The Bullroarer Atlas

LEDEN1915-001 - museum specimen

Central Inuit Chesterfield Inlet caribou-bone bullroarer CMH IV-C-1402

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

Function not recorded

The Chesterfield Inlet plate itself — serrated caribou bone with its single seal-skin cord.
The Chesterfield Inlet plate itself — serrated caribou bone with its single seal-skin cord. Image source
Leden's second Chesterfield Inlet roarer — pine, serrated, on its sinew cord.
Leden's second Chesterfield Inlet roarer — pine, serrated, on its sinew cord. 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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