Old Thule baleen whale blade

Source term: curious object (unidentified baleen)

Someone at Old Thule cut this strip of baleen into a whale: two flukes at one end, a slim tail stock, a body swelling to a blunt rounded head, and one hole drilled through the head. It lay in House 1, a cloverleaf winter house on Wolstenholme Fjord whose floor layer was thick with baleen, left by Thule whale hunters some five or six centuries ago. On the far side of the Inuit world, at Point Barrow, a baleen whale of exactly this cut, pierced at the head, was a bullroarer, imigdlugtaoq, and the instrument's name runs in one form or another from Alaska to East Greenland.

another curious object with a shallow cleft in one end, the other end rounded with a central hole; the object is carefully made with rounded edges.

Holtved 1944 I:298

Particulars

Object

Baleen blade cut to a whale outline, about 22 × 5 cm (scaled from the published photograph): a shallow V-cleft fluke end, a narrow waist, and a body widening to a rounded end pierced by one central hole; edges carefully rounded; a crack runs from one margin into the hole. Nationalmuseet L3:2927.

Function

Not recorded.