What Are the Lewis Chessmen and Why Is One Biting Its Shield?

The Short Answer

The Lewis Chessmen are 93 surviving medieval chess pieces carved from walrus ivory around the 12th century, discovered buried in a sandbank on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, in 1831 — and one of them depicts a Viking berserker warrior biting the rim of his own shield in a frenzy of battle rage.

What Are the Lewis Chessmen?

Carved most likely in Trondheim, Norway, around 1150–1200 AD, the Lewis Chessmen represent some of the finest examples of medieval craftsmanship ever found. They were made from walrus ivory — the prestige material of Northern Europe at the time, traded along Viking routes from the Arctic — and depict kings, queens, bishops, knights, warders, and pawns in extraordinary detail. Their expressive faces, elaborate thrones, and individual personalities make them unlike any other surviving chess set from the medieval period.

They were discovered in 1831 near Uig Bay on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, buried inside a small stone chamber in a sandbank. No one knows for certain how they came to be hidden there, though theories include a merchant’s cache lost during transport, a deliberate burial for safekeeping, or a shipwreck. Whatever happened, they remained underground for nearly nine centuries.

Who Are the Berserkers?

Among the most striking pieces are the warders — figures that stand in for the rook in modern chess. Several of them are depicted as wide-eyed warriors biting the rims of their shields, a direct visual reference to the Norse berserker tradition. In Viking sagas, berserkers were elite warriors said to fight in a trance-like fury, impervious to pain and fear. The word itself may derive from the Old Norse for “bear shirt,” referencing the animal pelts these fighters supposedly wore into battle.

Seeing that frenzy frozen in carved ivory — a face locked in a scream, teeth clenched on a shield — is one of the most visceral connections to the Viking world that any artifact can offer.

Medieval Chess Looked Nothing Like the Modern Game

The Lewis Chessmen reveal how differently chess was understood in medieval Europe. The rook, now represented as a castle tower, was originally a soldier or guardian — hence “warder.” The queen piece was far less powerful in medieval rules than in the modern game. The bishop’s role also differed significantly. The chessmen offer a snapshot of chess in transition, as the game spread from its origins in India through Persia and the Islamic world into Europe, shape-shifting with every culture it passed through.

The £5 Piece That Sold for £735,000

Of the 93 surviving chessmen, 82 are held by the British Museum in London, with 11 remaining in Scotland at the National Museum in Edinburgh. But the story of one additional piece may be the most astonishing of all. A single chessman sat unrecognised in a private Scottish collection for decades after being purchased by an Edinburgh antique dealer in 1964 for just £5. In 2019, that same piece — a warder, naturally — sold at auction through Sotheby’s for £735,000, making it one of the most valuable individual chess pieces ever sold.

Why the Lewis Chessmen Still Matter

These pieces are not just beautiful objects. They are a direct material link between Norse civilisation, medieval trade networks, and the cultural world of 12th-century Scotland. They show how Viking artisans worked, how medieval Europeans played, and how a luxury object could travel thousands of miles and then disappear into the earth for nine hundred years. The berserker is still biting that shield. He has been biting it since before the Magna Carta was signed.