The Bullroarer Atlas

ARCTIC-008 - museum specimen

Tunumiit (Ammassalik Inuit), East Greenland

Ammassalik district, Groenland oriental (East Greenland) - North America - Arctic

Play / practical

A trimmed wooden swinging-stick, marked with an old collection number, joined by a hide cord to a flat, saw-toothed wooden blade — the Tunumiit...
A trimmed wooden swinging-stick, marked with an old collection number, joined by a hide cord to a flat, saw-toothed wooden blade — the Tunumiit (Ammassalik) instrument collected in East Greenland, shown with its full whirling rig of blade, cord, and handle. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (1935.52.7) Image source

Source term: rhombe

A worn wooden bullroarer collected among the Tunumiit of the Ammassalik district on the east coast of Greenland and now in the Musee du quai Branly. It is a rectangular slat about seventeen centimetres long, one end whittled into a plain handle and grooved for the cord that spins it; the museum classes it as a free aerophone. It came back with the first French Greenland expedition, the mission led by the ethnologist Paul-Emile Victor with the anthropologist Robert Gessain, which was put ashore at Ammassalik by the Pourquoi Pas? in August 1934 to winter there; Victor afterwards gave some four thousand objects to the Musee de l'Homme. William Thalbitzer, who had catalogued the district's material culture a generation earlier, knew its bull-roarers "only as a toy for children" — noting in the same breath that among the Indians of North America the instrument could be sacred. Here the roar belonged to play.

Rhombe (palette) vieux, forme rectangulaire, une des extremites en forme de manche ou de poignee sans dents avec une gorge pour ficelle.

Old rhombe (palette), rectangular in form, one end shaped like a handle or grip without teeth, with a groove for the cord.

Musee du quai Branly object record 245543, inv. 71.1934.175.50
Object
A small, worn rectangular wooden slat, 17 cm long, 4 cm wide and 0.7 cm thick (about 13 g), one end shaped into a plain handle or grip (without teeth) and cut with a groove to take the cord. The museum classes it as a free aerophone (rhombe / aerophone a air ambiant): a flat blade whirled on a single string.
Function
A child's toy: in the Ammassalik district Thalbitzer knew the bull-roarer "only as a toy for children," noting pointedly that elsewhere it could be sacred (Thalbitzer 1914).
Map confidence
high - Representative anchor at Tasiilaq (formerly Ammassalik/Angmagssalik), the main settlement of the Ammassalik district, which is the named provenance; no finer find-spot is recorded.
Source location
object 245543, inv. 71.1934.175.50

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