The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-141 - museum specimen

Netsilik brummer (bull-roarer), Amundsen Gjøa expedition (UEM16245)

Canada - King William Island (Qikiqtaq) - Netsilingmiut territory, Kitikmeot, Nunavut - North America - Arctic

Play / practical

Netsilik saw-edged wooden brummer collected by Roald Amundsen, UEM16245.
Netsilik saw-edged wooden brummer collected by Roald Amundsen, UEM16245. · CC BY-SA 4.0 Image source
Simon Kirnik's polar-bear-bone blade, Gjoa Haven, 1975.
Simon Kirnik's polar-bear-bone blade, Gjoa Haven, 1975. Image source
Rosie Palah's wood-and-sinew roarer with its fur tuft, Gjoa Haven, 1975.
Rosie Palah's wood-and-sinew roarer with its fur tuft, Gjoa Haven, 1975. Image source

Source term: brummer

brummer = Norwegian for a bull-roarer or buzzer (from brumme, to buzz or drone).

The Netsilingmiut—“people of the place of the ringed seal”—travelled in small communities across King William Island and the country northwest of Hudson Bay, hunting seals on the sea ice and moving inland for fish and caribou. Oslo’s museum attributes this striking bullroarer to them: a pointed wooden blade 23.7 centimetres long, pierced for its cord and cut like a saw along one edge. It reached Oslo in 1906 with Roald Amundsen’s Gjøa expedition collection. Among the Netsilik two decades later, Knud Rasmussen listed the imiklutAQ — a shaped slat whirled round to make a humming noise — among the games, and at Malerualik such toys were laid in children’s graves; one conflicting catalogue field on this piece says “Alaska.”

Object
Pointed wooden bullroarer, 23.7 cm long, pierced for a cord and serrated along one edge.
Function
A game: Rasmussen's Netsilik record lists the imiklutAQ, a shaped slat whirled round to make a humming noise, among the toys, and such pieces lie in children's graves at Malerualik (Rasmussen 1931).
Map confidence
low - Gjøahavn (Gjoa Haven / Uqsuqtuuq), the harbour on the SE coast of King William Island where Amundsen wintered the Gjøa 1903–1905, in the Netsilingmiut heartland named by the record's ingress. Not a documented find-spot for the object itself; the catalogue's own locality field instead reads "Alaska."
Source location
UEM16245

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