Central Arctic baleen bullroarer

Source term: Bullroarer

A strip of baleen twenty centimetres long, cut from the plates of a whale's jaw and worked down to a narrow blade, with rows of deep teeth cut along both edges and one end drawn to a point. Its cord is still tied on at the other end. It reached Oxford in May 1907, bought by the Pitt Rivers Museum, from Cecil Vincent Goddard, somewhere in the Central Arctic of Canada. What a Central Arctic bull-roarer was for, Diamond Jenness recorded among the Copper Inuit of Coronation Gulf: the imilguptak was one of two toys confined to children, the other being the buzz, nilitak. A single cord at one end makes this the imilguptak kind.

Particulars

Object

Carved baleen blade, 200 x 30 mm. The museum photograph shows a long narrow strip with deeply serrated edges running most of its length, one end tapered, and a surviving cord attached at the opposite terminal end - single-end free-air suspension rather than an axial double-cord buzzer.

Function

Children's toy.