AS works of art, the Lewis chessmen tell us a great deal about the Scandinavian world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, what people valued and the quality of life. They are a useful source of information on how royalty, clerics, knights and warriors dressed. They have fascinated hundreds of thousands of people worldwide since their discovery and their popularity appears to be going from strength to strength. The replica chessmen and images of them that are widely available are a testimony to this, as is their use in advertising. Indeed, they often crop up in the most surprising and unusual situations. Here we draw attention to some of their appearances in literature, films and on televisions.
Two films set in the twelfth century – ‘Becket’ (United Kingdom 1964) and ‘The Lion in Winter’ (UK 1968) – feature Lewis-style chess sets being played, in the former by King Louis of France and one of his noblemen, and in the latter by King Philip II of France and Geoffrey, the son of King Henry II of England. More recently they are the inspiration for the chessmen in the film of J. K. Rowling ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ (United States 2001).
That doyen of children’s literature, Rosemary Sutcliff, wrote her Chess-Dream in a Garden around the Lewis chessmen, and on television, and subsequently in book form, they inspired the classic children’s animation, ‘The Saga of Noggin the Nog’, as described by one of its creators, Oliver Postgate:*
At different times both Peter Firmin and I had visited the … Museum, where we had both noticed a set of Norse chessmen from the island of Lewis. What had impressed us was that, far from being fierce and warlike, it was clear that these were essentially kindly, non-belligerent characters, who were thoroughly dismayed by the prospect of contest. … it occurred to Peter that the chessmen … could well have been called Nogs, that their prince was a Noggin and that the wicked baron … could be their … uncle, perhaps a Nogbad.
The creators of Noggin the Nog realised that there was a lot to be made of the faces of the Lewis chessmen, that children as well as adults could empathise with them. As we hope that this account has shown, it is the faces, the individuality of the pieces, that continue to fascinate, and which probably still have a lot to tell us.
* O. Postgate: Seeing Things, An Autobiography (London: Methuen, 2000), pp. 219-20. Used with the kind permission of Daniel Postgate.