Author: Bev

Ice skating was not invented in Finland

Bev
Stop Panneau De Signalisation - Images vectorielles gratuites sur Pixabay

Internet, stop saying it was.

The idea that ice skates made from animal bones first appeared in Finland is based on a paper published in 2008 in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. The authors, two biomechanics researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University, measured the metabolic cost of skating as compared with walking, then ran computer simulations of traveling via ice or on foot (walking in snow) in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. They concluded that

the present study supports the hypothesis that, in the second millennium BC, and compared to populations living elsewhere, ancient Finns were more likely forced to develop a tool that helped them save energy from travelling.

Formenti & Minetti 2008, p. 6.

Note that this doesn’t actually say that ancient Finns developed skating. All they’re saying is that, of the five countries they analyzed, skating gives people the greatest metabolic advantage in Finland—assuming skating was used for travel. That conclusion has been taken out of context and revered as truth by the internet. Somehow it morphed into archaeologists finding 5000-year-old bone skates in Finland, which never happened.

Unfortunately, Formenti and Minetti were not familiar enough with the archaeological evidence to pick the right places to analyze. Had they read further into the archaeological literature, they would have found Arthur MacGregor‘s description of possible Bronze Age finds from central Europe and “well-stratified Iron Age examples” from central Germany (p. 64) as well as the thorough discussion of Bronze Age skates from Hungary in “Skating with Horses” by Alice Choyke and Laszlo Bartosiewicz, among other fantastic references published before their article. Surely then they would have included central Europe (which MacGregor proposes as the homeland of ice skating (p. 67)) in their analysis.

Instead, they perpetuated the myth of skating history that connects the origin of skating with the Northern peoples. I wrote a paper about such mythologizing a couple of years ago. In that vein, how well Formenti and Minetti’s idea has spread is really interesting because of how it highlights the prestige accorded numerical simulations in recent years—it has been picked up by popular news outlets despite conflicting with what archaeologists have been saying for decades.

As for the date, I have no idea where the “5000 years ago” date for the first skates that keeps surfacing is from. The oldest skates that have been found in Finland so far date to the 14th century AD, i.e., the 1300s AD. The skates from central Europe go back at least that many years BC—to the second millennium, which is the timeframe Formenti and Minetti suggest. The skates recently found in China are only 3500 years old. They fit in with what I proposed in my book: like the archaeologists, I put the origin of ice skating in or near the Eurasian steppes.

References

A. M. Choyke & L. Bartosiewicz. 2005. Skating with horses: Continuity and parallelism in prehistoric Hungary. Revue de Paléo-biologie, spéc. 10:317–326.

Federico Formenti and Alberto E. Minetti. 2008. “The first humans travelling on ice: an energy-saving strategy?” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 93.1: 1–7.

Arthur MacGregor. 1976. “Bone Skates: A Review of the Evidence.” Archaeological Journal 133: 57–74.

B. A. Thurber. 2020. Skates Made of Bone: A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

B. A. Thurber. 2021. “The Myth of Skating History: Building Elitism into a Sport.” Leisure Sciences 43.6:562–574. doi:10.1080/01490400.2020.1870589

Old bone skates found in China

Bev2 Comments

This last week, the news has been full of reports on the recent announcement (in Chinese) that bone skates have been found in the Xinjiang area. The skates were reportedly found at a tomb in the Gaotai Ruins, which are part of the Jiren Taigoukou Ruins in Qialege’e, a village in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region of China. It’s hard to find on Google maps, but I think it’s Qialegeer Village in Nilka County, Ili, Xinjiang.

The proximity of the new skate finds to the Altai region. From Google Maps.

According to the news articles I’ve seen, the new skate finds are about 3,500 years old, putting them at about 1500 BCE. That’s on par with some of the earliest bone skates that have been found in Europe.

The location of these finds is really exciting because I predicted it in my book on bone skates, published almost exactly 3 years ago. I wrote a story—a rather speculative one since there wasn’t much evidence—suggesting that bone skates originated with nomadic pastoralists in the Eurasian steppes and may have been connected with the early evidence for skiing found in the Altai mountains. I wrote:

Further archaeological work could conceivably uncover early bone skates close to the Altai Mountains or early skis for comparison purposes.

Skates Made of Bone, p. 61

And here we have early bone skates found near the Altai Mountains in a tomb associated with pastoralists that also included pieces of wagons! I’m looking forward to learning more about these skates. I wish the report were more detailed.

