MUS2026-125 - museum specimen
Tunumiit bullroarer, Tasiilaq (NMAI, ex-Nationalmuseet)
Greenland (Denmark) - Tasiilaq (Ammassalik), East Greenland - North America - Arctic
Play / practical
Source term: bullroarer
On East Greenland’s Ammassalik coast, Tunumiit children grew up making miniature hunting gear and learning the skills of seal and bird hunting; Holm met one thirteen-year-old who had already taken thirty seals. This wood-and-hide bullroarer comes from that same Tasiilaq community. Denmark’s Nationalmuseet exchanged it with George Heye’s museum in 1922. In the Ammassalik record the whirled slat was a child’s plaything, never a spirit voice.
c is an ordinary bull-roarer, the lancet-shaped wooden leaf of which is fastened by a short string to a short stick, on which it is whirled round so quickly that it gives a whizzing or roaring sound.
William Thalbitzer, The Ammassalik Eskimo (Meddelelser om Grønland 39, 1914), p. 653
- Object
- Wood-and-hide bullroarer from Tasiilaq; NMAI 11/3020, transferred from the Nationalmuseet in 1922. A connection with Rasmussen’s Fourth Thule Expedition is possible, not confirmed.
- Function
- A child's plaything in the Ammassalik record (Thalbitzer 1914); no spirit use is reported for the district.
- Map confidence
- high - Tasiilaq settlement
- Source location
- NMAI 11/3020
- Toy / secular survival