The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MUS2026-380

Ambae wooden toy bullroarer

Vanuatu · Ambae (Aoba), New Hebrides · Oceania

Play / practical

New Britain bullroarer with a white-filled carved face and geometric bands near one end; the long wooden blade tapers to a plain point.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. A blade with a white-filled carved face and bands CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Image source

Source term: Schwirrholz; Spielzeug

Swung for fun on Ambae, the great volcanic island the old charts called Aoba. In these northern islands of the New Hebrides, the missionary R. H. Codrington wrote, the bullroarer was a common plaything; across the channel on Maewo its name was tal-viv, "a whirring string."

Particulars

Object
Wooden bullroarer, 29 cm long; Museum der Kulturen Basel Vb 4697, Felix Speiser collection.
Function
A toy.

Source

Museum der Kulturen Basel, Vb 4697, "Schwirrholz" / "Spielzeug" (wood, L 29 cm; Ambae Island; collector Felix Speiser), in Island 84: (Re-)Connecting with Felix Speiser's Vanuatu collection (1910–1912), University of Basel; R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians (Oxford, 1891), p. 342

View the source

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