Adventures in skating historiography
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,… Continue reading Bone skates and boats
I recently got hold of a copy of De Nederlandse glissen by H. W. Jacobi, thanks to some kind people in the Netherlands. It's a paper written for a course at the University of Amsterdam in 1976. This paper has gone viral (in the bone skates sense) despite its obscurity. It has been cited far… Continue reading H. W. Jacobi on bone skates
In August, 1878, A. Heneage Cocks visited Iceland and got a pair of bone skates. Here's the story as he told it to J. Romilly Allen: I noticed the bone skates hanging up in Kalderhohdi Farm on the Log River SW Iceland when putting up there in August 1878. I remember carefully concealing my feeling… Continue reading Kalderhohdi Farm
The first ice skates were made from the leg bones of animals. Skaters simply stood on them (tying them on was optional) and pushed themselves along with metal-tipped poles. The skater in the picture is using what seems to have been the most common technique: pushing with one pole between the legs. Two poles were… Continue reading Bone skates