The aim of this contribution is to briefly summarise the work on the Lewis Hoard of gaming pieces that has taken place since the publication of Vikings in Scotland. From that base, the argument is that the gaming pieces, or chessmen if you prefer, are not Viking; they post-date the Viking Age by at least a century. They are not a guide to the Viking economy, but viewed as a performance mechanism we can perhaps suggest that the Lewis Hoard helped to recall or reassemble a Viking Past, updated within newer political and social realities.

This helps to signal a reframing of the discussion of the hoard in the context of the assembly and reassembly of objects – concepts borrowed from, but not exclusive to, ethnographic and colonial studies (for example, Elsner and Cardinal 1994; Harrison, Byrne and Clarke 2013; Hamilakis and Jones 2017; Wingfield 2017 and with the key impetus for the approach, Latour 2005) – which help to emphasise both the affective, material qualities of things and their symbolic, representational ones. It underlies one of the key objectives in reassessing the Lewis Hoard: to raise awareness of it as an act, or rather several acts, of assembly or accumulation, with temporal depth both in its accumulation (probably through gift-giving episodes) and in its heirloom capacity to store and pass on generational knowledge (its later reassembly through its discovery, dissemination and affective influence on cultural practice will not be dealt with here, but see, for example, Caldwell and Hall 2018). This heirloom reflex around gaming pieces can be seen on a grander, institutional scale in Continental church treasuries and fittings (Kluge-Pinsker 1991: 34–5; Hall, Graham-Campbell and Petts, forthcoming). The assembly of the Lewis Hoard may have taken place in what came to be a Gaelic cultural milieu, one which hybridised Scandinavian cultural elements through generational inheritance and through adoption (for example, see Hall 2017). The affective, tangible agency of such pieces (including heraldry and colour) is discussed in Tate et al. 2014, Hall 2014 and Forsyth and Hall 2020.

Vikings in Scotland

‘Earls and Bishops’ is the final, thirteenth, chapter of Graham-Campbell and Batey’s Vikings in Scotland: An Archaeological Survey and concludes with a coda (pp. 263–4) on the Lewis chessmen (Figure 19.1) in which they accepted the long-standing view that the pieces were a merchant’s stock of the second half of the 12th century.

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