Caïssa
Goddess of chess
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Key Takeaways
- Caïssa is a fictional (anachronistic) Thracian dryad portrayed as the goddess of chess.
- In it, to avoid unclassical words such as rochus (chess rook) or alfinus (chess bishop), the rooks are described as towers (armored howdahs) on elephants' backs, and the bishops as archers: A leaked unauthorized 742-line draft version was published in 1525.
- The description of towers led to the modern name "castle" for the chess rook, and thus the term "castling", and the modern shape of the European rook chesspiece.
- In German, Schütze ("archer") became a general word for a chess bishop until displaced by Läufer ("runner") in the 18th century.
Caïssa is a fictional (anachronistic) Thracian dryad portrayed as the goddess of chess. The concept of a dryad of chess was first mentioned during the Renaissance by Italian poet Hieronymus Vida.
Vida's poem
The concept of Caïssa originated in a 658-line poem called Scacchia Ludus published in 1527 by Hieronymus Vida (Marco Girolamo Vida), which describes in Latin Virgilian hexameters a chess game between Apollo and Mercury in the presence of the other gods, and among them a dryad of chess named Schacchia. In it, to avoid unclassical words such as rochus (chess rook) or alfinus (chess bishop), the rooks are described as towers (armored howdahs) on elephants' backs, and the bishops as archers:
A leaked unauthorized 742-line draft version was published in 1525. Its text is very different, and in it the chess rook is a cyclops, and the chess bishop is a centaur archer.
The description of towers led to the modern name "castle" for the chess rook, and thus the term "castling", and the modern shape of the European rook chesspiece. Also for a time, some chess players in Europe called the rook "elephant" and the bishop "archer". In German, Schütze ("archer") became a general word for a chess bishop until displaced by Läufer ("runner") in the 18th century.
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