For March I’m planning a trip to New York City. I put my vacation request in yesterday for a few days in the middle of the month.<\/p>\n
The Lewis Chessmen<\/a> are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/a> through early April, and they’re something I would very much like to see while they’re on this side of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n While I’m a terrible chess player, I’m fascinated by the artistry and history of chess.\u00a0 Several years ago I plotted out a Doctor Who<\/i> novel that contained a scene with chess-playing Vikings.\u00a0 I have one chess set (a Lord of the Rings<\/i> chess set), intend to acquire at least two more in the coming months (a Doctor Who<\/i> set and Eaglemoss’ DC Comics chess set<\/a>), and have given serious thought to tracking down the vintage Franklin Mint Star Trek<\/i> 3-D chess set made about twenty years ago.\u00a0 The Lewis Chessmen, then, are precisely the sort of thing that would captivate me.<\/p>\n What are they, then?\u00a0 From memory the Lewis Chessmen are a more than complete set of chesspieces, in white and red instead of the modern white and black, carved from ivory by unknown Norsemen in the 13th-century (or was it the 11th?) which were discovered buried in the sand of an island off the coast of Scotland a century and a half ago. The chessmen are displayed at the British Museum and they are presently on loan to the Met.<\/p>\n Naturally, this is the very sort of thing that interests me. History! The Norse!\u00a0 Chess!<\/p>\n And since they’re on this continent through April, I intend to go see them. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For March I’m planning a trip to New York City. I put my vacation request in yesterday for a few days in the middle of the month. The Lewis Chessmen are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through early April, and they’re something I would very much like to see while they’re onContinue reading “On the Lewis Chessmen”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[125,4110,88,127],"class_list":["post-6301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-chess","tag-history","tag-scotland","tag-vikings","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}