The Immortal Game (5 page)

D
ESPITE 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.

But the dunes do have their powerful secrets, as an unsuspecting island peasant learned one day in the spring of 1831. At the base of a fifteen-foot sandbank near the south shore of the Bay of Uig, the interior was somehow exposed, and with it a nearly seven-hundred-year-old crypt. Our unwitting archaeologist stumbled into an ancient and cramped drystone room, six feet or so long and shaped like a beehive, with ashes strewn on the floor. The tiny room was filled, impossibly, with dozens of shrunken
people
: tiny lifelike statuettes, three to four and a half inches high, some stained beet-red and the rest left a natural off-white. The long hair, contoured faces, and proportionate bodies were eerily vivid, even animated, with wide-eyed, expectant expressions, battle-ready stances, and a full complement of medieval combat equipment and apparel. Hand-carved from walrus tusk and whale teeth, they wore tiny crowns, mitres, and helmets; held miniature swords, shields, spears, and bishop’s crosiers; some rode warhorses.

They were chess pieces, a total of seventy-eight figurines comprising four not-quite-complete sets:

eight Kings (complete)

eight Queens (complete)

sixteen Bishops (complete)

fifteen Knights (one missing)

twelve Warders (as Rooks, four missing)

nineteen Pawns (forty-five missing)

No one living at the time had ever seen anything like them. The ornamentation had a medieval gothic quality that lent the pieces an ancient and even mythic aura. Experts pronounced them Scandinavian, probably mid-twelfth century, probably carved near the Norwegian capital Trondheim some seven hundred miles away by sea, where a drawing of a strikingly similar chess Queen was later discovered. Norway was a long way off, but the link did make historical sense. The Isle of Lewis had been politically subject to the Kingdom of Norway up to 1266, and the local bishop held allegiance to the powerful Archbishop of Trondheim.

These weren’t nearly the oldest chessmen discovered—1150 put them somewhere in the middle of the chess chronology. But their abundance, origins, artistry, and superb condition made them among the most important cache of ancient pieces yet found. The modestly endowed Society of Antiquaries of Scotland tried immediately to buy them for display in Edinburgh, but before they could raise the funds, bigger fish swam in. A wealthy Scottish collector somehow plundered eleven of them for his private collection, and the British Museum in London bought the rest—sixty-seven pieces for eighty guineas (equivalent to £3,000 or roughly U.S. $5,000 in today’s currency).

The museum immediately recognized not only the pieces’ unique importance in the history of chess, but more importantly their profoundly palpable connection to life in the Middle Ages. “There are not in the museum any objects so interesting to a native Antiquary as the objects now offered to the trustees,” wrote the museum’s keeper of antiquities, Edward Hawkins, as he presented the pieces for the first time. The Lewis Chessmen were a priceless link to the past, and would become a signature draw at the museum.

There they now sit, sealed in a new glass crypt in the British Museum’s Gallery 42. Anyone can visit them.

King

Bishop

Knight

The Lewis Chessmen

“When you look at them,” suggests curator Irving Finkel, “kneel down or crouch in such a way that you can look through the glass straight into their faces and look them in the eye. You will see human beings across the passage of time. They have a remarkable quality. They speak to you.”

W
HAT DO
they say? The story of how chess migrated from the Golden Gate Palace in Baghdad to the remote Isle of Lewis, and how the pieces morphed from abstracted Persian-Indian war figurines to evocative European Christian war figurines, is an epic that underscores the enormous transfer of culture and knowledge in the Middle Ages from the East to the West. It also heralds an important shift in chess’s role as a thought tool. In medieval Europe, chess was used less to convey abstract ideas and more as a mirror for individuals to examine their own roles in society. As Europe developed a new code of social morality, chess helped society understand its new identity.

