This is a walrus ivory chess piece, a king, made in Denmark or Northern Germany in about 1400. The present chess piece belongs to a highly distinctive group of pieces of similar form and style, including kings, queens, bishops and knights, which range in size from 8 cm to 14 cm. Notwithstanding the close relationship to one another, there is insufficient evidence to prove that any of the above mentioned pieces belonged to the same set, and their find spots (where these are recorded), provenance and present locations indicate that they were widely scattered all over Europe, albeit with an emphasis on German collections.

By 1200 chess was a popular game in Europe, having been brought from India via the Middle East in the early medieval period. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the playing of chess became established as a courtly – and courting – pastime par excellence, as numerous references to it in written Romances, illustrations in manuscripts and depictions on works of art attest.
By the beginning of the Gothic period the principal pieces had already taken human form. The castle though does not appear to have taken the form of a building until the sixteenth century, and is most often represented as a mounted figure not unlike a knight. It is no9teworthy that hardly any chessboards have survived. The overwhelming majority of chess pieces were made in non-Parisian workshops and the most active workshops were based further north, in Scandinavia, Germany and England

The game of chess has from its inception carried chivalric and military associations. These qualities made the game a suitable intellectual pastime for the elite of Renaissance Europe. Luxury chess boards and finely carved chess pieces became common possessions in palaces from Italy to England and as today, color was used to distinguish between opposing chessmen.