Single Comment

It seems to me that the armed footsoldiers, four of them berserkers, must be rooks. They appear to be about the same size as the other pieces, just a little shorter, as the end pieces usually are, in modern chess sets and in other connections (even the Rockettes in Radio City are arranged with the tallest in the center and the shortest at the ends). In order to make them pawns in reproduction sets they have to be scaled down. Rooks are depicted as warders, castle guards, or captains afoot in German and Scandinavian sets down into the nineteenth century.