The Bullroarer Atlas

ARCTIC-009 - museum specimen

West coast of Hudson Bay (people not named)

Canada - West coast of Hudson Bay - North America - Arctic

Play / practical

The Hudson Bay blade: saw-toothed along both edges, its sinew cord knotted at the tip (KHM Oslo UEM26188).
The Hudson Bay blade: saw-toothed along both edges, its sinew cord knotted at the tip (KHM Oslo UEM26188). · CC BY-SA Image source

A leaf-shaped blade of dark wood, its edges sawed into even teeth, hangs from a single twist of sinew — the whole instrument nineteen centimetres from tip to tail. It came off the west coast of Hudson Bay, Inuit country, with no note of community or maker, and entered the Oslo registers under two Norwegian names, svingstikke and brummer — whirling-stick and hummer — with a third word, leke, marking what its collector took it for: a toy.

Object
KHM Oslo UEM26188: a 19 cm leaf-shaped wooden blade, both edges cut into regular saw-teeth, on a single sinew cord.
Function
Catalogued as a toy (leke); no field function recorded.
Map confidence
high - Approximate west-Hudson-Bay coastal anchor; the museum's only provenance is the coast itself.
Source location
UEM26188

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