The Bullroarer Atlas

HAD1898-001 - secondary catalog

Scotland / Aberdeenshire and Kincardineshire

United Kingdom - Scotland - Europe - British Isles

Weather / fertility magic

Another Pitt Rivers model bullroarer, the same oval board type wound this time with red cord — a stand-in for the Scottish 'thunder-spell,' no...
Representative image. Another Pitt Rivers model bullroarer, the same oval board type wound this time with red cord — a stand-in for the Scottish 'thunder-spell,' no photograph of which survives from Aberdeenshire or Kincardineshire. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 2009.46.17) Image source

thunder-spell English

Source term: thunder-spell / thunder-bolt

thunner-spell: north-east Scots name for the bull-roarer. "Spell" is most likely a charm, though it may instead be the Scots word for a thin shaving of wood (English "spill").

Etymology. A north-east Scots name for the bull-roarer, after its weather-charm use: it was whirled during thunderstorms to make the thunder cease or the thunderbolt miss. The "thunner" element is plain; "-spell" is undetermined — either "charm" or the Scots word for a thin shaving of wood (English "spill"). (medium confidence)

In the north-east of Scotland, when thunder rolled, boys took a thin slat of wood about half a foot long, bored a hole in one end, tied a few yards of twine through it, and whirled it round their heads to throw off a buzzing roar - in the belief that the thunder would cease, or that the thunderbolt would spare them. The minister-folklorist Walter Gregor set it down from first-hand observation in his 1881 Folk-Lore of the North-East of Scotland, naming it the "thunner-spell." In a fuller version of the entry that Gregor supplied to Alice Gomme's Traditional Games, he added that he had "used it with this intention" himself, at Keith; that herd-boys at Udny turned the same instrument to a blunter purpose, swinging it to terrify cattle into the byre; and that he had sent one specimen, in use at Pitsligo, to the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. Haddon gathered the Scottish names "thunder-spell" and (in Aberdeen) "thunder-bolt" from this material in his Study of Man, alongside English and Irish forms.

During thunder it was not unusual for boys to take a piece of thin wood a few inches wide and about half-a-foot long, bore a hole in one end of it, and tie a few yards of twine into the hole. The piece of wood was rapidly whirled round the head, under the belief that the thunder would cease, or that the thunderbolt would not strike. It went by the name of "thunner-spell."

Walter Gregor, The Folk-Lore of the North-East of Scotland (1881), p. 153
Object
Scottish thunder-spell bullroarer; PRM 1893.14.7 is Gregor's surviving Pitsligo Thunner-Spehl, a notched wooden slat with terminal cord.
Function
Toy and weather charm; Haddon reports use during thunder-storms and by herd-boys.
Map confidence
medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Haddon
Source location
p. 153; PRM 1893.14.7

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