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 otherreconstructedskates, 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!
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!
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).
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.
Last week I visited the statue of Leif Erikson in St. Paul, MN. Leif is known for discovering North America around 1000 CE. His exploits are described in Grœnlendinga saga (The Saga of the Greenlanders) and Eiriks saga rauða (The Saga of Erik the Red).
The Leif Erikson statue in St. Paul.
I was interested in his hat. Look closely and you’ll see that it has wings. The wings reminded me of Hermes/Mercury’s winged helmet in Greco/Roman mythology. Mercury is known for having a winged helmet and/or shoes, which explains how he was able to travel so fast.
I’ve already written about the connection between skating and winged shoes. In a tenth-century manuscript of the Aeneid, Mercury’s winged shoes (talaria in Latin) are glossed by scritscos, the ancestor of the German word for ice skates (Gallée, 162). Variations on this term are also used to gloss the word petasus, which is a type of hat. Somehow it seems to have gotten mixed up with shoes, though, because Notker, a Benedictine monk whose writings represent the end of Old High German, wrote
(Petasum means, especially to the Greeks, the winged shoe of Mercury)
Piper 1882: I.701
Somehow Mercury’s winged clothing got mixed up with ice skates. That is how the Leif Erikson statue in St. Paul is connected to ice skating.
Update: Gordon Campbell has something to say about Leif’s hat:
In the second half of the nineteenth century, horned and winged helmets became the distinguishing feature of these Vikings of the imagination, all of whom were of course male. … The Norse wore helmets when conducting raids, but the helmets were smooth so that they could deflect a sword blow; a horned helmet would catch a sword blade, and allow the helmet (and the head) to be removed.
Campbell 2021, 26–27.
References
G. Campbell. 2021. Norse America: The Story of a Founding Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prikschaats is the Dutch name for a type of medieval skate that includes a spike at the toe. It translates to “prick-skate.” I’ve already written about prikschaatsenhere and here. I also made a pair.
My prikschaatsen.
I made them out of part of a regular old 2×4 and some 3/8″ square bar stock (mild steel). The methods I used weren’t entirely historically accurate. The ordinary power tools and propane forge were analogous to medieval methods—the same workflow, with less soot and exercise. But I did use electric welding, which was definitely not available 500+ years ago, to attach the toe picks.
I’ve skated on them and they do work. After a bit of practice, I was able to skate by pushing with the toe picks. Since the blades are wide and flat (not hollow-ground like modern figure and hockey skates), they tend to slide sideways, which makes it difficult to push off an edge like modern skaters do. Skating on them feels more like walking than skating on modern skates does. For an intermediate step between pole-pushing and edge-pushing, this seems quite reasonable.
I finished putting the wood and metal parts together by scoring the end of the blade with a band saw, putting the skate in a vice, and hammering away. The wood part cracked a bit, but some glue fixed it well enough. Next time, harder wood and a thicker footbed are called for. The archaeological specimens are made from poplar and alder, which are both somewhat harder than the pine I used.
Once they were done, I tried them out on the ice. For boots, I used an old pair of Harlicks (not historically accurate, but quite practical). I tied them on with hockey skate laces.
The first skaters to use metal-bladed skates would have been familiar with bone skates and pole-pushing, not the foot-pushing technique used with modern skates, so pole-pushing seemed like a good way to begin. Pole-pushing works just fine.
Foot-pushing doesn’t really work. The skates feel like they don’t have edges—they don’t bite the ice when I try to push like modern skates do. The bottom of the metal runner is pretty flat, which I think is probably historically accurate.
These skates have more friction than bone skates, but also corner much, much better and feel more stable to stand still on. They’re less likely to slide out from under me when I’m not trying to slide anywhere.
This is a follow-up to my post on the Amsterdam skate, a skate dating to c. 1225 that was found in Amsterdam. In that post, I wrote about making the metal part. The skate also has a wood part, which this post is about.
Unfortunately, the wood part didn’t really survive its centuries in the ground, as you can see in this picture. I used the pictures of the Dordrecht skate to get a better idea of how it might have looked. And I tried to make it simple but structurally sound.
I ended up with a two-part design: a flat area for the foot and a block of wood to hold the blade. For wood, I used the leftover bits of a two-by-four. Pine lumber is not historically accurate (the skates were actually made from poplar and alder (Blauw 2001, p. 57)), but is easy to work with.
I used a band saw to cut out the footbed, which was inspired by my Buddy Snow Skate and the shape of my foot. The bottom piece, which held the blade, is a block from the remaining part of the two-by-four with a 3/8″-wide groove routed into the bottom for the blade to fit into and a bit of shaping done with hand tools. The holes for laces are just shallow cuts made with the table saw.
Reconstructed Amsterdam skates: wooden footbed and metal blade.
I glued the two pieces together with standard wood glue. To avoid water damage, I finished the skates with a modern lacquer.
Next, I have to grind the blade so it’s nice and shiny (and sharp!) and put the metal and wood parts together permanently. Then I can try them out on the ice.
Reference
Wiebe Blauw. 2001. Van Glis tot Klapschaats. Franeker: van Wijnen.
One of the oldest metal-bladed skates found to date was found in Amsterdam. It dates to around 1240 and consists of a metal bar wrapped around a chunk of wood. More about the skate, including pictures, can be found on schaatshistorie.nl. I’m working on reconstructing it using the equipment at CIADC. This post is about making the blade.
Based on the pictures, it looked to me like the blade was about one square centimeter, so I started with a piece of 3/8″ bar stock. I stuck it in the forge to heat it up and then, pounded away to get it into the shape shown in the pictures.
Bar stock in the forge.The heated skate blade, ready for shaping.Mostly finished. When I’ve made the wood part, I’ll finish up the heel (left) end and grind the whole thing smooth.
Making the blades turned out to be very easy despite my lack of experience. It makes me wonder whether the Amsterdam skate could have been made by an apprentice. It’s quite small—only about 20 cm long—and children are known to have made their own bone skates. Making metal blades would have been more difficult 800 years ago, because the nice bar stock that’s readily available today didn’t exist back then. The most difficult part was probably shaping the metal into the bar that was bent into the blade.
Next, I need to make the wooden base that connects the metal blade and the skater’s shoe. That will be part 2.
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.
