Today, for the first time, I got to see some of the magnificent Lewis chess pieces first-hand, in Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland. I wrote about them in my book
The Immortal Game (excerpt below) but until today had not yet seen them in person. Most of them usually reside at the British Museum in London.
They are 78 figurines, comprising four not-quite-complete chess sets, hand-carved from walrus tusk and whale teeth near Trondheim, Norway around 1150, but discovered seven hundred miles away in 1831 in the Bay of Uig on the Scottish Isle of Lewis.
They are spectacular.
