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.
Arthur MacGregor is one of the heroes of bone skates studies. He proved that bone skates really were skates in 1975 by making a couple of pairs and skating on them. The next year, he published a really great review article. His dissertation Skeletal Materials presented the bigger picture. And then his book Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn put bone skates in the general context of bone tools. After that, he did a lot of work with the York Archaeological trust, including on bone skates, resulting in contributions to various volumes of The Archaeology of York.
His work on bone skates was so amazing because he was able to connect archaeology and ethnology. In 1991, he wrote
The fact that archaeology and ethnology had useful things to say to each other became obvious from the beginning of my interest in animal bones. Having gathered references to archaeological works which “proved” scientifically that certain polished bones from the early medieval period were used in leather working, I was fortunate to discover a more extensive and persuasive ethnological literature which showed the same objects to be ice-skates, in regular use in certain communities up to the present century.
Arthur MacGregor. 1975. “Problems in the Interpretation of Microscopic Wear Patterns: The Evidence from Bone Skates.” Journal of Archaeological Science 2: 385–390.
Arthur MacGregor. 1976. “Bone Skates: A Review of the Evidence.” Archaeological Journal 133: 57–74.
Arthur MacGregor. 1980.“Skeletal Materials: Their Structure, Technology and Utilisation c. A.D. 400–1200.” PhD diss., Durham University.
Arthur MacGregor. 1985. Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn: The Technology of Skeletal Materials since the Roman Period. London: Croom Helm.
Arthur MacGregor. 1991. “Bone, Antler and Horn: An Archaeological Perspective.” Journal of Museum Ethnography 2: 29–38.
People were still using bone skates in Sweden in the nineteenth century (see pp. 143–145 of my Skates Made of Bone).
Many people immigrated from Sweden to the midwestern United States in the nineteenth century.
This combination of facts had led me to wonder whether Swedish immigrants to the Midwest used bone skates in their new homeland. Based on my research so far, the answer seems to be “no.” Every time I’ve visited an archive or asked at a museum or historical society, the response has been one of helpful bewilderment. While Swedish immigrants are well-known, bone skates are unheard of.
If it’s true that they didn’t use bone skates, the next question is, why not? This is a good opening for more research. A few possibilities have occurred to me:
Bones were not readily available because the immigrants’ relationship to animals was different in the US. This could be related to farm vs. city life or poverty.
The parts of the US where they settled weren’t well-suited to skating. They could have been too snowy (Minnesota does get a lot of snow) or lacked good places to skate. This is questionable because I have found references to immigrants using metal-bladed skates.
Swedish immigrants tried to integrate themselves into American culture, which didn’t include bone skates.
The next step is to zoom in on the details to figure out what was happening on a smaller scale. I know of certain places in Sweden where people were still using bone skates—Småland and some of the other southern provinces, including the islands of Gotland and Öland. This is the blue area in the map. Further north, skiing was more popular because there was much more snow.
Sven T. Kjellberg. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In 1940, Sven T. Kjellberg published the results of his experiments on bone skates. He concluded that the bones he evaluated weren’t used as skates, but others could have been. I reached a different conclusion from his results.
Kjellberg took a pair of bone skates to a small pond in his neighborhood to try them out (pp. 76-77). Pushing with a pole in the usual manner, he was able to get going pretty well. The problem came when he reached the end of the pond. Turning on bone skates is extremely difficult, and he was only able to accomplish it by bending his knees inward and pressing on the insides of the skates. This, he reasoned, would produce noticeable wear on the bones—after just ten minutes, he could already see wear starting to appear. Skates subjected to more intense use would eventually become rounded on the inside.
To me, this seems more like a side effect of suboptimal experimental conditions. It seems more likely that bone skates were generally used in fairly straight lines—across lakes, for example. Olaus Magnus describes long-distance races on bone skates, and William fitz Stephen‘s skaters glided in straight lines toward each other while jousting.
Kjellberg’s other main point is that in Lund, where the bones he was examining were found, winter terrain would have consisted of many small skating areas, such as the spaces between dams along a river. Skaters would have had to walk along streets and other non-icy surfaces to get from one bit of ice to the next. This, he argues, would have left marks on their skates.
