Ivory Vikings

"These are the Lewis chessmen. Most of them are in the British Museum. When they do the ‘100 best objects in the world’—those sorts of lists—the Lewis chessmen always end up on there. They were made in the second half of the 12th century and discovered in the 19th century on Lewis, under a sandbank, in slightly mysterious circumstances. In this book—and I’m not sure I agree with everything in it: none of the books I’ve chosen are the last word on Vikings—Nancy Brown takes the idea of the Lewis chessmen and uses it to look at the Norse world in its entirety. She creates a chronologically multi-layered effect, all the way up to the history of their discovery. She starts with a chapter on the rooks. Chapter 2 is on the bishops, then there are chapters on the queens, the kings and the knights. Each one focuses on a different aspect of Norse history. For example, for the queens, she’s looking at strong, powerful women. What’s interesting is that she champions the idea of the Lewis chessmen being made in Iceland. There’s always a lot of debate as to where they were made. A lot of people say they were made in Trondheim in Norway. She sides with the more recent, Icelandic faction. Specifically, she says they were made by a woman called Margaret the Adroit who was in the service of Bishop Pall, who was a patron of the arts. Whether or not you agree with that theory, what’s nice about the book is the way she teases out all these different threads that we don’t necessarily to associate with Vikings and the Viking age—like female craftsmanship. I really like the idea of a woman—called Margaret the Adroit—carving all this amazing artwork out of ivory in medieval Iceland. The book also takes a broad, geographical sweep because a lot of Norse ivory came from Greenland. So you get a sense of how the different parts of the Norse world connect up. She deals with the question of how they ended up in Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. Of course, the Scottish islands were Norse for centuries. Orkney was under Norse control until the 15th century. There’s another saga, The Saga of the Orkney Islanders which tells stories about the Norse rulers of these islands. There are also Norse runes carved on the Neolithic chamber at Maeshowe in Orkney, and at other sites all over the place. Also, she looks at religion and what happens after the conversion to Christianity. She focuses particularly on this character, Bishop Pall, who’s a northern Icelander from Skalholt. Even as a person who studies the sagas for a living, we don’t really talk about The Saga of Bishop Pall very often—to be honest it’s not particularly exciting. But Nancy Brown suggests that the saga was written by Bishop Pall’s son, and she opens up this whole area of medieval Iceland—the creation of art and literature—that even if you’re an expert on this sort of thing, you’re unlikely to consider. I learned so much from this book. Like I said, I wouldn’t necessarily agree with all of it by a long shot. She’s not an academic, but she knows her stuff. I think it would be a stronger book if she hadn’t decided what she thought the answer was and then take that as read, but it is a really interesting book. I particularly like the chapter in which she looks at the earliest account of how the chessmen were discovered—it starts off as a fairly standard story—and how the story changes and becomes more dramatic over time. So first it’s a guy, then it’s a guy and his wife, then it’s a guy and his wife and a cow, and then the cow is itching its bum and breaks open the sandbank and the chess pieces are inside. It just grows and grows and grows, and she traces how stories live and develop and change, which, for anyone who’s interested in storytelling, is really clever. “Scotland has an incredibly rich Viking history” There are also very sad parts. Brown talks about a man who was the assistant curator of manuscripts at the British Museum when the chess pieces were discovered. He was instrumental in getting them bought for the British Museum. She’s looked at his diaries, which he kept from the age for 18 all the way up to a few months before his death. This is a different sort of history, and it is tragic. Around the time when he was looking into the chess pieces, his wife has just died in childbirth. He’d been courting her for 10 years. Her father had only just allowed them to get married, and then she died. The chess pieces come onto the scene less than a year after her death, and so his diary is full of his grief and an almost mechanical fascination with studying these Viking artefacts. She goes all they way up to the Scottish referendum, and how the Lewis chessmen get embroiled in that. There was a poster for the British Museum with an image of one of these chessmen, and it said something underneath like ‘Norway 1050-1200.’ Of course the Scottish nationalists were furious. They said, ‘No! These are the Lewis chessmen—that’s where they were discovered. We don’t even know where they were made, and you’re just taking away our role in this part of Viking history.’ Scotland has an incredibly rich Viking history of its own. That’s the other thing that I think is very interesting about this book: there are some parts of the Viking world that we really do focus in on and others that we really don’t. For example, the Scottish Isles. We don’t think of that as being a strong part of the Viking story, and yet it is—and that’s why they seem to have ended up in Lewis. Possibly it was a trader going from Norway to Iceland—who knows? I’ve spent a lot of time, growing up, on the Isle of Bute because that’s where my Dad was born. There’s an amazing Viking hogback grave marker in one of the ruined churchyards, like a giant piece of Toblerone. You find these all over the Scottish isles. Then, when you get up to the Northern Isles, everything is Norse. Most of the place names are of Norse origin. There’s a town in both Orkney and in Shetland called Twatt, which comes from ‘thveit,’ a Norse world meaning ‘cleared place.’ There are a million and one tea towels that have pictures of the ‘Twatt’ place name sign. I’ve got one in my office. In Brown’s book, she creates windows onto different parts of the Viking Age—and the medieval Nordic world that comes afterwards—that I really didn’t know very much about."