Margret the Adroit


Margret the Adroit was an Icelandic carver of the early 13th century.

Career

Margret the Adroit appears in a single textual source: the Icelandic saga Páls saga biskups. She lived in Skálholt, as the wife of Thorir the priest, who assisted Bishop Páll Jónsson and managed the see after the bishop's death in 1211. At the time, it was common for bishops to send and receive expensive gifts from other bishops and noblemen. According to the saga, "Margaret made everything that Bishop Pall wanted." As a gift for the Archbishop, Bishop Páll commissioned a "bishop's crozier of walrus ivory, carved so skilfully that no one in Iceland had ever seen such artistry before; it was made by Margaret Adroit, who at that time was the most skilled carver in all Iceland." He also commissioned an altarpiece and "Margret carved the walrus ivory extremely well."

Claims regarding the Lewis Chessmen

In 2010 at a conference at the National Museum of Scotland on the Lewis Chessmen, Gudmundur Thorarinsson and Einar S. Einarsson argued that Margret the Adroit made the chessmen. It was a claim that US author Nancy Marie Brown supports in her 2015 book, Ivory Vikings, the Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them.