Commensacq Guidanson burrumbe rhombe

burrumbe

Source term: rhombe / burrumbe

burrumbe — the local Landes name for the rhombe (bullroarer), a thin board whirled on a cord; the source links it to the Basque names burruna and furrunfurra.

On 21 June 1965, in his workshop in the Guidanson quarter of Commensacq, in the pine country of the Landes de Gascogne, Léonce Mano made a whirled wooden board and played it for the ethnomusicologists Claudie Marcel-Dubois and Maguy Pichonnet-Andral; Marcel-Dubois photographed him at the bench and again outside his door, whirling it. He called it a burrumbe, the local name for the rhombe. Its museum record is blunt about what such boards were for: one 'served until 1939 to drive the wild boar from the maize.' As it was told to the two researchers, the sound would put a boar or a wolf to flight, and pigs — herded in the open by young boys — were kept out of the cultivated fields the same way. The rhombe Mano made, twenty-nine notches cut along its half-metre blade, entered the Mucem collections, and his account of it survives in the Landes survey archive.

Dans tous les cas de figure, l’idée est toujours la même: tenir un “mal” à distance par un son effrayant.

Whatever the case, the idea is always the same: to hold an “evil” at bay with a frightening sound.

Marie-Barbara Le Gonidec, “Le rhombe,” Les Réveillées (EHESS)

Particulars

Object

A 47.5 cm rhombe of white wood (fir) with twenty-nine notches cut along the blade, and its cord, made by Léonce Mano during the 1965-1966 Landes field survey; photographs record him making and playing it (Mucem 1966.114.4.1-2).