Maynooth roarer among homemade toys

Source term: Bull roarer

In December 2024 the National Museum of Ireland's Country Life museum staged a pop-up display of homemade toys that included a bull roarer, catalogued as F:1934.18 and donated by Donnchadh Ó Floinn of Maynooth, Co. Kildare. It was shown among children's playthings, not ritual objects. That secular framing fits the wider Irish record. When Alfred Haddon gathered specimens in the north-east corner of Ireland for The Study of Man in 1898, he found the instrument was a boy's plaything there too — in common use among boys in Co. Down, where it was called a "boomer." His informant recalled that once, as a boy, when he was playing with one, an old country woman told him it was a "sacred" thing, and Haddon added that it would be worth while to follow up the clue.

It would be a strange circumstance—but not more strange than others that we have already studied—if the dreaded god of vengeance of West Africa should become the plaything of a boy in the north of Ireland.

Haddon, The Study of Man (1898), ch. X, p. 283

Particulars

Object

A bull roarer from Maynooth, Co. Kildare, donated by Donnchadh Ó Floinn (National Museum of Ireland F:1934.18).

Function

A homemade toy, shown among children's playthings in the Irish Folklife collection.