My younger reader may not realise it, but, in the olden days, news streams had to put all the news items in writing, have them printed on enormous leaves of paper, fold those together, and have them delivered, once a day, to people’s homes. But some things were the same. People were still mostly interested in the sports news or what was called, quite wrongly, the funnies. These were usually found at the back and generally of an impressive ineptness. Our topic for today is one of those.
Fideel de Fluwelen Ridder is a series that was published in Flemish newspaper De Standaard for a good ten years. It was written by Gommaar Timmermans1 under the pseudonym GoT and deals with the antics of Fideel, the velvet knight, who looks more like a wizard. In this episode, Bombazij, his lord, invites him to a game of chess. However, certain subtleties of the rules still seem to evade him:
Bombazijn: I drew the highest card, so I get two kings, five rooks, four knights or so, and twenty pawns.
Obviously, Fideel protests. Not against this mockery of all things chess, not against the 6×5 board that later shifts into a 10×5 board, but against the fact that he doesn’t get a king. His protests are not well received.
In fact, we soon come to see the violence inherent in the system. Bombazijn conks an innocent onlooker on the noggin, we cut away to a flabbergasted snail to spare the tender feelings of the reader, and, once we cut back, we see Bombazijn with his head sticking out through a broken chessboard. With this sad spectacle, the reader is sufficiently traumatised and a satisfied GoT lays down his pen.2
Realism: 0/5 Everything is wrong here. The board is wrong, there are only black pieces, and they’re gambling with the pieces.3
Probable winner: The serfs. Or at least the makers of chessboards.
1. [Son of the once locally famous Felix Timmermans.] ↩
2. [Many years later, GoT would again traumatise large swaths of the population.] ↩
3. [And the flowers on the left change colours!] ↩