The Bullroarer Atlas

HAD1898-004 - secondary catalog

Marienwerder / Kwidzyn region

Poland - West Prussia - Central Europe

Play / practical

A dark wooden board pierced with a row of round holes and strung on a cord at the Pitt Rivers Museum — an English piece shown for the general...
Representative image. A dark wooden board pierced with a row of round holes and strung on a cord at the Pitt Rivers Museum — an English piece shown for the general European type, not the whip-mounted children's bullroarer game recorded around Marienwerder in West Prussia. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1902.51.6) Image source

Source term: Schwirrholz

Schwirrholz = German for bull-roarer (literally "whirring wood"); burren = the local West Prussian verb for the whirring of the whip-mounted toy.

At Gut Neudörfchen in the early 1860s, children made a light wooden Schwirrholz a handspan long and fixed it to a whip; cutting, balancing, and swinging it took real skill, and not every boy could raise the same voice from the toy. Around 1870 the district's Germans emigrated to America and Poles took their place — leaving Haddon to wonder whether the whirring toy went with the emigrants or passed to the newcomers' children.

In West Prussia, near Marienwerder, the true bull-roarer (Schwirrholz) has been noted by Siedel. A narrow piece of light wood, a span in length, was fastened to a whip, the whirling of the whips was called burren, and not every boy could do this equally well; the success depended also partly on the length and weight of the bull-roarer as well as on the nature of the whip.

Haddon 1898, The Study of Man, pp. 285-286 (citing H. Siedel, Das Schwirrholz in Westpreussen, Globus, 1896, p. 67)
Object
Handspan-long narrow board of light wood, carefully cut and fixed to a whip; Seidel explicitly distinguished it from the doubled-cord Waldteufel.
Function
Children's game requiring a well-balanced board, suitable whip, and practiced circular swing.
Map confidence
medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Haddon
Source location
Seidel 1896, Globus 70:67–68

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