It seems that no published knight's tours were shown by means of geometrical diagrams until dalla Volpe in 1766,
though there are signs of symmetry in some which suggest that diagrams must have been used in their construction.
At least four different methods of presentation of tours using letters occur in the mediaeval manuscripts:
(1) Numbering the cells, using the methods of numeration then in use, based on the successive letters of the alphabet.
(2) Listing the coordinates of the cells, again using letters as coordinates rather than specialised numerals.
The 'algebraic' system of notation now used by most chess players preserves this in part, using letters for files and numerals for ranks.
(3) Using the literal coordinates of the cells as the first syllables in an acrostic poem.
(4) The 'verse tour' method of Rudrata, as described by Murray, and termed here 'paradromic verse'.
(5) Another method, which I call the 'cryptotour', which seems to be a nineteenth century development, presents the tour by means of letters or syllables on the cells, which when read in the sequence of a knight's tour produce a well known verse or saying. The zenith of this subject was probably reached around 1875 when such tour puzzles were as popular as crossword puzzles became in the next century.
Puzzle questions marked † have corresponding answers marked ‡ in the Solutions section, including tour diagrams.
The use of coordinates to record positions and moves in chess goes back at least to the time of al Adli (c.840). H. J. R. Murray (British Chess Magazine 1902) wrote: “The ... manuscripts of the chess work which was compiled from the books of al-Adli and as-Suli contain diagrams which represent knight's tours. In one of these ... the successive squares to which the knight is moved are marked by the old Arabic letter-numerals ... The next diagram in the manuscripts is at first sight quite enigmatic. The squares are marked with a pair of letters .... the bottom row, reading from right to left, being ya, ka, la, ma, na, ra, sha, ta; while the second row ends in b, and the other six in j, d, h, w, z and hh respectively, the initial letter of every file being the same throughout. It is obvious that this is ... only a means of describing the squares in a convenient manner ...”
The Manasollasa of Somesvara (c.1150, described by F. Bernhauer 1996) uses a similar system, the files lettered c, g, n, d, t, r, s, p and the ranks (top to bottom) by vowels similar to a, â, i, î, u, û, e, ê. This system makes it possible to present a tour as a sequence of syllables that is pronounceable and looks like Sanskrit, but (as far as I am aware) makes no sense. The tour (in the reentrant version), grouped into four-cell sections, runs:
| pa | si | pu | se | - | tê | ne | cê | gû | - | nî | cu | gi | ca | - | nâ | ta | sâ | pî |
| sû | pê | re | dê | - | ge | dû | gu | ci | - | ga | dâ | ra | pâ | - | sî | pû | sê | te |
| nê | ce | nû | gê | - | cû | gî | câ | na | - | tâ | sa | pi | su | - | pe | rê | de | nu |
| tû | rî | di | tu | - | ri | dî | ru | ti | - | du | rû | tî | ni | - | cî | gâ | da | râ |
An Anglo-Norman chess manuscript (~1275-1300) in the King's Library of the British Museum (according to H. J. R. Murray A History of Chess 1913) uses a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h for the files and i,k,l,m,n,o,p,q for the ranks (from top to bottom). The currently customary coordinate system used in most chess books substitutes 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 for the ranks (bottom to top). This 'algebraic' notation was introduced by Philip Stamma in his Essai sur le Jeu des Echecs (1737). This notation can be extended to boards of any size, with files lettered a,b,c ... and ranks numbered 1,2,3... from the bottom left corner. When we wish to apply mathematical methods however it is necessary to make both coordinates numerical, the method of Descartes (1637), the cell in file x and rank y being denoted (x, y).