These skates are among the oldest skate finds to date. The earliest European bone skates are hard to pinpoint because there has been confusion about identification and dating. The earliest artifacts I’ve seen identified as skates are the Early Bronze Age radius-based artifacts from Albertfalva, Hungary, which date to around 2500 BCE but are no longer generally accepted as skates (Skates Made of Bone, 52). The next skate candidates are metapodia found in Ukraine and connected to the Sabatinovka culture, whose dates are generally put around 1500–1100 BCE but could be earlier (Skates Made of Bone, 53). The earliest clear European skates are from the Late Bronze Age and appeared in Eastern Europe (Skates Made of Bone, 53). They’re probably a few centuries later than the Xinjiang skates, if the 1500 BCE date turns out to be right.

The Xinjiang skates do indeed look a lot like typical European bone skates, based on the photo included with some of the news articles:

Photo
A skate from Xinjiang? From Lou Kang’s article. Another article credits the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.

The image has no caption, which made me wonder if it could be a stock image.

Both my story and these new finds contrast sharply with the popular but false story that skates were first used by ancient Finns 5,000 years ago. That story is not based on archaeological evidence, but rather on computer simulations by Formenti & Minetti that didn’t include Central Europe—where the earliest archaeological evidence is—as a possibility. Archaeologists have been putting the origin of ice skating in or near the Eurasian steppes since the 1970s (Skates Made of Bone, 51).

References

Federico Formenti and Alberto E. Minetti. 2008. “The first humans travelling on ice: an energy-saving strategy?” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 93.1: 1–7.

Lou Kang. 2023. “3,500-year-old bone ice skates unearthed in Xinjiang tomb.” Global Times.

B. A. Thurber. 2020. Skates Made of Bone: A History. McFarland.

Bone skates in Fríssbók

Bev

Fríssbók or Codex Frisianus is an Icelandic manuscript written in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. It includes a copy of Magnússona saga (called Saga Sigurðar, Eysteins ok Ólafs in C. R. Unger’s edition). The whole manuscript has been digitized and is available at handrit.is!

Here is the part about skating, with the phrase “ek kvnna ok sva a isleggiom” (I could also go on skates) underlined.

The top part of column B of Copenhagen, Arnamagnæan Institute, AM 45 fol., f. 63r. Photo: Suzanne Reitz. Taken from handrit.is. I added the red underlining.

The word for bone skates, isleggiom, crosses the line break. There are some abbreviations, as is normal for medieval manuscripts.

This is the only unambiguous reference to bone skates in the corpus of Old Norse literature, but not the only manuscript containing it: there are numerous manuscript copies of the saga.

Skating on my snavelschaatsen

Bev

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been learning to skate on my snavelschaatsen (long-toed skates modeled after Hieronymus Bosch skates).

They are very slick and work best on soft ice. It was hard to get them to stay in place, but using two laces—one to keep them attached and the other to keep them from sliding forwards and backwards—works pretty well.

Compared with my other reconstructed skates, these give me more power and let me take longer strokes. I took them out for a public skating session on terrible ice (half slushy and half snowy with lots of gouges) and they did great. They glided smoothly over the cracks and after a couple of laps, I was skating faster and more stably than many of the people on rental skates!

Bone skates in the Guildhall Museum

Bev

The Catalogue of the Collection of London Antiquities in the Guildhall Museum lists 16 bone skates. The first, #134, is “said to have been found with two Roman sandals” at London Wall. A few of these skates, including #134, were drawn by Charles H. Whymper; his drawing is preserved in the British Museum.

“Five skates made out of bone” by Charles H. Whymper, c. 1891. British Museum no. 1931,1114.102; asset no. 1613392675. Reproduced under a CCC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Stevens’ Bibliography of Figure Skating

Bev

Ryan Stevens, who writes the Skate Guard blog, has taken on the gargantuan task of making sense of all the books on figure skating published in the last century and a quarter by continuing F. W. Foster’s 1898 Bibliography of Skating. It’s a job worth doing and Stevens is to be commended for taking it on.

The bulk of the text (pp. 14–249) consists of a list divided into 15 sections: General (very long), Skating History (65 entries), Shows and Tours (14 entries), Skating Clubs (38 entries), Skating in Art (7 entries), The Science of Skating (8 entries), Skating in the Media (6 entries), LGBTQ+ Skating (8 entries), Academia (13 entries), Cooking (4 entries), Fashion (21 entries), Fiction (a paragraph of generalities with a few specific book recommendations), Biographies (very long), Newspapers (16 entries, mainly web archives), and Periodicals (many entries). Rulebooks and other official publications are excluded.

The General section contains over 400 entries. Each includes the book’s title, author, and year. Many entries feature a brief note mentioning a book’s focus or language. Most are in English, but many other languages are represented as well. They are listed in chronological order, which highlights the shift from books on skating technique to very specialized books and eventually to books aimed at spectators rather than skaters as the sport’s general appeal grew.

The other extremely long section is the list of biographies. This section is organized by skater (alphabetized by first name) instead of date, making it possible to find favorite skaters easily. This format gives an overview of each skater’s popularity. Yuzuru Hanyu wins that competition with 36 entries, all in Japanese.

