The Bullroarer Atlas

EUEXP-001 - secondary catalog

Black Forest folk survival (unnamed group)

Germany - Black Forest - Schwarzwald, Baden-Württemberg - Central Europe

Play / practical

A German Schwirrholz toy at the Nuremberg Toy Museum: a smooth teardrop-shaped board with fine vertical ridging, cord looped through a hole at...
Representative image. A German Schwirrholz toy at the Nuremberg Toy Museum: a smooth teardrop-shaped board with fine vertical ridging, cord looped through a hole at the rounded end — a German folk specimen standing in for the Black Forest survival called Schlägel, since no photograph of that local form is known. Spielzeugmuseum der Stadt Nürnberg (Museum Lydia Bayer), 1974.253 — via Europeana CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Schlägel English

Source term: bull-roarer

Schlägel — German for a "mallet" or "beater" (a variant of Schlegel); the Black Forest name Haddon's friend reported for the bull-roarer.

A. C. Haddon's 1898 chapter on the bull-roarer rounds off its survey of European survivals with a secondhand line: a German friend had told him he had seen the bull-roarer in the Black Forest, where it went by a local name Haddon's text prints as "Schldzel." In the same breath he added that the toy was sometimes seen at fairs in Basel. There is no collector, no date, and no village behind the report, only the whirled wooden slat and a dialect word passed to Haddon at one remove.

A German friend has informed me that he has seen the bull-roarer in the Black Forest, where it is known as Schlägel; and I have also heard that it is sometimes seen in fairs at Basel in Switzerland.

Haddon 1898, The Study of Man, p. 285
Object
Flat wooden slat whirled on a cord; folk survival in the Black Forest, local dialect term Schlägel.
Function
Folk toy/secular survival; no ritual function recorded.
Map confidence
low_medium - Black Forest regional centroid; representative anchor, no more precise locality given by Haddon.
Source location
p. 285

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