The Immortal Game by David Shenk Read Free Book Online Page A

swam in. A wealthy Scottish collector somehow plundered eleven of them for his private collection, and the British Museum in London bought the rest—sixty-seven pieces for eighty guineas (equivalent to £3,000 or roughly U.S. $5,000 in today’s currency).
    The museum immediately recognized not only the pieces’ unique importance in the history of chess, but more importantly their profoundly palpable connection to life in the Middle Ages. “There are not in the museum any objects so interesting to a native Antiquary as the objects now offered to the trustees,” wrote the museum’s keeper of antiquities, Edward Hawkins, as he presented the pieces for the first time. The Lewis Chessmen were a priceless link to the past, and would become a signature draw at the museum.
    There they now sit, sealed in a new glass crypt in the British Museum’s Gallery 42. Anyone can visit them.

    King

    Bishop

    Knight
    The Lewis Chessmen
    “When you look at them,” suggests curator Irving Finkel, “kneel down or crouch in such a way that you can look through the glass straight into their faces and look them in the eye. You will see human beings across the passage of time. They have a remarkable quality. They speak to you.”
             
    W HAT DO they say? The story of how chess migrated from the Golden Gate Palace in Baghdad to the remote Isle of Lewis, and how the pieces morphed from abstracted Persian-Indian war figurines to evocative European Christian war figurines, is an epic that underscores the enormous transfer of culture and knowledge in the Middle Ages from the East to the West. It also heralds an important shift in chess’s role as a thought tool. In medieval Europe, chess was used less to convey abstract ideas and more as a mirror for individuals to examine their own roles in society. As Europe developed a new code of social morality, chess helped society understand its new identity.
    The depth of chess’s role in the Middle Ages is not necessarily a story that was destined to be told. But for the perseverance of a single British scholar, much of the detail would likely have remained indefinitely buried under the sandbank of time. Fortunately, such doggedness was second nature to Harold Murray, thanks to the peculiar circumstances of his youth. In 1879, when Murray was eleven, his father, James Murray, a self-educated son of a Scottish tailor with a passion for language, began what would become easily the most exhaustive and most revered publishing project in the history of his own native English: the
Oxford English Dictionary
, which aimed to parse out the precise meaning, origin, and historical trajectory of every English word in general use. Harold, James’s eldest son, was one of the most prolific contributors to the
OED
’s first edition, cataloguing an astounding 27,000 quotations. By the time Harold graduated with honors from Oxford University’s Balliol College, he closely shared his father’s intense historical curiosity, attachment to precision, and zeal for the unearthing of origins. He also inherited the family passion for languages: James Murray was fluent in twenty-five; Harold knew at least twelve, including Icelandic, Old Middle German, Early Anglo-Saxon, Medieval Latin, and Sanskrit.
    On top of all this, Harold had a special love for numbers, games, and puzzles, an appetite for anything that would challenge the mind. He displayed unusual powers of concentration. In school he excelled at mathematics. This potent combination of interests paved an inevitable road to chess and to its elaborate history. Harold picked up the game at age twenty, playing with his younger siblings and cousins. From the start, he studied tried-and-true strategies, and was the kind of player who stuck to a handful of opening moves that felt comfortable and worked. “I have seen no reason to abandon a style of play which is generally successful against the players I meet,” he wrote. He made rich chess friendships, won