The medieval craftsman, carving into walrus tusk ivory, was careful to detail the intricacies of the Norse warder. The bearded guard holds a sword at attention, a shield to his left. A long beard protrudes. The nine centuries gone have taken an eye.
But the warder and four other chess pieces were scattered and lost to lore of a shipwreck.
A hoard of 93 pieces was discovered in a sand dune at Scotland’s Isle of Lewis in 1831 and destined for prominence as one of the British Museum’s most traveled artifacts — and a cameo in a Harry Potter film.
Not the warder, though. He was destined for a drawer.
The Viking-era piece was sold for a few dollars to an Edinburgh antique dealer in 1964, occasionally taken out and admired by his widower years later. In recent months, a family member took the piece to an auction house for an evaluation.
Alexander Kader, a European sculpture expert, was used to all kinds of things coming through the door, both magnificent and mundane. It’s part of his job to evaluate the value of things, and he inspected the warder for the family.
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His jaw dropped, he told BBC. “I said, ‘Oh, my goodness, it’s one of the Lewis Chessmen.’ ”
A July 2 auction is now set to determine the value appreciated from a few bucks in the 1960s. Sotheby’s estimates that it could fetch between $670,000 and $1.26 million, the auction house said in a news release, which confirmed that the warder belonged to the set. The antique dealer’s family wished to remain anonymous, the BBC reported.
The find inches historians and museum curators closer to solving a mystery that has vexed them for more than a century: What happened to the missing pieces?
Existing Lewis Chessmen pieces have been studied, 3-D modeled, packed safely in crates and shipped all over the world for exhibition. The mostly walrus ivory and whale teeth pieces, carved between 1150 and 1200, were enough to make up four complete sets — except for a knight and four warders, Sotheby’s said. The warders were used as rooks.
Historians suggest that they were carved in Trondheim, known for game piece artisans. Trondheim was also the seat of the archbishop of Norway, with the island of Lewis under its authority as part of the kingdom of Norway from early Viking times up to the Treaty of Perth in 1266.
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Frederic Madden, a 19th-century British Museum curator, thought the pieces were buried after a shipwreck by a trader, given their relatively minor wear.
“They … are the most curious specimens of art that I ever remember to have seen,” Madden wrote in 1831. The pieces were stained red at one point, Madden noted, and some of them are forever biting their shields. Those are Berserkers, he wrote — soldiers loyal to the Norse god Odin who gnashed their teeth on shields in a fury.
The chessmen were immediately saddled with improbable tales after their discovery on a wind-swept dune. A grazing cow discovered the set, and later, a struggle ensued. A murder was committed to conceal the prize. The killer was hanged, or so the wild accounts said at the time.
Surviving pieces are split between the British Museum in London and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. This particular warder could be bought by a museum or loaned to one by the buyer, Kader told the BBC.
But then, there are the others.
“There are still four out there somewhere. It might take another 150 years for another one to pop up,” Kader said.
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