The Lewis Chessmen, Up Close

The Lewis Chessmen, Up Close
Aug 19 2010, 10:55 AM ET

David Shenk is a writer on genetics, talent and intelligence. He is the author of Data Smog, The Forgetting, and most recently, The Genius In All of Us.

Today, for the first time, I got to see some of the magnificent Lewis chess pieces first-hand, in Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland. I wrote about them in my book The Immortal Game (excerpt below) but until today had not yet seen them in person. Most of them usually reside at the British Museum in London. They are 78 figurines, comprising four not-quite-complete chess sets, hand-carved from walrus tusk and whale teeth near Trondheim, Norway around 1150, but discovered seven hundred miles away in 1831 in the Bay of Uig on the Scottish Isle of Lewis. They are spectacular.

Excerpt from The Immortal Game

Despite appearances to the contrary, the rolling, uneven dunes on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, about fifty miles west of the Scottish mainland, are not ancient burial mounds. They’re natural formations, configured over thousands of years by the shifting water table and the terrific sea winds howling off the Atlantic.

Here is the full article.