Some of the Lewis Chessmen from the British Museum are temporarily on display in Scotland. Their contentiousness however can distract from what the pieces actually are & represent in their own right. Like the Parthenon Sculptures, they are in part famous purely for their recent history.

The Atlantic

The Lewis Chessmen, Up Close
Aug 19 2010, 10:55 AM ET

Today, for the first time, I got to see some of the magnificent Lewis chess pieces first-hand, in Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland. I wrote about them in my book The Immortal Game (excerpt below) but until today had not yet seen them in person. Most of them usually reside at the British Museum in London.

They are 78 figurines, comprising four not-quite-complete chess sets, hand-carved from walrus tusk and whale teeth near Trondheim, Norway around 1150, but discovered seven hundred miles away in 1831 in the Bay of Uig on the Scottish Isle of Lewis.
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