A similar consonant-vowel system of coordinates is used in the telegraphic code for transmission of chess games, known as the Gringmuth notation in which the files a–h are lettered BCDFGHKL on White's half of the board and MNPRSTWZ on Black's side, while the ranks 1–4 and 8–5 are lettered AEIO, so that each cell has a two-letter designation. For example castling king-side with the White king is shown as GAKA and with the Black king as SAWA. Beverley's tour in this notation, divided into four-cell sections again, is almost an incantation:
| MA | PE | NO | RI | - | SA | WE | ZO | TI | - | GO | KI | LA | HE | - | FA | CE | DO | BI |
| DE | BA | CI | FO | - | GE | KA | LI | HO | - | SI | WO | ZE | TA | - | RE | NA | MI | PO |
| BO | DI | CA | FE | - | HA | LE | KO | GI | - | TO | ZI | WA | SE | - | RO | NI | PA | ME |
| PI | MO | NE | RA | - | TE | ZA | WI | SO | - | HI | LO | KE | GA | - | FI | CO | BE | DA |
One can of course easily 'demonstrate' the knight's tour just by memorising a simple open tour. An elaborate verbal scheme for memorising a tour was described by George Walker in an article on 'Chess without a Chessboard' in Fraser's Magazine (March 1840). According to Roget (1840) this described a method “designating each square by a different syllable composed of certain consonants and vowels, indicating the horizontal and vertical columns in which it stands. The whole series of these 64 arbitrary syllables, joined into 16 words, to be learned by heart.” I have not seen the original reference, but the method seems to be that described by William Mason in the Good Companions Chess Problem Club Folders (1917 pp.207-8): “A stunt I used to do over fifty years ago — moving the knight to each square of the board, with my eyes blindfolded or my back turned to it.” The ranks are named: un, oo, ee, or, iv, ix, en, et and the files: M, L, K, H, G, F, D, B. This provides monosyllabic names for the 64 squares, which can then be memorised, in the order of the tour, as a piece of nonsense doggerel.
The tour is represented as follows:
| Len | Het | Fen | Bet | Dix | Bor | Doo | Gun |
| Koo | Mun | Lee | Kun | Moo | Kee | Goo | Dun |
| Bee | Div | Ben | Fet | Hen | Let | Mix | Lor |
| Hee | Kiv | Gor | Hix | Liv | Men | Ket | Gen |
| Kix | Giv | Fee | Hor | Gix | For | Hiv | Gee |
| Fiv | Den | Biv | Dee | Bun | Foo | Hun | Loo |
| Mor | Lix | Met | Ken | Get | Fix | Det | Bix |
| Dor | Boo | Fun | Hoo | Lun | Mee | Kor | Miv |
Some of the tours in the Arabic manuscripts were presented by means of an acrostic verse, the first two letters of the 64 lines of verse giving the coordinates of the cells. However, there are no modern examples of this type of acrostic composition because of the modern use of semi-numerical coordinates. Perhaps some poet will undertake the task of completing an appropriate set of 16 quatrains for the Beverley tour, or some other, using the letter-coordinates of the Gringmuth notation, as listed above, as the initial pairs of letters!
The following 'kooky gibberish' is the best I have managed so far. The coordinates are the first two letters of the words: Magical Pegasus Nobly Ride, Sagely Wend Zonal Tiles, Go Kind Labyrinthine Hero, Fabulous Centaurs Doubly Bind, Delineate Baffling Circles Fourfold, Generate Kaleidoscopic Lively Horsemanship, Sixty-four Worlds Zealously Take, Rectangulate Nature's Mighty Power, Boldly Direct Careful Feet, Harmoniously Leap Kooky Gibberish, Tour Zigzag Wander Serpentine, Rove Nightmarish Palamedean Meanders, Pirouetting Motion Never Rash, Teach Zany Wisdom So, High Low Keener Grow, Finally Completing Beverley's Dance.
