Bones of contention

Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them. By Nancy Marie Brown. St. Martin’s Press; 288 pages; $26.99.

IN 2010 an amateur Icelandic historian gatecrashed an international symposium on the Lewis chessmen, the greatest cache of medieval game pieces ever found. Gudmundur Thorarinsson, a chess-player (and an engineer by profession), hoped to convince the assembled scholars that the 92 walrus ivory pieces unearthed on the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland, in 1831 were the work of a woman carver commissioned by a medieval Icelandic bishop. He was dismissed as a “nuthead”. Though no one really knows where the chessmen were made, the consensus of curators of the Lewis hoard held by the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland is that they probably originated in Norway late in the 12th century.

Mr Thorarinsson’s theory, however, caught the eye of Nancy Marie Brown, an American who has written extensively on the Viking age. Alerted by the disparaging of medieval Iceland as a “scrappy place full of farmers”, she begged to...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1NCBRtN