#outer hebrides

Winter beaches, The Outer Hebrides.

Stunning views after an afternoon of climbing Rueval on Benbecula.

Scotland

Via Òran na Mara

This Isle of Lewis chess set was discovered in the early 19th century in a buried stone chamber in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland by a crofter named Malcolm MacLeod. Legend has it that he mistook the pieces for elves and fled in terror. Later, a local man named Roderick Ririe of Stornoway was the first to exhibit the pieces in Edinburgh at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1831.

Most of the pieces are carved from walrus ivory, with a handful made from sperm whale teeth, and they date to roughly 1150 to 1200 AD. The carving style and details, like the bishops’ mitres pointed front and back, place them firmly in that window. Scholarly consensus has long favored Trondheim, Norway as the workshop, given its tradition of ivory carving and similar finds at the cathedral site, though a persistent minority view (championed by writer Nancy Marie Brown) points to Iceland and a specific named carver, Margret the Adroit. Nobody knows why they ended up buried on Lewis: theories range from a merchant’s lost cargo to a shipwreck to the treasured possessions of a local Norse-aligned ruler, since Lewis at the time had close ties to the Kingdom of the Isles and Norway.

Their fame rests largely on personality: the queens sit with a hand pressed to one cheek in an expression somewhere between worry and weariness, and the rooks are carved as wild-eyed warders biting the tops of their shields, a detail scholars read as a depiction of berserkers working themselves into a battle frenzy. They’re considered masterpieces of Norse art and offer a window into medieval craftsmanship and the cultural exchange between Norse and European societies.