Given the incredibly large number of skating books published, a complete bibliography is impossible, and Stevens does not claim to have listed every book published between 1899 and 2023. However, a few omissions are puzzling. Henry C. Lowther’s Principle of Skating Turns and Combined Figure-Skating are included, as is the omnibus English Skating in Three Parts; but the first part, Edges and Striking, is missing. D’Este Stock’s The Figure Skate (1954) is included twice (under General, with the author given as “Clarence Stock Sidney D’Este” and under Science, with the author correctly listed as “C. S. D’Este Stock”) but H. E. Vandervell’s book published under the same title in 1901 is absent. Also missing is James R. Hines’ Historical Dictionary of Figure Skating, though his other books are included.

Minor typographical errors are scattered throughout; for example, Lowther’s Principle is listed as “Principles,” and Three Parts is listed as “Three Parks”. However, my main criticism is about layout. The pdf I read does not look like it was professionally produced. There are infelicitous pagebreaks in the middle of entries, and a few pages are blank except for a heading. These issues may have to do with format I read the book in; I hope the print version has an improved layout.

Overall, it’s a good list of books that will certainly be of interest to figure skating enthusiasts. The formatting issues don’t interfere with its functionality.

[Full disclosure: I received a pdf version of this book in exchange for an honest review.]

References

C. S. d’Este Stock. 1954. The Figure Skate: A Research into Dimensions and their Effects upon Performance with a Consideration of Penetrations into Ice and the Pressure upon It. Folkstone, Kent: A. Stace & Sons.

Fred. W. Foster. 1898. A Bibliography of Skating. London: Warburst.

James R. Hines. 2011. A Historical Dictionary of Figure Skating. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Henry C. Lowther. 1900. Principle of Skating Turns. London: H. Cox.

Henry C. Lowther. 1902. Combined Figure-Skating. London: H. Cox.

Henry C. Lowther. 1902. Edges and Striking. London: H. Cox.

Henry C. Lowther. 1902. English Skating in Three Parts. London: H. Cox.

Ryan Stevens. 2023. A Bibliography of Figure Skating 1899–2023: The International Guide to Reading about the World’s Most Exciting Sport. Independently published. ISBN 979-8373971102 (paperback), 979-8373987363 (hardcover); also available on Kindle.

H. E. Vandervell. 1901. The Figure Skate: A Research into the Form of Blade Best Adapted to Curvilinear Skating. London: Straker Brothers.

Vieth, On Skating

Bev

I have completed my translation of the first German book on skating, Gerhard Ulrich Anton Vieth’s Ueber das Schrittschuhlaufen. It was originally a lecture given in Dessau in 1788, then published as a journal article in 1789, and finally published in book form with some additions by an anonymous editor in 1790.

Vieth’s book is interesting because he’s the first to connect skating to dance. He quotes Noverre’s Lettres sur la danse and suggests skating to music.

Vieth also uses physics to explain how to skate a spiral line. He brings up Newton’s laws and some of the things Newton proves in the Principia. That’s not really surprising since in his life off the ice, Vieth is a math teacher. He’s also one of the pioneers of physical education, along with GutsMuths and Jahn.

The book quite short and doesn’t talk about practical fundamentals, like what kind of skates to use. Still, it’s very interesting to compare with Robert Jones’s book from 18 years earlier.

Lunn’s Letters to Young Winter Sportsmen

Bev
Letters to Young Winter Sportsmen - Skiing, Skating and Curling - Lunn, Brian
The cover of the Home Farm Books reprint. Note the misused comma!

Young men planning to spend the winter at an Alpine resort (which lots of rich English people did back in the day) and get involved in winter sports while there are the intended audience of this book, which was published in 1927.

The book gives a good sense if what it was like to vacation at these Alpine resorts and of how excited people were about their winter sports. I particularly liked this paragraph:

If, later on, you wish to give yourself seriously to ski-ing, you should induce your father to send you for a few terms to the excellent university of Innsbruck, whence Kitzbühl, St. Anton, and many other smaller places can so easily be reached for the week-ends. In the days when the Austrian crown made living so cheap for the foreigner, I spent some months there working for an examination. One could have breakfast on the morning train to Kitzbühl, spend the day ski-ing there, and have dinner on the train in the evening, and a third-class ticket in Austria entitled you to the use of the restaurant car. I did not pass the examination that year.

Lunn, Letters, p. 14.

The book is mostly about skiing, but it does include a rather long chapter on figure skating by Humphry Cobb. Cobb also wrote the chapter on curling. In addition, Lunn’s wife wrote the chapters on skiing equipment and the first day, and Geoffrey Samuelson wrote the chapter on racing. This means just four of the nine chapters were actually written by Lunn!

