Lewis Chess Set flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
When I was young an uncle bought my father a kit to make the Lewis Chess pieces. Dad made the kit, and my brother made him a chess board in woodwork classes at school. It sat on the sideboard in the dining room and was well loved by all of us.
N and I went to Lewis with mum and dad one year, but I didn’t know then that there were large chess pieces on the island. N and I visited again in 2019 and tracked some of them down.
Lewis chessman flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license
Lewis chessman flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license
Lewis chessman flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license
That’s also when I bought N the chess set at the top of this post. As dad was slipping away with vascular dementia I took the photos above and turned them into postcards to send to him. We had good conversations about the chess set, and our holiday. Happy memories bought him back to us temporarily.
Today’s TDC was about turning into a chess piece. As usual I ignored the specifics of the challenge but remembered I had these pics uploaded. As I was searching for info about the original chess set, I realised that two of the pieces in these pics are actually Berserkers – the clue is that they are biting their shields:
The rooks are represented as warriors which came to be called “warders” at an early stage after they were discovered. Four of the warders are shown biting their shields – these have been identified as the berserkers of the Norse sagas. Wikipedia
I think that’s an appropriate image for a remixer to choose as her chess piece.
