Hello my name is Irving Finkel. I work in the British Museum. I'm a curator
and welcome to my corner.
So today we're going to talk about the Lewis Chessmen.
The Lewis Chessmen are not in my department which is called the Middle
East they're in a totally different department which I don't approve of but
I can't do anything about it. They've been carved in the middle of the
12th century out of walrus tusks by craftsmen who were really geniuses but
they imparted to those chess pieces a huge dollop of humanity and rather a lot
of humour. So these chessmen probably were carved north of England in
Norway, Scandinavia - we don't know where, there are different theories about it.
Some group of them was buried on the shore of Lewis for reasons we don't really know
and lay there from the middle of the 12th century till about 1830 so those
chess pieces are quite extraordinary they were found somewhere on the Isle of
Lewis on a white silvery beach on the northern shore
sometime in 1830 nobody - quite knows what really happened there's a story
about a nunnery there's a story about a murder there's all the usual stories, but
the most reasonable one is that a cow was munching grass which was growing
on the edge of the beach and somehow with its foot or its nose
dislodged something which slid apart and there revealed and some kind of case
where all these small ivory chess pieces, who must have terrified the life out
from the first person who saw them because they probably thought they were
devils, but wisdom prevailed and somebody local scooped them up or most of them.
They were taken to the mainland on the quiet they were sold to a collector
here and a collector there and the bulk of them ended up in the British Museum
and the rest in the Museum in Edinburgh.
When you see them for the first time something magical happens and they bewitch you,
and of course that's what happened to me, that's what happens to all curators in this Museum
they come here as children, they fall in love with certain things and for me it was in the first place
the Lewis chess pieces, I never managed to get them out of my system,
I've always, always been crazy about them.
So in the old days when I was a young person, you could buy replicas of these chess pieces
in the shop. It was an innovation, they were about one pound twelve shillings
and sixpence and they were made by craftsmen who did their utmost to
reproduce the look of ancient ivory so they were very impressive.
We were not a particularly affluent family and we were brought up in such a way that we
only had treats on a small number of occasions like birthdays and things of
this kind so I acquired my set of replicas of the Lewis chess pieces,
32 pieces, on Christmas and birthdays over many many years of work.
In fact, when I got my PhD I still was short seven pawns and my dad decided he would
buy those as a small gesture. So I finally had a whole set to play with.
When you have that chess set in front of you, you feel like a general with an army at your
disposal fighting to the death but also tinged with a big dollop of humanity as I said.
So it's a marvellous matter that they've come to light because thousands and thousands and thousands
of people have seen these chess pieces. In fact they're in the back of people's mind and
sometimes you see them on biscuit tins, sometimes you see them on calendars and
of course you will have seen them in that cursed horrible film! Whose name I
forget about some kid with glasses who had nothing better to do one afternoon
than to play a game of chess and they used the replicas of the Lewis chess
pieces which belong to me.
Thing was the movie wasn't very interesting but
the chess piece part was very interesting indeed because if you ever
saw it you will have seen how wicked this queen could be and how vulnerable
this poor military knight could be in the face of her fury. So these are the
actual ones and I would quite like to be able to bring this alive for you by showing
you that film if I can remember what it was called but as I can't what we're
going to do now is a kind of reenactment of it in the British Museum so that it brings
it back into your memory in case you've forgotten too.
Knight to E5.
Queen to E5.
That's totally barbaric!
That's wizard's chess.
See you've packed.
I see you haven't.
Change a plan, my parents decided to go to Romania
to visit my brother Charlie. He's studying dragons there.
Now this is an interesting matter, I tell you for why
because in that film which will become nameless in this speech
it was necessary to have a chess set where children in the school could
play a game and the wardrobe mistress was sent to the British Museum to get a
set of Lewis chess piece replicas because she was a British Museum girl
because her father and her grandfather had been keepers in this Museum back in
time a long way. So she knew all about the Lewis chess pieces. Like me,
she's grown up admiring them. So she came here to buy a set of replicas and lo and
behold there were none available in the shop even for ready money. So she rang me
up knowing I had these replicas and to cut a long story short they borrowed my
replicas for use in the film. Now this isn't just a small matter, it's a matter
of extremely significant archaeology because when the chess pieces were first
discovered some of them were red. Most of them were white but some were red - they'd
been stained artificially in the workshop to distinguish the two sides on
the chessboard because as we have black and white pieces so originally they were
white and red. Well it turns out nowadays that you cannot, for love nor money,
tell which of those pieces was originally red because all the colour
has vanished even on the inside of the pieces where you have the kind of
net of structure which formed the marrow of the tusk so to speak even in the
interstices inside the core of the piece there is no trace of red.
So I'd asked the man who makes these marvellous replicas to make a replica set in red so we can
see what they would really look like. So what actually happened was that all the
children in the world saw the replicas of the Lewis chess pieces as they were
originally red and white and if they watched attentively which I hope they
did they will have seen how unpleasant and vicious in nature the red queen could
be when provoked.
They are amazing things and I think they
really need to be appreciated for lots of reasons.
Somehow or other they captivate the passerby. It is true in museum that when
people have been there a while their legs get weary and they're actually
thinking, longing, for open the fields and yoghurt. But sometimes things arrest
their attention and I have been many times hanging around by the
case where the chess piece are, I'm often hanging around there because I've
always expected one of these days they will have a conversation that I can
overhear but leaving that aside it is always a heartwarming thing to see jaded
people who rather wish they were no longer in the British Museum at all
seeing these chess pieces and being electrified by them and stooping down
and saying look at that and look at that and isn't that marvelous and that is
what they are they are marvellous.
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