For today’s skaters, the response to this is simple: use skate guards. There is no evidence for guards for bone skates, and they don’t seem necessary. This situation could have encouraged skaters to simply not attach their skates to their feet. Tying bone skates on wasn’t necessary because skaters never lifted their feet from the ice. Unattached skates would have made it easy to reach the edge of one skating area, step off the skates, pick them up, carry them to the next skating area, put them down, step back on, and glide away. In this situation, bindings would have been more trouble than they were worth.
Kjellberg doesn’t rule out the use of bone skates as skates, but does say he doesn’t think the bones he was examining were skates because the wear patterns weren’t what he expected based on his experiments. I think more extensive experiments would have helped.
Reference
Sven T. Kjellberg (1940). “Gnida, mangla, och stryka.” Kulturens årsbok, 68-91.
My book on bone skates, Skates Made of Bone: A History, is finally out. My copy has arrived, and the publisher, McFarland, is filling orders. You can get it directly from them or from the bookstore of your choice.
Gösta Berg (1903–1993) was a Swedish ethnologist who worked on skating, skiing, and other winter activities. His writings include three papers on bone skates, written in three different languages over a period of nearly thirty years:
“Isläggar och skridskor” (Bone skates and metal-bladed skates), published in Swedish in 1943.
“Skier und Schlittschuhe: Zwei nordische Fortbewegunsmittel” (Skis and skates: Two nordic modes of travel), published in German in 1952.
“Skates and punt sleds: Some Scandinavian notes,” published in English in 1971.
Reading these three papers in order provides a view into how Berg’s ideas about bone skates evolved over time. Climate takes on progressively more significance in his work. The first paper mentions climate considerations briefly, the second expands on them, and the third begins with a discussion of climate and nails down the details. Berg (1971, p. 4) describes the necessary climate as one with cold winters, but little snow. This explains why bone skates finds are common in southern Sweden, but not in the north, where there is much more snow.
Berg’s papers are great resources on the use of bone skates in Sweden, but he did make two mistakes, which have propagated through the history of bone skates research:
Only children and beginners had to tie their skates on (Berg 1943, p. 82). This statement was refuted by Edberg & Karlsson (2016, p. 15), who noted that the smaller skates found at Birka and Sigtuna—the ones suitable for young children—had no attachment mechanism and were much less elaborately worked than the larger ones.
The races on bone skates described by Olaus Magnus were 5–8 km long (Berg 1943, p. 84). This seems to be the result of a mathematical error converting Olaus’s 8–12 Italian miles to kilometers. A more correct figure is the 12–18 km given by Fisher & Higgens (1996, p. 86). For more details, see my blog post.
Despite these mistakes, he made substantial contributions to the study of bone skates. He also did important work on other winter activities; skiing, skating on metal-bladed skates, and sledding are covered in these papers. And he wrote more extensively on skis elsewhere (see, e.g., Berg 1950). His page on the Swedish version of Wikipedia summarizes his broader accomplishments and memberships.
References
Gösta Berg, 1943. Isläggar och skridskor. Fataburen 1943:79-90.
Gösta Berg, 1950. Finds of skis from prehistoric time in Swedish bogs and marshes. Stockholm: Generalstabens litografiska anstalts förlag.
Gösta Berg, 1952. Skier und Schlittschuhe: Zwei nordische Fortbewegungsmittel. Tribus: Jahrbuch des Linden-Museums Stuttgart 2:188-195
Gösta Berg, 1971. Skates and punt sleds: Some Scandinavian notes. In Vriendenboek voor A. J. Bernet Kempers. Arnheim: Meertens en Plettenburg. Pp. 4-13.
R. Edberg & J. Karlsson. 2016. Bone skates and young people in Birka and Sigtuna. Fornvännen 111:7–16.
Olaus Magnus. 1996. Description of the Northern Peoples. Ed. P. G. Foote, trans. Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgens. London: Hakluyt Society.
In his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Description of the Northern Peoples), Olaus Magnus describes races on bone skates that are “8–12 Italian miles” long (p. 42). The question is, how long is that?
The header for Olaus Magnus’s chapter on skating races. Someone on bone skates is in the upper left. Source: Magnus 1555, p. 42.
The Italian mile is probably pretty close to a modern mile. It’s thought to be based on the Roman mile (1000 paces), but there was a lot of variation from place to place. The general value Wikipedia gives is 1820 meters. A modern mile is 1600 m.
To calculate how long the races were, take 8–12 Italian miles and multiply by however many kilometers you think there were per Italian mile. Using Wikipedia’s value of 1.82 gives about 15–22 km or 9–14 modern miles.
