Béarn hurrumbo pastoral bullroarer

bur rumbo / hurrumbo

Source term: rombo

Béarnais (Gascon) shepherds’ name for the whirled-wood noisemaker.

Etymology. From Béarnais bourroumbe, a dull, muffled roar — which in Palay's dictionary also names the child's game of whirling a piece of wood on a string to make that sound. An onomatopoeic motion-sound word.

In Béarn, on the French side of the Pyrenees, shepherds whirled a bullroarer they called the bur rumbo or hurrumbo, not in any rite but to keep order in the fold: the droning frightened off and drove away mares that tried to push into the pens of rams. Jean Servier set the Béarn usage beside the neighboring Basque furrunfarra, a small board of wood with notched edges that the shepherd spun on a cord sometimes tied to a stick, its buzz scattering animals foreign to the flock, chiefly mares, which could panic the rams in their fold at night. The name carries the sound. In Béarn one word, bourroumbe, names both a dull roar and, in Simin Palay's dictionary of Béarnais and Gascon, the child's game of making that noise by swinging a piece of wood hard on a string.

En Béarn, los pastores emplean también del [sic] "bur rumbo" o "hurrumbo" para atemorizar y separar a las yeguas que tratan de penetrar en las majadas de carneros.

In Béarn, the shepherds also use the bur rumbo or hurrumbo to frighten and separate the mares that try to get into the pens of the rams.

Jean Servier, El hombre y lo invisible (Spanish trans. of L'homme et l'invisible), p. 140

Particulars

Object

A shepherd’s whirled noisemaker, the bur rumbo or hurrumbo.

Function

Pastoral animal-scarer, used to drive mares from the rams’ pens.