304 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT 



to secure horsevael ("horsewhales") "which have in their 

 teeth bones of great price and excellence."* 



In the fourteenth century the Scandinavian saga of 

 Kroka, the crafty, who lived in the tenth century, makes the 

 statement that the three most precious things that Gunner, 

 prefect of Greenland, could obtain in the island, when he 

 sought to propitiate King Harald Hardraad of Norway, in 

 1050 A. D. by the bestowal of the most valuable gifts at 

 his disposal, were a white bear, a set of chessmen carved out 

 of walrus ivory, and a gold-inlaid skull of a walrus with the 

 teeth still in place.f A curious specimen of such a chessman 

 in the British Museum, carved from this kind of ivory, 

 closely resembles the pieces of a nearly complete set found 

 in 1831 in the Scotch Island of Lewis. 



Touching the use of walrus ivory in the Middle Ages it 

 has been noted that in northern Europe, in Germany, and 

 in the Netherlands, for example, while elephant ivory was 

 freely and principally used during the ninth and tenth cen- 

 turies, a large proportion of the carvings executed there 

 during the eleventh and twelfth centuries were of walrus 



ivory 4 



In "Hakluyt's Voyages" we read that when Jacques Cartier 

 discovered the Isle of Romea, in 1534, he reported the finding 

 there of "very great beasts" as large as men, and having 

 " two great teeth in their mouths like unto Elephant's teeth." 

 Hakluyt, after giving the Latin names hoves marini and vacccB 

 marinoB, says they were called, in the Russian tongue, 

 " morsses." These teeth were sold in England " to the combe 

 and knife-makers at 8 groats and 3 shillings the pound 

 weight," while elephant ivory only brought half as much; 



*In the first chapter of King Alfred's edition of the "De Miseria Mundi" of Paulus 

 Orosius. See Lanfer, op. cit., p. 25. 



fWilliam Maskell, "Ivories Ancient and Medieval," London, 1875, p. 80, citing a 

 paper read before the Society of Antiquaries in 1832 by Sir Frederick Madden. 



JM. Digby Wyatt, "Notices on Sculpture in Ivory," London, 1856, pp. 10. 11. 



