The Bullroarer Atlas

NAAIN-019 - ethnographic attestation

Muscogee (Creek) / James H. Hill text corpus

United States - Eufaula - eastern Oklahoma - North America - Southeast-Oklahoma diaspora

Play / practical

A reddish-brown wooden board carved with chevron and dogtooth bands, wound with cord and photographed with its Pitt Rivers catalog card...
Representative image. A reddish-brown wooden board carved with chevron and dogtooth bands, wound with cord and photographed with its Pitt Rivers catalog card 1928.9.99 - a Hopi piece shown for lack of any physical description of the Muscogee fohfokv, which Hill's text classes simply as a game played by one person. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1928.9.99) Image source

fohfokv Muscogee / English translation

Source term: fohfokv; bull-roarer

fohfokv — Muscogee (Creek) word glossed as "bull-roarer" in James H. Hill's "Various Games" text, where it is named as a game for one person to play alone.

The Muscogee (Creek) word fohfokv appears in a short text on various games as the name for a bull-roarer, glossed in English as a game for one person to play alone. The text is one of some 140 stories and language samples that James H. Hill of Eufaula, Oklahoma, wrote out for the linguist Mary R. Haas during her fieldwork in eastern Oklahoma between 1936 and 1940. Hill records no dimensions, no maker, and no ceremony; the toy sits among ordinary amusements. The corpus was edited and published only in 2014, by Jack B. Martin, Margaret McKane Mauldin, and Juanita McGirt.

Object
Whirled noisemaker attested lexically; Hill's text classes it as a game played by one person and records no physical description.
Function
Muscogee bull-roarer game; the checked source gives game context and solitary play, with no ritual function stated.
Map confidence
medium_high - Eufaula, Oklahoma community anchor for James H. Hill's source provenance; the text corpus is tied to Haas's eastern Oklahoma fieldwork and Hill of Eufaula, not to an exact performance or collection site.
Source location
Creek (Muskogee) Texts pp. 247, 254; Muskogee Documentation Project

View source Open this point on the interactive map