No. WILLEMSEN1998-001
Eindhoven banded bone blade
Netherlands · North Brabant · Low Countries · Europe
Play / practical
snorrebot
Snorrebot: Dutch “whirring bone”; here a flat blade swung freely on a cord.
Swung on a cord, a flat blade of bone spins along its own length and hums; swing harder and the note climbs. This one is rounded at one end, pierced near the other and crossed by bands of incised lines. It was dug up in Eindhoven with other bone toys: a skate, knucklebones and dice. Making one took little more than a cattle rib and a piece of string. The thick joint end and the thinnest part of the rib were cut away, a hole was drilled through the thicker end, and sometimes the sides were trimmed. Low Countries children knew a second snorrebot as well: a piglet’s foot-bone threaded on a looped string, twisted and pulled between both hands until it whirred back and forth. Bones left over from slaughter, hard and plentiful, kept both kinds coming.
Particulars
- Object
- Flat bone blade with a hole near one end, a rounded opposite tip and bands of transverse incisions.
- Function
- Sound-making toy, whirled on a cord.
Sources
- Annemarieke Willemsen, Kinder delijt: Middeleeuws speelgoed in de Nederlanden (1998), §2.29 p.112; pp.195–196, Fig.159. View · archived
- Anton Ervynck, Een snorrebot uit de 9de–11de eeuw: Beenderresten uit de Gouvernementstraat, Stadsarcheologie 14(4) (1990), pp.39–42, especially p.40 and n.4. View · archived
- M. J. Rijkelijkhuizen, J. T. Zeiler and J. van Dijk, Osseous and keratinous objects from the Netherlands, Nederlandse Archeologische Rapporten 84 (2024), §6.7.11, p.143. View