Norse Code

In the days of the movie “Gladiator”, sand and sandals were de rigueur. “The Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” moved the focus to swords and sorcery. The current favourites are blood and mud. A prime example is the “Last Duel”, depicting chivalric battles in the days of mad King Charles VI of France, who thought (wrongly as it turned out) that he was made of glass. In the same genre is “The Northman”, which I saw last week.

This Norse saga, reinterpreted for the silver screen, at times recalls the Monty Python reenactment of famous battles such as Pearl Harbor. Whichever battle was being depicted, it always ended up as a communal roll in the mud, with members of the local Women’s Guild bashing each other with their handbags. “The Northman” is packed with fights between identically hirsute Vikings, struggling in a universal sea of mud to eviscerate any foe, by whatever iron-based means are available: swords, axes, spears….

Yet in the epicentre of this combative chaos I literally saw some walking, breathing chessmen. The Isle of Lewis chess pieces date from approximately one thousand years ago and form the most ancient complete set of chess men in the world. The pieces are distinctive, especially the rooks, sometimes known as warders, guards or even berserkers. One such long lost piece, not contained in the British or Scottish museum collections, recently sold for an astounding £735,000 at auction.

Lo and behold, in the mud and blood of “The Northman”, I could discern the unmistakable figures of the Lewis rooks striding into battle. It seems inconceivable that the film’s designers had not consulted the Lewis hoard, before finalising the look of the film.

“The Northman” deserves our consideration for many other reasons. It is a brave attempt to reconstruct an important episode from the 12th century Scandinavian writer, Saxo Grammaticus (“Saxo the Learned”), from which originates the revenge-laden story of Prince Hamlet, so adroitly reworked by Shakespeare four centuries later. Saxo’s magnum opus was Gesta Danorum, the deeds or exploits of the Danes, very much an homage to Virgil’s Aeneid, the Latin prototype.

The movie also references those other two great epics of Viking literature, Heimskringla, or “The Orbit of the World”, written down by Saxo’s contemporary, Snorri Sturluson, in ancient Icelandic, covering the deeds of those very warriors who would have played chess with the grim-faced Lewis pieces.

The third major influence is the early English poem Beowulf, composed in the West Saxon dialect. Here the hero overcomes monsters, witches and dragons in a saga with a superficially Christian ethos, which may have been superimposed on the original pagan template. Beowulf contains one of my favourite lines from the whole of English literature, along with Marlowe’s: “Egregious viceroys of these Eastern parts…” (the opening lines of Tamburlaine the Great Part Two). Here it is: Wyrd oft nereth unfaegne Eorl (“Fortune favours the man whose mind is prepared”).

(On the topic of the Lewis chessmen, I have a theory that the famous TV detective duo, Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis, were inspired by the Lewis Chessmen. The pieces are made of walrus ivory, known as “morse”.)

“The Northman” is determined to portray its pagan environment, complete with savage Nordic gods and numerous appearances by ravens, sacred to Wotan. Another avian intervention has recently flown into view in the world of chess publishing: Michael Basman’s pamphlet: Everybody’s talking about the Bird, a well considered contribution about H.E. Bird, the 19th century English chess virtuoso. Henry Bird is described justifiably by Basman as competitor, innovator, author, theorist, teacher, historian and visionary.

This week’s game is a drastic Bird victory while the pamphlet is available from www.mikebasmanchess.com

Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from Blackwell’s

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