Why Is the Rook so Short?

The rook represents a castle.  Castles are far taller than kings, queens, bishops and knights in the real world.  Why is the rook so short?  What king would have such a diminutive castle built?  It would make His Highness a laughingstock!  And what knight worth his salt would bother protecting a castle shorter than him?  If this draws enough responses, I will start a petition.

On the other hand, your brilliant response suggests you have no sense of irony.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ogk you shouldn't eat too much **** it causes brain damage HAHAHAHAHHAHA

As does yours, perhaps?

A rook is kind of crow, which is much shorter than a King, Queen, Bishop or Knight. So the size of the rook seems fine in relation to the other pieces. But pawns are usually smaller than rooks, but serfs are usually bigger than crows, even in Russia, so what's that all about?

Rooks were originally chariots in earlier forms of chess, I believe?

seriously?

Yup, the Persian word rukh means chariot - see Wiki on rooks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rook_(chess)

It is a little interesting when you consider height largely reflects piece value. Shortest pieces are pawns, tallest are Kings. However rooks are often shorter than knights and bishops. 

Thanks for taking my post seriously.  Really, you shouldn't have.

The physical size of a piece is proportional to its importance in tge game. Not a coincidence. And not all nations see the rook as a castle. Some call it 'a boat' - Russian term.

Maybe my response will be the one to start you on your way to writing a petition.

Actually the King intended for the Rook to be much larger than it currently is. However, once Queen had come back from her shopping spree in the local chess village, King was dead broke and could only raise the Rook to its current height. He is willing to raise it to a real castle's height if you are willing to bear the financial burden

Finally someone offers a credible explanation!  As you may have guessed, this was (supposed to be) a parody of stupid forum topics.

I fail to see how people can take this light-hearted thread and turn it into a serious discussion thread. Its pretty evident from the OP that this thread is meant as a humour and should be taken likewise.

Whats next? A serious discussion on why the Knight piece is denoted by only a horse from the neck up and not an actual Knight? 

That reminds me.  On some other thread about chess rules people disagree with, someone complained that there's no knight on the horse.  I suggested increasing the board size to 100 squares, renaming the knights - horses, and adding two actual knights.  The new knights would move like kings, except that you could move a knight onto a square occupied by a horse of the same color (it could also move onto a square occupied by a horse of a different color but that would be a capture of course).  Then you would have three options after that: move the knight one square, move the horse (as the old knight moved) or move them together (again as the old knight moved).  That only makes sense as the knight would be astride the horse.  It would allow the knight to get to the battle faster.  I pointed out the downside would be that both pieces could be taken in a single capture.

Actually, this question about the relative sizes of the chess pieces does deserve to be taken seriously in my opinion.

I have written an article on the origin of the Staunton pattern chess pieces which is the correct and last word which needs to be said on that.

The Edel family of woodturners in Germany had quite a lot to say about the different size of the pieces, Micharl Edel said that the tops of the pieces should slope down in size if a rule were placed along the tops of the pieces when they were in their start positions.

So it is the rooks destiny because of its position at the edge of the board to be the shortest of the main pieces.