Fisher and Higgens give the value 12–18 km in a footnote to their translation of Olaus Magnus (p. 86). That’s what you get when you use the modern value of 1.6 km per mile.
The value 8–12 km was calculated by Gösta Berg back in 1943 (p. 84) and has made its way into the literature on bone skates. I think he made a math error, because that’s what you get when you divide instead of multiplying.
The answer is, it depends on how long an Italian mile was in the sixteenth century. Since units of measurement weren’t standardized, it’s hard to say for sure. But it’s clear that the races were pretty long, probably in the 15–18 km range or around 10 miles
References
Gösta Berg (1943). “Isläggar och skridskor.” Fataburen, pp. 79–90.
Olaus Magnus (1555). Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus. Rome: J. M. de Viottis.
Olaus Magnus (1996). Description of the Northern Peoples. Ed. P. G. Foote, trans. Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgens. London: Hakluyt Society.
My book on bone skates is available for pre-order! You can get it directly from the publisher, McFarland, from Amazon, or from whatever bookstore you like best.
This book is the result of nearly 20 years of research, though there were many distractions during that time, some of them quite substantial—like a PhD in an unrelated field. The first book-length study of bone skates, it brings together literary and archaeological evidence to provide a comprehensive description of how bone skates were made and used and fits them into the larger context of European history.
The Lödöse Museum in Sweden hosts an annual skating event—on bone skates! This year, the skating is scheduled for February 11 from 1 to 3 PM; the details are here (in Swedish).
Skating on bones in Lödöse, Sweden. Photograph courtesy of Marie Schmidt, Lödöse Museum.
There are videos of previous years’ skating events on the museum’s Facebook page. They are quite interesting to watch. The skating is done on synthetic ice (unless the weather is cold enough for natural ice to form), and the children don’t get to use metal-tipped poles for safety reasons. Out of necessity, they’ve figured out how to push with their feet on bone skates, and some even learned to spin on them.
Spinning on bone skates is easy on smooth ice in an indoor ice rink, with a pole. All you have to do is give a good hard push around and stand up straight. The skates have very little friction and spin quite easily once they get going. In fact, Formenti and Minetti showed that bone skates had less friction than metal-bladed skates for about five hundred years after metal-bladed skates were invented (1826).
The written descriptions of bone skates don’t mention tricks like this. Skaters seem to have focused on speed over style, but surely some enthusiastic medieval or early modern skaters figured out how to spin on bones. Edberg and Karlsson found that longer skates were more likely to have holes for attaching them to the skaters’ feet at two sites in medieval Sweden. They think this means older, more experienced skaters “may have had more challenging excursions in mind” (50). Could they have needed the extra control provided by bindings for spinning or doing other tricks? What other tricks might they have been doing?
References
Rune Edberg and Johnny Karlsson. 2015. Isläggar från Birka och Sigtuna. En undersökning av ett vikingatida och medeltida fyndmaterial. Stockholm Archaeological Reports 43. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet.
Federico Formenti and Alberto E. Minetti. 2007. “Human locomotion on ice: the evolution of ice-skating energetics through history.” The Journal of Experimental Biology 210:1825-1833.
I just ran across an interesting bone skate in the Swedish History Museum’s catalog. It’s listed as having possible boat-like carvings. You can see them if you look carefully at the picture: right about the middle of the bone, just above the number written on it, there are some curved scratches.
Photograph by Ola Myrin, courtesy of the Swedish History Museum. Reproduced here under the terms of its Creative Commons 2.5 license. No changes were made to the image.
Are these scratches an intentional representation of a boat? It’s possible, and this skate would be quite interesting if they are. In that case, this skate becomes a tangible piece of evidence for the link between bone skates and boats in Norse mythology.
In Saxo Grammaticus’s History of the Danesand Olaus Magnus’s Description of the Northern Peoples, the Norse god Ullr (or Ollerus, as Olaus Magnus calls him) has a magic bone inscribed with runes that he uses to cross the sea as fast as he could in a boat. The magic bone sounds like a bone skate, as long as the sea is frozen. Olaus Magnus’s illustrator seems to have been a little confused on this point, because his depiction makes it look more like a surfboard.
Ullr on his magic bone. From Olaus Magnus (1555:122).
References
Olaus Magnus. 1555. Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus. Rome: n.p.