Rudrata (900ad) apparently presented his tours by syllables on the cells which when read normally or in the sequence of the tour give the same verse. By my calculations this means that the syllable patterns in his three tours, rook, elephant (two forms) and knight have to be as shown:
If poems can be written to fit the elephant and knight patterns then Sanskrit must indeed be a strange language! Unfortunately Murray (1913) does not quote the actual verses; he cites Jacobi (1896) who first elucidated the tours. However, the fact that sense can be written in some languages while using very few letters is evidenced by some correspondence in the 'Notes & Queries' section of The Guardian newspaper which mentioned the Finnish phrase 'Kokoo koko kokko kokoon!' {Gather the whole fire together!} and short stories of up to 72 letters in Chinese consisting entirely of the sound 'shi', which it seems can be pronounced in four different tones or written in 73 different characters, mostly with several meanings! The English punctuation test: 'He where she had had had had had had had had had had had the teacher`s approval' is well known.
Murray argues that the elephant tour is split at the halfway point because of the difficulty of fitting a verse to the pattern that results if the middle move is a simple forward step (case 3 above) since this “allows the use of only two different syllables in the third and fourth lines” and “such a task approaches sufficiently near to impossibility to justify the abandonment of the chess condition in part.” However, this argument is unconvincing, since in the knight's tour apart from the 1st and 21st cells the others use only two syllables, and this was apparently achieved. A simpler explanation is the wish to retain the poetic form of two matching couplets.
It is natural to wonder whether it is possible to fit English verses to tours in the fashion described above. Not surprisingly, no other examples of this method of presentation of tours have been reported, other than the following rather absurd little rook-tour reverse-verses, and the even more absurd elephant tour couplet which I gave in Chessics 1985. Punctuation, pronunciation and spelling are open to poetic licence!
Many of the earliest tours were presented simply by lettering the successive squares visited by the knight in alphabetical order, since at that time the symbols for numbers were not separate from those for the sounds of speech. I do not know if any knight's tours incorporated words in this way, but Singmaster (1991) reports that al Buni (~1200ad) presented some 4×4 magic squares in alphabetical form with the top rank spelling a word.
† 4.1: Using A to P for 1 to 16 construct a 4×4 magic square including a word in one rank.
† 4.2: The earliest examples I know of that apply this principle to knight's tours are the dedicatory lettered tours employed by T. R. Dawson on the title pages of four of his books in the C. M. Fox series, which began in 1935. Dawson's tours are all lettered A...Z&A...Z&A...J and are all closed. The ampersands are inserted between Z and A to give an odd number of symbols, so that a letter can occur on cells of either colour. We show his WILD ROSES example from Caissa's Wild Roses in Clusters 1937.
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† 4.4: In Chessics (#15, p.4, 1983) I used a tour lettered Q to Z spelling out CHESSAYS along the top rank to advertise a series of booklets with that title.
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These word-spelling tours of course tend to be extremely irregular, since they are constructed to fit the given letters. There is much scope for amusement in trying to get a tour to spell out a phrase of your own choosing. The initial and final letters can be any of the following pairs: AJ, BK, CL, DM, EN, FO, GP, HQ, IR, JS, KT, LU, MV, NW, OX, PY, QZ, R&, SA, TB, UC, VD, WE, XF, YG, ZH, &I. To find which letters appear on which colour it helps to write the alphabet in a zigzag form: A B C D ··· The interest in these tours is in constructing them rather than tracing the tour from the given letters, which is usually quite easy. Diagrams of the tours are given at the end for those who wish to trace them.
† 4.6: Alphabetical tours can also be constructed to show other tricks. The following tour (a K...T tour, from Chessics #22, p.67, 1985) depicts the 6-cell routes (lettered KNIGHT) of the two black knights in visiting their white cousins. Although the routes the two knights take may seem somewhat arbitrary, in fact they are the ONLY such routes possible under the alphabetical conditions. The Hs and Is have to cross-connect.
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† 4.8: "Revolver Practice": Construct a tour spelling out REVOLVER on the top rank. (This was suggested by C. J. Morse who claims that this is the only word whose letters form the same pattern as the chessmen on the back row in the opening position!)
