The Bullroarer Atlas

NAAIN-012 - museum specimen

Sallirmiut Inuit / Southampton Island

Canada - Nunavut - Kivalliq Region - North America - Arctic

Play / practical

A serrated bone blade on a long coiled hide cord, displayed with its Japanese museum label reading 'Bone Bullroarer, Inuit, Canada' - a...
Representative image. A serrated bone blade on a long coiled hide cord, displayed with its Japanese museum label reading 'Bone Bullroarer, Inuit, Canada' - a culture-family match for the Sallirmiut instrument called annoresiut, not the Southampton Island piece collected between 1913 and 1916 that this page documents. Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples (北海道立北方民族博物館), acc. H1.89.9, via Hokkaido Digital Museum CC0 Image source

annoresiut English

annoresiut — built on the root anore/anori, "wind." The name suits the instrument's airy roar, but no source ties this object to weather or wind magic.

A bullroarer of animal bone strung on a sinew cord, gathered on the south and west coasts of Southampton Island by the Norwegian ethnomusicologist Christian Leden during his 1913-1916 expedition across the Keewatin. Across the Inuit ethnographic record this is a children's toy rather than a cult object: a lozenge of bone or wood pierced at one end and whirled on a sinew line until it gave off a loud whirring drone. Collectors of Games of the North American Indians filed the bone and sandstone "buzzes" of the neighbouring Hudson Bay Eskimo under play, and later students of Inuit sound counted the bullroarer among the noisemakers, not the instruments of the angakok. Leden kept the Inuktitut name, annoresiut, a word built on the root for wind. The Sallirmiut he credited it to were already gone: in the winter of 1902-03 a disease carried by a sick sailor aboard the whaler Active swept the island, leaving one woman and four children alive. The piece now rests in the museum's Arctic holdings in Washington.

Two of these – the bullroarer and the buzz – are typically identified as toys rather than musical instruments... The Inuit bullroarer was a lozenge-shaped plate of bone or wood about 15-20 cm long, pierced at one end and suspended on a sinew cord... When spun rapidly it made a loud whirring sound.

Peter Whitridge, "The sound of contact: Historic Inuit music-making in northern Labrador," North Atlantic Archaeology 4 (2015), pp. 18-19
Object
Animal bone and sinew bullroarer collected between 1913 and 1916
Function
Material object from south and west coasts of Southampton Island; user lead reports local name annoresiut
Map confidence
high - representative on-land anchor at Sallirmiut Inuit / Southampton Island (regional coordinate fell just offshore of the rendered coastline); not an exact findspot
Source location
NMAI object record NMAI_69748 / catalog 6/4624 / barcode 064624; Indigenous Term annoresiut. Function: Whitridge 2015, North Atlantic Archaeology 4:18-19; primaries Jenness 1946:143, Mathiassen 1927b:120, Murdoch 1892:378-379; Culin 1907 (BAE 24th Ann. Rep.) figs. 1011-1014, pp. 751-754.

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