Author: Bev

The oldest skating art (again)

Bev1 Comment

The dates of the Hieronymus Bosch paintings in my previous post aren’t quite clear—there’s a range of 10–20 years for each. I found it interesting that the early ends of these ranges are actually earlier than the woodcut of St. Lydwina’s accident, which often gets the credit for being “[t]he first depiction of ice skating in a work of art.” That woodcut was published in Johannes Brugman’s Vita alme virginis liidwine in 1498. Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings could have been slightly earlier!

The famous woodcut of St. Lydwina’s fall. Courtesy Wikimedia commons.

But it doesn’t matter which of these images is the oldest by a year or two, because there’s another image that beats them all. The drawing below is part of a manuscript produced in Ghent about 1320. And now the license has changed so I can reproduce it here!

Drawing from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 5. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. I cropped it for this post.

Skating in the art of Hieronymus Bosch

Bev1 Comment

I’ve found two instances of skating in Hieronymus Bosch‘s paintings. Note that they are all using snavelschaatsen!

The Garden of Earthly Delights

This triptych was probably painted between 1495 and 1505. Skating appears in the panel representing Hell.

Courtesy of Wikimedia commons.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony

There’s a messenger bird skating in the lower right corner of the leftmost panel of this triptych, which dates to between 1495 and 1515 (or thereabouts).

Courtesy of Wikimedia commons.

My new snavelschaatsen

Bev2 Comments

Yesterday I put the finishing touches on my snavelschaatsen. I started them back around the end of February or the beginning of March, so it took me about 9 months to make them, start to finish.

My finished snavelschaatsen.

These skates are based on a couple of Hieronymus Bosch paintings and some archaeological finds. The style is about 500 years old.

Skating on snavelschaatsen in the Hell panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1495–1505). Courtesy of Wikimedia commons.

To make them, I used an assortment of modern hand and power tools at CIADC. The blades are forged from 3/8″ mild steel bar stock and filed flat by hand. I cut the outline of the wooden footstock with a table saw, then moved to a table router, a bandsaw and a belt sander for the larger details. The smallest details were hand-carved with a chisel. I used a drill press for both the holes for straps and the hole to put a screw through the metal part at the heel. There are more strap-holes than any of the paintings or finds show because I want to try out some different strap configurations and hole positions. I finished them with couple of coats of polyurethane on the wood part and a layer of paste wax on the metal blade, except the part that’s going to contact the ice, which I left bare.

The skates in progress, as of June 2, 2021.

The really interesting thing about them is that they are the first skate model that required edge-pushing. With the earliest metal-bladed skates, it wasn’t clear whether skaters were pushing with their feet or sticking to poles, as they did with bone skates. With prikschaatsen (spiked skates), skaters could have pushed with their toes. By this point, it’s clear that skaters were pushing with their feet. The long neck on these skates would have made it impossible to toe-push.

I’ll write more about them once I’ve tried them out. I also need to make the long-toed shoes that were popular back then for the most realistic experience.

Bibliography

Niko Mulder. 2009. “Ten IJse 5—Snavelschaats volgt de mode op de voet.” Kouwe Drukte 13 (37): 32–34.

Hans van der Donck. 2011. “Schaatsen uit een Delftse beerput.” Kouwe Drukte 15 (42): 22–25.

Wim Molenveld and Frits Locher. 2011. “Oude schaatsijzers, bodemvondsten uit Haarlem.” Kouwe Drukte 15 (43): 11–13.

Hans van der Donck, Niko Mulder, and Kurt Cerstiaens. 2012. “Westlands houtje.” Kouwe Drukte 16 (46): 12–13.

The 1893 European championship

Bev

The International Skating Union (ISU) was founded in 1892 and held its first official competition in 1893—the European championship in Berlin. The speed skating events went well. The figure skating event began the tradition of judging controversies.

The problem was figuring out whether Eduard Engelmann or Henning Grenander won. Engelmann had won the previous year, before the ISU took charge. An article published a few days later in The Field summarized the events:

From The Field, January 28, 1893, p. 111. Courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive.