While the book is addressed to young men, some comments are made indirectly to women by referring to the reader’s sister(s). Mrs. Lunn (who wrote the chapter on equipment) remarks,

…all of the foregoing applies to your sisters as well as to yourself—both sexes wear the same things [i.e., pants, not dresses] out ski-ing.

Lunn, Letters, p. 20.

In contrast, Cobb advised women to wear skirts while skating:

Clothes I will leave to you and your tailor. All I can say is let them be suitable, and please persuade your sister, if she is going to skate, to wear a skirt.

Lunn, Letters, p. 91.

Cobb focuses on the English style, which he recommends starting with. Once you’ve learned it, he adds,

if you have any reason or feel a yearning to become an International skater, by all means try it. It is an art and not a sport, or rather I should say, the element of sport is subservient to the artistry and appearance, and studied—often too studied—grace of the International skater.

Lunn, Letters, p. 89.

It’s interesting to see the English style (mainly combined figures) referred to as the more sporting of the two, while the International style (the flashy ancestor of today’s competitive skating) is considered an art instead.

Reference

Brian Lunn. 1927. Letters to Young Winter Sportsmen: Skiing, Skating, and Curling. Facsimile reprint by Home Farm Books, n.d.

Frostiana’s chapter on skating

Bev
The cover of my edition of Frostiana.

Frostiana is a book about various ice activities that was allegedly (but probably not literally) published on the ice during the last London Frost Fair in 1814. I put together an edition of it a few years ago.

The whole book is a collection of previous works, generally without citations. Today we call this plagiarism in academic circles. I added some citations, but not all, to my edition.

The last chapter of Frostiana is about skating. It’s a mix of several different sources, but I’ve just figured out that the main one for the chunks called “Origin of skating” and “Rules for learners” was the first Encyclopedia Britannica article on skating. It was included in volume 10 of the second edition, published in 1783. You can read it at the Internet Archive.

There’s one important difference between the original and the reprint that says something about how far knowledge of skating came between 1783 and 1814. The original says:

Although the ancients were remarkable for their dexterity in most of the athletic sports, yet skating seems to have been unknown to them. It may be looked on, therefore, as a modern invention; and probably derived its origin in Holland, where it naturally became habitual and necessary, not only as a graceful and elegant amusement, but as an expeditious mode of travelling when the lakes and canals were frozen up during winter.

Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 10, p. 9168

Frostiana says:

Although the ancients were remarkable for for their dexterity in most of the athletic sports, yet skating seems to have been unknown to them. According to the antiquaries, this exercise made its appearance in the thirteenth century. It probably derived its origin in Holland, where it was practised, not only as a graceful and elegant amusement, but as an expeditious mode of travelling when the lakes and canals were frozen up during winter.

Frostiana, p. 159

The thirteenth century still seems about right for the introduction of metal-bladed skates. The antiquaries made good progress!

Frostiana also cuts the paragraph bout the Edinburgh skating club and the article’s author:

The metropolis of Scotland has produced more instances of elegant skaters, than perhaps any other country whatever; and the institution of a Skating Club about 40 years ago, has contributed not a little to the improvement of this elegant amusement. We are indebted for this article to a gentleman of that Club, who has made the practice and improvement of skating his particular study; and as the nature of our work will not permit the insertion of a full treatise on skating, we shall give a few instructions which may be of use towards the attainment of the art.

Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 10, p. 9186

The date of the Edinburgh Skating Club’s founding has been unclear to skating historians for years. Here, it sounds like a member is putting it in the 1740s.

References

“Skating.” In Encyclopædia Britannica. 2nd ed., vol. 10. Edinburgh: J. Balfour et al., 1783

B. A. Thurber, ed. 2018. Frostiana: Or a History of the River Thames in a Frozen State. Evanston, IL: Skating History Press.

The Ferodowill skate holder

Bev1 Comment

On January 23, 1917, Joseph Henry Ferodowill of St. Paul, MN, was granted a patent for his skate holder. It’s basically two C clamps on a metal base, with some screws that make it adjustable.

Popular Mechanics Magazine, vol. 48, no. 4 (October, 1927), p. 160.

The advertisement says it’s good for “Lengthwise and Cross” grinding. The picture in the advertisement above looks like the wheel is set up for cross grinding.

I got one of these skate holders and used it to sharpen my Robert Jones skates. Once I’ve skated on them, I’ll post the results. I also sharpened a new pair of blades I’ve been working on. Here is a video of how I did it:

Sharpening skates with a Ferodowill skate holder

First, I used witness marks and adjusted the holder to align the blade.

Second, I used long, steady strokes to sharpen the blade.

This bench grinder has a 6″ wheel, which means I put a 3″ radius of hollow on the blades. Do not use this hollow for regular skating, it will not be satisfactory. But I’m interested in seeing whether it performs better than the totally-flat sharpening Robert Jones recommends.