The depth of chess’s role in the Middle Ages is not necessarily a story that was destined to be told. But for the perseverance of a single British scholar, much of the detail would likely have remained indefinitely buried under the sandbank of time. Fortunately, such doggedness was second nature to Harold Murray, thanks to the peculiar circumstances of his youth. In 1879, when Murray was eleven, his father, James Murray, a self-educated son of a Scottish tailor with a passion for language, began what would become easily the most exhaustive and most revered publishing project in the history of his own native English: the
Oxford English Dictionary
, which aimed to parse out the precise meaning, origin, and historical trajectory of every English word in general use. Harold, James’s eldest son, was one of the most prolific contributors to the
OED
’s first edition, cataloguing an astounding 27,000 quotations. By the time Harold graduated with honors from Oxford University’s Balliol College, he closely shared his father’s intense historical curiosity, attachment to precision, and zeal for the unearthing of origins. He also inherited the family passion for languages: James Murray was fluent in twenty-five; Harold knew at least twelve, including Icelandic, Old Middle German, Early Anglo-Saxon, Medieval Latin, and Sanskrit.

On top of all this, Harold had a special love for numbers, games, and puzzles, an appetite for anything that would challenge the mind. He displayed unusual powers of concentration. In school he excelled at mathematics. This potent combination of interests paved an inevitable road to chess and to its elaborate history. Harold picked up the game at age twenty, playing with his younger siblings and cousins. From the start, he studied tried-and-true strategies, and was the kind of player who stuck to a handful of opening moves that felt comfortable and worked. “I have seen no reason to abandon a style of play which is generally successful against the players I meet,” he wrote. He made rich chess friendships, won more than his share of games, and even sometimes played blindfolded or against several people at once.

After leaving Oxford to teach at preparatory schools, Murray broadened his commitment to the game as a school club coach. But the best way to make his personal mark on chess, he realized, was through a massive excavation of its history. No book had rigorously sought to establish the true origins of the game, trace the early history, and then bring it up to the present. The challenge of writing the definitive history of chess, spanning 1,300 years and dozens of languages, was monumental. Even with all the resources at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, tracking a thousand-year-old chess migration across continents and religions and cultures was like trying to find and track a bird without any homing device. But for the trained son of James Murray, it was suitably proportional, a fitting family task. Harold Murray set out in 1897 “to investigate…the invention of chess; and to trace the development of the modern European game from the first appearance of its ancestor.” This impossible job would consume much of his energy for the next sixteen years, and become his life’s one great work.

One of Murray’s first chores was to learn Arabic and immerse himself in the early days of Islam. He documented how the Muslims took to chess, wrestled with its legality and propriety, and plugged it into their intellectual and territorial ambitions. Then he traced the Islamic geographic expansion, and chess’s.

Following Muhammad’s death in 632, the empire grew at a staggering pace, expanding into Persia, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Nubia, Libya, Morocco, Cyprus, Sicily, and parts of Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, and China. By 900, Muslim armies controlled an uninterrupted stretch of land and sea from the Himalayas all the way across North Africa and into Spain.

So also went Islamic culture. In 1005 the Egyptian ruler al-Hakim tried to outlaw chess and ordered the burning of all chess sets in his territory. But it was too late to stop the game’s march across North Africa. Murray discovered references to Muslim players in Cairo, Tripoli, Sicily, Sijilmasa, Fez, Seville, and Córdoba.

The game may have enjoyed its European debut in 822, having been introduced to the emir of Córdoba, Abd-al-Rahman II, by an outcast Persian Muslim nicknamed Ziriab. A onetime slave, Ziriab had trained in Baghdad with the legendary musician Ishaq at the court of Harun ar-Rashid. Then he became too good at his job: after Ziriab had the audacity to outshine his mentor in the presence of their caliph, Ishaq stepped in to protect his ground. “Jealousy is the oldest human evil,” Ishaq warned Ziriab. “No one is immune to it, not even I. There is not room enough at this court for both of us. You can choose between two things. Either you stay here and I’ll have you killed, or you go so far away from here that I’ll never hear of you again. If you choose this, I’ll give you the [travel] money.” Thus began an epic journey, wives and children in tow, across North Africa, into Morocco, and finally across the Strait of Gibraltar into Muslim Spain. When he arrived in Córdoba, this unwitting ambassador from Baghdad brought an early glimpse of the Islamic enlightenment. Famous for the sounds of his gut-stringed lute, Ziriab also dazzled Emir Abd-al-Rahman II and friends with refinements in cooking, fashion, hygiene, home decor, and recreation. Baghdad’s favorite new board game of symbolic warfare was apparently an instant hit in Spain. The very next emir, Mohammed I, was personally devoted to the game.