The Bullroarer Atlas

HAD1898-042 - secondary catalog

Montgomeryshire, Wales

United Kingdom - Montgomeryshire - Wales - Europe - British Isles

Play / practical

Fig. 38 of Haddon's plate of British bull-roarers; no. 4, bottom centre, with a zigzag serrated edge and a round hole near its base, is the...
Fig. 38 of Haddon's plate of British bull-roarers; no. 4, bottom centre, with a zigzag serrated edge and a round hole near its base, is the Montgomeryshire specimen he labelled simply 'roarer.' A. C. Haddon, The Study of Man (1898), fig. 38 Public domain Image source

roarer English

Source term: roarer / bull-roarer

"Roarer": the local Montgomeryshire name for the whirled wooden bull-roarer.

Etymology. Plain vernacular English name formed from the sound the instrument makes. (high confidence)

There was no Montgomeryshire bull-roarer left to collect by the 1890s, so the Rev. Elias Owen of Oswestry had one made for Alfred Haddon in the form he remembered from sixty years earlier in that Welsh county, where it was simply called a "roarer." Owen (1833–1899) was a Welsh cleric and folklorist, author of Welsh Folk-Lore (1896), who gathered old customs from elderly parishioners on his rounds as a diocesan school inspector. Across the British Isles Haddon found the object surviving only as a children's plaything, whirled for its noise under a scatter of local names — roarer in Wales, bull, boomer, thunder-spell, hummer.

The Rev. Elias Owen, of Oswestry, kindly had a "roarer" made for me as they were used sixty years ago in Montgomeryshire in Wales.

Haddon 1898, The Study of Man, ch. X "The Bull-Roarer," pp. 219–224
Function
Rev. Elias Owen of Oswestry had a remembered Montgomeryshire roarer made for Haddon, matching Fig. 38 no. 4; Haddon says it was the form used about sixty years earlier.
Map confidence
medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Haddon
Source location
p. 280; Fig. 38 no. 4

View source Open this point on the interactive map