The Bullroarer Atlas

HAD1898-025 - secondary catalog

Merlav / Merelava, Banks Islands

Vanuatu - Melanesia

Sacred / spirit

A plain, paddle-shaped Melanesian bull-roarer, its broad rounded blade drawing down into a long slender stem tipped with a small drilled and...
Representative image. A plain, paddle-shaped Melanesian bull-roarer, its broad rounded blade drawing down into a long slender stem tipped with a small drilled and notched butt, the wood streaked dark with age and entirely without carving; no photograph of the worung-tamb used on Merlav (Merelava) in the Banks Islands survives, so this related Melanesian piece is shown instead. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Oc1906-1013-1451) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

worung-tamb English

worung-tamb: Merlav (Banks Islands) name for the bull-roarer, glossed by Codrington as "a wailer," from its use to make a mourning sound the night after a death.

Etymology. The source ties `worung-tamb` to the moaning or wailing sound made after a death. (high confidence)

On Merlav in the Banks Islands the bull-roarer was swung the night after a death, and was called worung-tamb, "a wailer." Codrington, who recorded it firsthand, was emphatic that the instrument held no mystery in these islands: on neighbouring Mota the same whirling slat was the nanamatea, "death-maker," sounded to drive a ghost away, while on Vanua Lava, Maewo and Araga it was an open plaything with names like "pig" and "a bit of bamboo." Only in Florida, he wrote, did it carry any secret weight. In Merlav its work was not to frighten the dead off but to mourn them, a wailing made through the night after a death.

There is no mystery about it when it is used in the Banks' Islands to drive away a ghost, as in Mota, where it is called nanamatea, death-maker, or to make a mourning sound, as in Merlav, where it is called worung-tamb, a wailer, and used the night after a death.

Codrington, The Melanesians (1891), ch. XVII
Function
Bullroarer used to make a moaning sound the night after death.
Map confidence
medium - representative anchor on Gaua (Santa Maria), the main southern Banks island; Merelava is a small island in the same group
Source location
p. 342 (ch. XVII "Dances. Music. Games.", Toys section)

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