![]() Chess in Iceland makes no direct reference to the Lewis chessmen. Iceland’s long fondness for chessįiske’s preface to Chess in Iceland, published posthumously in 1905, promised a second volume that would contain “notes on the carved chessmen and other chess objects found in the museums of Scandinavia and England, commonly regarded as the productions of Icelandic workshops.” Sadly, he never completed that volume. Pleased the Icelanders shared his twin passions for books and chess, he endowed libraries and donated chess sets to several towns. He traveled to Iceland in 1879, crossing the island on horseback. ![]() Founder of The American Chess Monthly, first librarian of Cornell University, and fluent in Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, and German (he also read Latin, French, and Persian), Fiske amassed a private collection of Icelandic literature that rivaled that of the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Reading Van der Linde, Willard Fiske became annoyed. The Lewis chessmen (Ninox / CC BY-NC 2.0 ) To learn the fascinating backstory of the most famous chessmen artifacts in the world, see The Missing Pieces: Unraveling the history of the Lewis Chessmen ![]() Icelanders, he scoffed, were too backward to even play chess. In 1874, the Norwegian chess historian Antonius Van der Linde belittled Frederic Madden’s suggestion that Iceland could produce anything approaching the sophistication of the Lewis chessmen. ![]()
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