This article ignored the systemic problem underlying the controversy: how do you add up the judges scores?

An article by Carl Fillunger published the next day in the Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung gives full details of the scores.

From Carl Fillunger, “Zur Aufklärung,” Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung, January 29, 1893, p. 105. Courtsey of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

The problem is that some of the judges gave the skaters half points. Engelmann got 1987 points plus 4 half-points. Grenander got 1988 points plus 2 half-points. If you round the half-points down, Grenander wins. If you keep them as half-points, there’s a tie (and Engelmann wins because the figures break the tie). If you round up, Engelmann wins.

Fillunger proposed counting the half-points as half-points and gives the title to Grenander. Instead, the ISU declared the competition invalid. But 77 years later, when the ISU published 75 Years of European and World’s Championships in Figure Skating, they gave Engelmann the title—with a footnote invalidating it and the results calculated using ordinals instead of points.

References

Carl Fillunger, “Zur Aufklärung,” Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung, January 29, 1893, 105.

“The figure-skating championship,” The Field, January 28, 1893, 111.

International Skating Union. 1970. 75 Years of European and World’s Championships in Figure Skating. Results in Figure Skating. Davos, Switzerland: International Skating Union.

Goose poop in the smithy

Bev

In the first printed book on metallurgy, the Pirotechnia, Vannoccio Biringuccio describes a process for purifying iron used “outside Christendom”:

They say that the file it, knead it with a certain meal, make little cakes of it, and feed these to geese. They collect the dung of these geese when they wish, shrink it with fire, and convert it into steel. I do not much believe this.

Biringuccio [1540], 70

Biringuccio’s skepticism sounds quite reasonable, but the same process is described in Þiðreks saga af Bern (The Saga of Didrik of Bern). Weland (also called Wayland, a smith well known in Germanic mythology) uses it to produce a very special sword:

Weland went to the smithy. He broke the sword into pieces, then filed it as finely as he could and mixed it with flour. Then he took geese and starved them for three days and then gave it to them to eat. He cleaned their droppings, and took the steel that the geese had not digested and beat it together and made a sword that was much smaller than the last one.

Cumpstey 2017, 50

Cumpstey’s translation is based on the Swedish version found in a manuscript from around 1500—pretty close to Biringuccio’s time. There’s also an Old Norse version that was written down in the 13th century (Cumpstey 2017, viii). It tells the same story:

Nv tekr hann svartit oc blandar við miol. oc þa tekr hann alifugla oc sveltir þria daga oc þa tecr hann miolet oc gefr fvglonvm at eta. þa tecr hann savr fvglana oc lætr coma i afl oc fellir oc vellr nv or iarnino alt þat er deigt var i. Oc þar af gerir hann eitt sverð och er þetta minn en hit fyRra.

Bertelsen 1905, 98–99

Does this have implications for early metal-bladed skates? I doubt such a complex process was considered necessary. The earliest metal-bladed skates were relatively small, which suggests to me that they followed bone skates in being primarily for children. Weland’s sword is an amazing one.

I wonder if Þiðreks saga is where Biringuccio got the idea from.

References

Henrik Bertelsen. 1905. Þiðriks saga af Bern. Vol. 1. Copenhagen: S. L. Møllers bogtrykkeri.

Vannoccio Biringuccio. 1966 (1540). Pirotechnia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Iam Cumpstey, trans. 2017. The Saga of Didrik of Bern. Cumbria: Skadi Press.

New publications

Bev

I haven’t been writing much here lately, but some new things are up on Schaatshistorie.nl:

And my article on the figures events at ISI Worlds last summer, “Figuring it out at 2020ne Worlds,” just appeared in Recreational Ice Skating. They haven’t posted the Fall 2021 issue yet, but maybe they will have by the time you read this. It’s on pages 23–24.

Fluted skates

Bev

Early skating authors had a lot of bad things to say about deep hollows on ice skates.

I have said nothing of those skates whose surfaces are grooved, and are commonly called fluted skates, because I think their construction is so bad, that they are not fit to be used; in fact, they are so generally disapproved of, that I shall dispense with explaining their defects.

…

Ladies’ Skates should be fluted.

