Irving Finkel and the Chamber of Lewis Chessmen I Curator's Corner S2 Ep9 #CuratorsCorner

Hello my name is Irving Finkel.

I work in the British Museum.

I'm a curator

and welcome to my corner.

So today we're going to talk about the Lewis Chessmen.

The Lewis Chessmen are not in my department which is called the Middle East

they're in a totally different department which I don't approve of

but I can't do anything about it.

They've been carved in the middle of the 12th century out of walrus tusks

by craftsmen who were really geniuses

but they imparted to those chess pieces a huge dollop of humanity

and rather a lot of humour.

So these chessmen probably were carved north of England

in Norway, Scandinavia - we don't know where

there are different theories about it.

Some group of them was buried on the shore of Lewis for reasons we don't really know

and lay there from the middle of the 12th century till about 1830.

So those chess pieces are quite extraordinary

they were found somewhere on the Isle of Lewis on a white silvery beach on the northern shore

sometime in 1830 nobody - quite knows what really happened

there's a story about a nunnery

there's a story about a murder

there's all the usual stories

but the most reasonable one is that a cow was munching grass

which was growing on the edge of the beach

and somehow with its foot or its nose dislodged something which slid apart

and there revealed and some kind of case

where all these small ivory chess pieces

who must have terrified the life out of the first person who saw them

because they probably thought they were devils

but wisdom prevailed and somebody local scooped them up

or most of them...

and they were taken to the mainland on the quiet

and they were sold to a collector here and a collector there

and the bulk of them ended up in the British Museum

and the rest in the museum in Edinburgh.

When you see them for the first time something magical happens

and they bewitch you

and of course that's what happened to me