纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 061刘易斯棋子（5）（在线收听）

The main pieces, on the other hand, are full of personality. Elite guards, knights on horseback, commanding kings and meditative queens. Pride of place goes of course to the ultimate source of legitimate power - the king. Capture him, and all fighting stops. All the Lewis kings sit on ornate thrones, a sword across their knees. Guarding the kings are two kinds of specialist warriors. One is immediately familiar to us - he is the knight, fast-moving, versatile and mounted on horseback. From the very beginnings of chess in India, the mounted warrior is a constant - he's in every age and in every country and he's pretty well unchanged today. But these familiar knights are flanked by something much more sinister. At the edges of the board, where we now have castles, are the ultimate shock troops of the Scandinavian world. They stand menacingly, some of them working themselves into a frenzy of bloodlust by chewing the tops of their shields.

I've got one in my hands now, and they are pretty terrifying - these are the fighters called "berserkers". It's an Icelandic word for a soldier wearing a shirt made of bear skin and the word "berserk" even today is synonymous with wild, destructive violence. More than any other piece on this board, the berserkers take us to the terrifying world of Norse warfare.

The Lewis Chessmen were discovered in what is now modern Scotland, and recently some politicians have advanced the case that some or all of the Chessmen should be returned back to the Isle of Lewis. That's a comparatively modern controversy though.