#chess set

[sosuperawesome]

Glass Mushroom Chess Set // Nocco Noccoo

[smbhax]

Mindy Lee (@mindyleedoodles) - "Knight"

[dozydawn]

[proserpina-granatum]

Central Europe, Selenus-Pattern Chess Set, early 19th century

Japan, Ecclesiastical Figures Chess Set, c. 1966

India, Playing Set, c. 1930

Peru, Incas, c. 1977

Mathilde Jaksch-Szendro (man. Augarten Wein Porcelain Factory), Figural Chess Set, 1926-1960

France, Figural Chess Set, 20th century

Irving Amen, End Game, 1960s

Personal highlights from the Maryhill Museum's chess collection. The collection is cataloged here.

[tgirl-tamag0tchi]

Anyone wanna play chess with me?

Made my first move…

[toyastales]

I need this chess set in my life.

[gentlemensarts]

[vintage-tigre]

This Isle of Lewis chess set was discovered in the early 19th century in a buried stone chamber in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland by a crofter named Malcolm MacLeod. Legend has it that he mistook the pieces for elves and fled in terror. Later, a local man named Roderick Ririe of Stornoway was the first to exhibit the pieces in Edinburgh at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1831.

Most of the pieces are carved from walrus ivory, with a handful made from sperm whale teeth, and they date to roughly 1150 to 1200 AD. The carving style and details, like the bishops’ mitres pointed front and back, place them firmly in that window. Scholarly consensus has long favored Trondheim, Norway as the workshop, given its tradition of ivory carving and similar finds at the cathedral site, though a persistent minority view (championed by writer Nancy Marie Brown) points to Iceland and a specific named carver, Margret the Adroit. Nobody knows why they ended up buried on Lewis: theories range from a merchant’s lost cargo to a shipwreck to the treasured possessions of a local Norse-aligned ruler, since Lewis at the time had close ties to the Kingdom of the Isles and Norway.

Their fame rests largely on personality: the queens sit with a hand pressed to one cheek in an expression somewhere between worry and weariness, and the rooks are carved as wild-eyed warders biting the tops of their shields, a detail scholars read as a depiction of berserkers working themselves into a battle frenzy. They’re considered masterpieces of Norse art and offer a window into medieval craftsmanship and the cultural exchange between Norse and European societies.

After their discovery, the hoard was broken up and sold off within months, with most pieces eventually reaching the British Museum and a smaller group passing through Edinburgh collectors into what became the National Museum of Scotland. Today 82 pieces remain at the British Museum in London and 11 at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, with six on long-term loan to Museum nan Eilean in Stornoway, back on Lewis itself. At least one piece, a missing warder, turned up in a Edinburgh family’s drawer in 2019 (they’d bought it for five pounds in the 1960s) and sold at Sotheby’s for close to a million dollars, a reminder that the hoard as found may still be incomplete.