Instead of placing the letters in alphabetical order as in the lettered tours they can spell out a sentence. If either the tour or the sequence of the letters is forgotten this turns the tour into a puzzle.
† 5.1: This example is given in Staunton's chess column in the Illustrated London News (1871): “Knight's Tour No. V, by an old problem composer, respectfully dedicated to Mr Staunton. The letters, taken continuously in the order of the knight's route over the board, form a descriptive sentence which is 'Bagman's (or Piper's) News' to a chessplayer.” I think a stronger clue is necessary and will reveal that the statement is a definition of the knight's move.
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† 5.2: An open tour in Cahiers de L'Echiquier 1930, has the title 'Polygraphie du Cavalier', from which I have taken the title of this section. This tour is shown above right. It quotes a line from Barbey d'Aurevilly, whose name appears at the end of the quote.
† 5.3: G. E. McGuffey, Fairy Chess Review 1937, used a quote from Ben Jonson. No other clue was given and unfortunately no-one was able to solve it! It appears to have been intended as a compliment to the chess problem (and tour) composer P. C. Taylor. It may help to know that three of the I's are the first person pronoun.
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The presentation of a knight's tour as a series of syllables or words written on the cells of the chessboard so that, when read in the order of the tour, they reveal a verse or message I call a cryptotour. If the tour is known the message can be read, and if the message is known the tour can be traced. Each encodes the other. Usually neither is known and it is a question of reconstructing both, using clues provided by each aspect to assist in the unravelling of the other.
† 6.1: The folowing is the earliest example I know of and appeared in the first chess magazine Le Palamède June 1842 (quoted in Cahiers de L'Echiquier Français 1930). It gives a 'squares and diamonds' tour, one word per square, revealed by a specially composed verse.
| qu'au | d'allure | pourtant | et | coursier | fuis | fois | tous |
| mais | blanc | meme | et | quatre | en | ne | ta |
| toujours | tremble | noir | peut | trace | ton | sens | seize |
| monde | faire | change | point | galoper | pas | propre | repasse |
| parvenir | abime | cheval | franchir | marqué | tu | course | du |
| qu'un | d'un | toi | s'ouvrir | doivent | l'ourse | ainsi | verrais |
| un | veux | chaque | voila | tes | au | midi | sa |
| degré | ce | pieds | qui | jusqu'a | borner | sous | but |
Further French examples, by Jules de Poilly, appear in Le Palamède in 1844 and 1846, using the tours of de Moivre and de Mairan. His poems are specially composed, to consist of eight lines each of eight words.
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Il faut que ton cheval sente toujours l'entreinte,
Prends soin de modérer sa trop bouillante ardeur, Car tu ne pourrais pas sortir du labyrinthe Si tu ne conservais le sang-froid protecteur; Le sort de Phaeton, ou le destin d'Icare Viendront t'atteindre, ami, si tu descends trop bas; En remontant trop haut par malheur on s'egare; Que le juste-milieu te sauve du trépas! |
Galopez en tous sens, en avant, en arrière;
Mais ne repassez pas par le meme chemin. Gagnez tantot le centre, et tantot la frontière, Si vous voulez mener l'affaire à bonne fin. Il faut, vous le savez, visiter chaque case, Sans en oublier une; et si votre Pégasse Se montre, en bondissant, rétif à votre voix, Dormez, vous le ferez courir une autre fois. |
Examples in German were given by A. Herma Rösselsprunge aus deutschen Dichtern (1849). The Cleveland Library Ohio has provided me with photocopies of hand-written versions of ten cryptotours on the four-handed chess board, from Illustrierte Zeitung 1852 and 1863, which lacking German I have not been able to decipher. Also from Cleveland are copies of 41 'Rosselsprung' cuttings from an unknown source printed in 'Fraktur' type. The verses are from contemporary German poets, including E. M. Arndt (1769-1860), K. E. Ebert (1801-1882), G. F. Daumer (1800-1875), H. Heine (1797-1856) and F.Ruckert (1788-1866). Most of those that I have decoded show tours with maximum axial symmetry, having only four asymmetrically placed links (or three in open tours), indicating a systematic study of this topic. H. Schubert's Mathematische Mussestunden (1904) gives a three-dimensional (4×4×4) cryptotour.
