The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MUS2026-227Oceania

Middle Sepik fishtail bullroarer

Papua New Guinea · Middle Sepik · Oceania · Sahul

Function not recorded

Ethnologisches Museum VI 57792: a carved Middle Sepik blade with a terminal hole and fishtail end.
Plate I. Ethnologisches Museum VI 57792: a carved Middle Sepik blade with a terminal hole and fishtail end. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Image source
A pale wooden blade connected by a cord to a long segmented stick.
Plate II. Representative — not this record’s object. A Middle Sepik blade with its cord and operating stick, Berlin VI 57802. Image source

Source term: Schwirrholz

Schwirrholz - the standing German museum term for a bullroarer, literally "whirring wood".

A blade of pale wood the length of a forearm — thirty-eight centimetres by six — and just eight millimetres thick, thin enough that the measurement alone shows it was made to be swung, not merely carved for display. It tapers to a rounded point at one end; at the other, a small drilled hole sits just short of a stubby notched tail shaped like a fish's fluke. Berlin's Ethnologisches Museum received it as a gift from Hermann Schlenker in 2012, cataloguing it as a Schwirrholz, a "whirring wood," from the Middle Sepik — though its own cord and its makers' word for it are long gone.

Particulars

Object
Carved wood, 38 x 6.2 x 0.8 cm. A pale, gently bowed leaf-shaped blade, widest at the middle and drawn to a rounded point at one end; at the other end a drilled circular hole sits immediately before a short notched, fishtail-shaped projection. No cord survives. At just 8 mm thick on a 380 mm blade, it is an unusually thin, clearly free-air profile.
Function
Not recorded.

Source

Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, VI 57792, 'Schwirrholz' (Middle Sepik; gift of Hermann Schlenker, 2012)

View the source · archived

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Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.