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Nancy Marie Brown

NANCY MARIE BROWN  is the author of highly praised books of nonfiction, including  Song of the Vikings.  She is fluent in Icelandic, and spends her summers in Iceland. She has deep ties to the Scandinavian cultural institutions in the U.S. Brown lives in East Burke, VT. Her latest title is Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman who Made Them .

Book description

In the early 1800's, on a Hebridean beach in Scotland, the sea exposed an ancient treasure cache: 93 chessmen carved from walrus ivory. Norse netsuke, each face individual, each full of quirks, the Lewis Chessmen are probably the most famous chess pieces in the world. Harry played Wizard's Chess with them in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Housed at the British Museum, they are among its most visited and beloved objects.

Questions abounded: Who carved them? Where? Nancy Marie Brown's Ivory Vikings explores these mysteries by connecting medieval Icelandic sagas with modern archaeology, art history, forensics, and the history of board games. In the process, Ivory Vikings presents a vivid history of the 400 years when the Vikings ruled the North Atlantic, and the sea-road connected countries and islands we think of as far apart and culturally distinct: Norway and Scotland, Ireland and Iceland, and Greenland and North America. The story of the Lewis chessmen explains the economic lure behind the Viking voyages to the west in the 800s and 900s. And finally, it brings from the shadows an extraordinarily talented woman artist of the twelfth century: Margret the Adroit of Iceland.

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Web page: http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/

Publisher: http://us.macmillan.com/ivoryvikingsthemysteryofthemostfamouschessmenintheworldandthewomanwhomadethem/nancymariebrown

History

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Posts

Lewis Chessmen king and queen, with rook and knight behind them.

The Icelandic Theory: Experts Challenge Establishment Dogma to Reveal History of Ivory Vikings

In 1874, the Norwegian chess historian Antonius Van der Linde belittled Frederic Madden’s suggestion that Iceland could produce anything approaching the sophistication of the Lewis chessmen...
Lewis Chessmen

The Missing Pieces: Unraveling the History of the Lewis Chessmen

In the early 1800s, on a golden Hebridean beach, the sea exposed an ancient treasure cache: ninety-two game pieces carved of ivory and the buckle of the bag that once contained them. Seventy-eight...