† 6.2: The craze for cryptotours seems to have reached Britain only in the 1870s. The first English examples I have found are 16 given in Howard Staunton's chess column in the Illustrated London News 1870–1874. The first of these has one of the most amusing chess-related verses I have come across. The author is not mentioned; perhaps it was Staunton himself (he was a literary man; a one-time actor, and editor of an edition of Shakespeare).
| sor | to | king | good | say | luck | loy | eth |
| and | moth | a | soon | dis | our | to | bad |
| place | ry | church | his | force | is | hat | al |
| er | queen | him | wight | he | to | may | truth |
| man | his | and | and | chess | es | knight | op's |
| a | sneer | the | and | un | lawn | of | tates |
| cas | that | at | less | pawn | no | bish | lant |
| eth | faith | tles | hath | the | gal | in | love |
His subsequent examples employ a wide range of literary quotations, especially from Walter Scott and Shakespeare, and even include examples in French (de Musset), Italian (Dante) and Macaronic verse (Porson). None of the verses selected however are on subjects particularly relevant to tours. The popularity of these puzzles, as judged by the long lists of solvers, was great (this was before the invention of crossword puzzles) and it led to their appearance in other columns. There was a long series of 'Knightly Peripatetics' conducted by 'E.H.' in the Glasgow Weekly Herald beginning in 1872, some of the tours being the earliest known magic two-knight tours. An article by 'J.B.D.' in The Leisure Hour 1873 gives a cryptotour using a poem by Scott. The last item in the Poems and Problems of J. A. Miles (1882) bearing the title 'The Retrospect' encrypts a passage from Ossian (J. Macpherson).
† 6.3: Four good examples, two apparently sent to a knight's tour tourney organised by the British Chess Magazine and the others from Sussex Chess Magazine and Brighton Guardian are given in Chess Fruits (1884) by T. B. Rowlands and his wife Frideswide F. Rowlands. The first is given here for solution.
| Now | irt | ght | our | heb | seo | pat | red |
| Kni | veils | bri | hun | Our | cke | ier | fs |
| mb | tray | day | ast | tyf | tot | cour | hwa |
| ness | he | Fro | ght | che | yne | ix | Wej |
| das | ima | dark | Our | ard | our | nda | ver |
| Till | but | yst | ge | the | O'er | our | Thr |
| lgr | lea | lif | ave | hwa | onw | cle | rkw |
| eis | lon | api | hat | ar | etr | oug | ney |
The verse of the second, which may owe something to Jules de Poilly's French examples, is:
With nerve of steel and heart of fire
A gallant knight did once aspire
To roam the land of black and white
And prove to all his powerful might.
He started from the King's domain
And back again to it he came
Without missing a single square
Nor resting twice on any there.
The third quotes a verse from Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice Act 3, Scene 2, lines 131-8). The last is a seasonal greeting. Later examples appear in Puzzles Old and New by Professor Hoffmann (1893) and in A. C. Pearson's Twentieth Century Standard Puzzle Book (1907).
One of the oddest of these encryptions, and certainly the longest, is a booklet by H. Eschwege, published at Shanklin, Isle of Wight, in 1896, with the title The Knight's Tour, In a continuous and uninterrupted ride over 48 boards or 3072 Squares. Adapted from Byron's 'Mazeppa'. Byron's poem is presented on a series of chessboards, one word to a square, commencing at f8 and proceeding to e2, whence to leap to f8 on the next board, and so on. One tour (provided by H. E. Dudeney) is used throughout, but on the 48th board it is modified to end at h1.
