The Bullroarer Atlas

LEDEN1915-001 - museum specimen

Central Inuit

Canada - Chesterfield Inlet - Kivalliq, Nunavut - North America - Arctic

Function not recorded

Birket-Smith's 1929 photograph of a Caribou Inuit bull-roarer from the Pâdlimiut at Hikoligjuaq, inland from Chesterfield Inlet — lanceolate,...
Representative image. Birket-Smith's 1929 photograph of a Caribou Inuit bull-roarer from the Pâdlimiut at Hikoligjuaq, inland from Chesterfield Inlet — lanceolate, notch-edged, on its long looped sinew cord (the thin whistle at left shares the figure). The Leden piece itself is in the Canadian Museum of History, unphotographable for reuse. Kaj Birket-Smith, The Caribou Eskimos (Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition V, 1929), fig. 111b Public domain Image source

Source term: Bullroarer

This whirring blade came south with a song collector. Christian Leden, the Norwegian ethnomusicologist, spent 1913-1916 on the west coast of Hudson Bay filling wax cylinders with Inuit song — 'their intervals were so different from ours,' he wrote, 'that it was almost impossible to retain them' — and at Chesterfield Inlet, Igluligaarjuk, 'the place of few houses,' then a whalers' rendezvous with a brand-new trading post, he acquired this caribou-bone plate on its seal-skin cord. Inland, among the Caribou Inuit, such roarers were children's toys called anoreziut; this one kept neither its name nor its story.

Object
Caribou-bone plate with a seal-skin cord through one end; 25.9 x 7.8 x 0.9 cm. Canadian Museum of History IV-C-1402.
Function
No function recorded.
Map confidence
high - Chesterfield Inlet / Igluligaarjuk community coordinate; CMH names the municipality as object origin.
Source location
IV-C-1402

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