LANG1884-001 - ethnographic attestation
English country boys
United Kingdom - England - Europe - British Isles
Play / practical
Source term: bull-roarer
For Andrew Lang, the bull-roarer that warned women away from Australian tribal mysteries was no exotic instrument at all but a toy he knew from boyhood: "a toy familiar to English country lads." In Custom and Myth (1884) he set out, "in the interests of science," how it is made — a piece of the commonest wooden board, "say the lid of a packing-case," about a sixth of an inch thick and eight inches long, sharpened at the ends to roughly the shape of a large bay-leaf, with a strong string about thirty inches long tied to one end. Whirled fast on its cord it produced what Lang called "a most horrible and unexampled din," a mighty rushing noise as if some supernatural being "fluttered and buzzed his wings with fearful roar." He warned that the thing would "almost infallibly break all that is fragile in the house" and "probably put out the eyes of some of the inhabitants." The anthropologist E. B. Tylor had once whirled one before an audience at the Royal Institution, where at first it did nothing particular until it "warmed to its work." Boys, Lang wrote, had always known it in England as one of the most efficient modes of making the hideous and unearthly noises in which it is the privilege of youth to delight.
The instrument which produces the sounds that warn women to remain afar is a toy familiar to English country lads. They call it the bull-roarer.
Lang, Custom and Myth (1884), "The Bull-Roarer: A Study of the Mysteries," pp. 29-30
- Object
- A piece of common board about a sixth of an inch thick and eight inches long, sharpened at the ends to the shape of a large bay-leaf, with a strong string about thirty inches long tied to one end.
- Function
- Secular toy/noise-maker in English country-boy use.
- Map confidence
- low - Representative England anchor for a broad toy-survival statement
- Source location
- pp. 29-31
- Toy / secular survival