The Bullroarer Atlas

No. NA-S1952-016

Tanaina weather-magic bullroarer

United States · Alaska · Mackenzie-Yukon edge · North America

Weather / fertility magic

Deg Hit’an (Ingalik) bull-roarer made by Billy Williams at Anvik, Alaska: a pale spruce blade with saw-toothed edges and a rawhide line wound around and across the blade.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Deg Hit’an spruce bullroarer from Alaska. CC0 · Image source

Source term: bullroarer

On the beaches of Cook Inlet, a Tanaina (Dena'ina) bull-roarer was swung when the waves came rolling in, to quiet the water and bring fine weather. Cornelius Osgood, who recorded the practice in the 1930s, also noted what the instrument was made from: when a mountain sheep was butchered, the sinew of its back was saved for bull-roarer strings, though the hide itself was never worn, for fear it would cripple the wearer.

[The bull-roarer] is swung on the beach when the waves are rolling in in order to make fine weather.

Osgood 1937, The Ethnography of the Tanaina, p. 175

Particulars

Object
Bull-roarer whirled on a cord of mountain-sheep back sinew.
Function
Swung on the beach when waves rolled in to bring fine weather.

Sources

  1. Theodore A. Seder, 'Old World Overtones in the New World,' Museum Bulletin (University of Pennsylvania) XVI(4) (1952), pp. 51-54 View · archived
  2. Osgood, The Ethnography of the Tanaina (1937), p. 175

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