Thunner-spehl, whirled against thunderbolts

THUNNER-SPEHL

Source term: bull-roarer

Scots "thunner-spehl" — thunder-spell; a notched wooden slip whirled on a string to imitate or ward off thunder.

Etymology. Transparent Scots dialect compound naming the instrument as a charm or spell against thunder/lightning.

In Aberdeenshire and Kincardineshire boys whirled a notched shaving of wood on a string during thunderstorms, in the belief that the thunder would cease or that the thunderbolt would not strike. The anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon, who gathered British bull-roarers for the chapter on the instrument in "The Study of Man" (1898), reported that it was known as a thunder-spell in parts of Scotland and in Aberdeen as a thunder-bolt, and that a Liverpool Museum informant told him the things were made by farm-servants and villagers and were quite common in those counties. The earliest notice, from Galloway in 1822, describes a thunder-spale whirled "beneath the school-yard 'dike'" as suggesting the notion of a distant thunder-clap. Two Scottish specimens entered the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1893, recorded under the local name thunner-spehl.

whirled round the head, under the belief that the thunder would cease, or that the thunderbolt would not strike

W. Gregor, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the North-East of Scotland (1881), 153, as quoted in Dictionaries of the Scots Language, SND s.v. "thunner spale"

Particulars

Object

Roughly carved slip of pine with serrated edges, 197 mm long, its whirling string threaded through a hole at one end; from Knockando parish, Elgin.

Function

Thunder-charm, whirled in storms to make the thunder cease or the thunderbolt miss; later swung simply for the noise.