Jones [1772], 37, 95

Fluted skates, if at all useful, are only fit for boys, and should not be used by moderately weighty persons, or those who are heavier than boys of thirteen usually are, as the sharp edges cutting too easily into the ice, prevent the possibility of figurings; indeed these skates are even dangerous, for the ice cuttings, collecting, and hardening in the grooves, raise the skater from the edge of his skates, and thereby endanger his balance.

Williams 1843, 113

The feeling of “sharp edges cutting too easily into the ice” is familiar to everyone who has ever had the skates’ radius of hollow suddenly decreased, intentionally or not.

I do not recommend fluted skates, or those with a groove or channel along the bottom of the steel. They certainly take an easier hold of the ice than the ordinary kind, but they can only be worn by light weights, and, in any case, are treacherous servants. The tiny shavings of ice which are cut up by the edge are sure to collect in the groove, where they become impacted into a solid mass which can hardly be cut with a knife. By degrees the groove is filled up, and, lastly, the compressed ice projects beyond the steel, and causes inevitable falls. Many a person has fallen repeatedly without any apparent cause, and has only regained the use of his skates when the groove has been cleared with a strong knife. This habit of the skate is termed ‘balling.’

“On the Ice” 1863, 17

Walsh (1877) gives a good description of how skates were sharpened using a grinding wheel. The grinding wheel does not produce a flat cross-section; instead, the blade’s curvature from edge to edge matches the radius of the grinding wheel:

The Skate-Blade was formerly fluted to prevent supposed lateral slipping, but this fluting is quite unnecessary and is now obsolete, the concavity given to the skate-blade by grinding it on the lap at right angles to the length of the blade being more than sufficient to ensure the cutting edge holding the ice without slipping laterally. The blade of the skate should be no deeper than will ensure a curve being made without the edge of the boot, to which the skate is attached, touching the ice.

Walsh 1877, 726

Today, figure skaters use much deeper hollows. It’s even reasonable to say that all today’s figure skates are fluted, but skaters don’t seem to have problems with ice balling up in their blades. What happened?

References

Robert Jones. 2017 (1772). A Treatise on Skating. Edited by B. A. Thurber. Evanston, IL: Skating History Press.

“On the Ice.” 1863. London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for Hours of Relaxation 3: 11–18.

Stonehenge. 1877. British Rural Sports: Comprising Shooting, Hunting, Coursing, Fishing, Hawking, Racing, Boating, and Pedestrianism, with All Rural Games and Amusements. 13th ed. London: Frederick Warne and Co.

J. L. Williams. 1843. The Boy’s Own Book: A Compendium of All the Sports and Recreations of Youth. Paris: Baudry’s European Library.

English skating and national identity

Bev1 Comment

My article on English skating just came out! Here’s the citation:

Thurber, B.A. 2021. “The English Style: Figure Skating, Gender, and National Identity.” Sport History Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1123/shr.2020-0023.

Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century, a unique style of figure skating developed in Great Britain. This style emphasized long, flowing glides at high speed with a stiff, upright body posture. It contrasted with the International style, a type of skating developed on the Continent that favored brisk limb movements and showy tricks, such as jumps and spins. English skaters saw the International style as effeminate, while their own represented their idea of masculinity and allowed them to express their national identity. After the founding of the International Skating Union in 1892, British skaters found it necessary to adopt the International style to be competitive. Women proved better able to do so than men, and Madge Syers won the gold in the 1908 Olympics. Over time, the process of transnational exchange enacted through international competition resulted in the near-disappearance of the English style.

Bone skates and keywords

Bev

I used Gephi to make a graph of all the keywords connected to bone skates in the WBRG reference database.

Graph generated using Gephi.

Most of the results aren’t very surprising. Of course bone skates are strongly linked to worked bone, bone, Europe, and the Middle Ages (1000–1500).

More surprising are the links to North America and to whales (Cetacea), found in references 1553 and 3705, which have to do with indigenous people in the Arctic. Molluscs and some of the other surprising keywords are connected via general works covering a range of objects, not just skates.

Some other interesting references linked to bone skates are numbers 1353 and 852.