† 6.4: An interesting use of a cryptotour was made by H. J. R. Murray in British Chess Magazine (1917):
| he | fall | dom | ne | the | thinks | then | he |
| from | man | speaks | the | wis | may | think | ly |
| and | fore | him | wise | ver | hap | or | first |
| game | fol | thinks | of | fool | at | chess | our |
| be | words | tious | same | the | in | speaks | all |
| ly | less | out | dom | cau | is | roy | of |
| its | plays | and | rule | the | game | so | life |
| hour | frets | thought | a | wis | of | still | al |
Murray wrote: “My most recent investigations have dealt with the tour on the whole board in general. I have made some advance, but not sufficient to make it desirable to give any account of the lines upon which I am working. Under similar circumstances mathematicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were wont to publish anagrams which concealed the key to their work, so that they could prove their claim to priority if a rival investigator forestalled them in publication. May I adopt their custom and give a tour in the puzzle form of older chess magazines, which illustrates three maxima in a theory of the tour which promises to reveal the total number of tours possible? No excuse is necessary in this magazine for borrowing for the purpose a poem from one of its most welcome contributors in its early days — the late Professor Tomlinson.”
D. E. Knuth reports that Fred Rixey's Jumblegrams, New York (1927), a booklet of puzzles published by the Wright Press, consists of 30 puzzles on a 6×6 board. Often there are blank squares, so the path length may be less than 36. Answers are not given in the book, but were available on writing to the publishers. The first problem uses a quotation from Horace.
† 6.5: To conclude these verse cryptotours, I show here an example of my own on the 6×6 board. It requires a reentrant tour by a 'bison' which moves in {1,3} and {2,3} leaps! To help I will say that most of the tour is comprised of camel {1,3} moves, with only one zebra {2,3} move.
| some | by | if | bison | may | 've |
| or | chance | you | camel | ing | in |
| and | camel | chess | swith | eye | or |
| son | son | sgo | white | seen | you |
| stripe | bison | to | jumps | swith | mak |
| lar | black | humps | son | zebra | set |
Another literary application of knight's tours is in the construction of special crossword puzzles. The most interesting example I have seen was by 'Alban' (Will Scotland) in Crossword, the magazine of The Crossword Club, in 1988. This presented the first verse of Jabberwocky, which happens (?!) to have 100 letters, in the form of a 10×10 knight's tour. The minor point that there are no actual words across and down was overcome by arranging that one letter be omitted from each answer before being entered on the diagram. This is a standard ploy among crossword buffs, known as 'Letters Latent'. Thus for example the fourth clue across was "Cask of wine the French knocked back around noon — boring!" The answer to this is TUN-N-EL, from which the Ns are omitted, giving TUEL to enter. Some letters remained unclued. The omitted letters, astonishngly enough, spell out the title of the book from which the quotation is taken.
In reply to a request in Crossword in 1992 I received several replies about crosswords with chess-move themes that appeared in the BBC Radio magazine The Listener. Derek Willan particularly recalled one that appeared "about 15 years ago and involved tracing a knight's move around the six faces of a cube". D. G. Mockford mentioned crossword 1020 by Pipeg (13 x/1949) in which clues were entered by following routes taken by knight, rook and bishop, and 1024 by Cocos with moves in knight paths. This had the title 'Knight's Move – IX' presumably the ninth in a series! H. J. Godwin listed 18 later examples. I reproduce here his list of numbers, dates and composers for any reader who may wish to follow up the references (1306 v/55 Gib, 1348 iii/56 Wray, 1378 x/56 Halezfax, 1386 xii/56 Sugden, 1468 vii/58 Halezfax, 1590 xi/60 Wray, 1632 ix/61 Wray, 1672 vi/62 Aeschylus, 1677 vii/62 Wray, 1709 ii/63 Doghouse, 1714 iv/63 Chabon, 1783 vii/64 Wray, 2150 viii/71 Sabre, 2407 i/77 Leiruza, 2428 vii/77 Leiruza, 2512 viii/79 Leiruza, 2900 v/87 Adam, 2980 xii/88 Casein).
