p.m.

October 17, 2015: The Sixth Annual Iceland Affair, Winchester Center, CT; time to be announced.

November 1, 2015: Vermont Voices at Stone Church, Chester, VT at 2 p.m., hosted by Misty Valley Books.