Though the magazine has closed, 'The Listener Crossword' still appears in The Times on Saturdays. David Pritchard sent me a cutting of 3353 by Wolfram (13 April 1996) that uses a 12×12 knight's tour. Words are entered along the tour, commencing at the top left corner, one letter to each square. Further, by reflecting the tour in the principal diagonal a second series of words is spelt out along the tour! How some of these remarkable feats of word manipulation are accomplished I'm not too sure, but they certainly carry on and advance the tradition in an admirable way.
Alphabetical Numbering
‡ 4.1: Lettered magic squares.
By reversing the second the word is altered to LOBE in the second row.
| A | N | K | H | X | P | F | K | A | X | F | I | D | O |
| G | L | M | B | X | E | B | O | L | X | L | G | N | A |
| P | C | F | I | X | I | N | C | H | X | M | B | K | H |
| J | E | D | O | X | D | G | J | M | X | C | P | E | J |
‡ 4.2-8: Diagrams of the tours:
‡ 4.8: Revolver practice.
| R | E | V | O | L | V | E | R |
| W | N | Q | U | U | S | K | W |
| D | S | F | M | P | F | Q | D |
| N | X | J | T | T | J | X | O |
| I | C | M | G | G | P | C | I |
| Y | O | H | K | T | H | N | Y |
| B | L | Q | & | & | L | S | B |
| P | Z | A | K | R | A | Z | M |
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Polygraphy: Diagrams of the tours:
‡ 5.1: Staunton: 'The knight moves from one corner to the opposite on a rectangle of six squares.'
‡ 5.2: Cahiers: 'La beauté tend a l'unité tandis que la laideur est multiple: Barbey d'Aurevilly'.
‡ 5.3: McGuffey: 'When I take the humour of a thing once, I am like your tailor's needle — I go through'.
‡ 5.4: Omar: 'Where destiny with men for pieces plays, hither and thither moves and mates and slays'
(from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Fitzgerald). The letters HITHER are traversed twice (shown by the darker lines in the diagram).
Cryptotours:
‡ 6.1: Le Palamède 1842:
Franchir chaque degré d'un monde blanc et noir
Galoper en tous sens du midi jusqu'a lourse
Voila ce qu'un cheval peut faire; mais pourtant
Quatre fois seize pas doivent borner sa course
Au but ainsi marqué toi qui veux parvenir
Tremble qu'au meme point ton coursier ne repasse
Tu verrais sous tes pieds un abime s'ouvrir
Change toujours d'allure et fuis ta propre trace.
‡ 6.2: Staunton:
The man that hath no love of chess
Is, truth to say, a sorry wight,
Disloyal to his King and Queen,
A faithless and ungallant Knight.
He hateth our good mother church,
And sneereth at the Bishop's lawn,
May ill luck force him soon to place
His Castles and estates in Pawn!
‡ 6.3: T. B. and F. F. Rowlands (the tour is a magic one, 12o by Jaenisch):
Our life is but a pilgrimage,
From birth unto the bier,
We journey onward as the Knight,
Our pathway never clear.
O'er checkered course of sixty-four,
Through ways that lead astray,
Now bright, then dark, we travel on,
Till darkness veils our day.
‡ 6.4: Murray (verse by Tomlinson)
The wise man thinks before he speaks
And words of wisdom from him fall.
The fool speaks first then haply thinks
Or he may never think at all.
So in our royal game of Chess
The rule of life is still the same.
Folly frets out its thoughtless hour
And wisdom plays a cautious game.
‡ 6.5: Jelliss
If in chess you may chance to set eyes on
Some camels with black and white stripes on
Or zebras with humps making camellar jumps
You've seen bison, or bisons, go by son!
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