Category: Metal skates

Gösta Berg

Bev
Gösta Berg in 1945. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Reconstructing the Amsterdam skate, part 1

Bev2 Comments

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.

The Amsterdam skate, sourced from Schaatshistorie.nl.

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.

Skate sharpening 100 years ago

Bev1 Comment

I recently ran across an explanation of how to sharpen skates from March, 1919—just over 100 years ago.

Don’t try to draw file at first, … Cut right across the runner first, filing in the usual manner and watching closely the file marks, see that they do not cut down over the corner of the runner. In this manner work down the entire length of [the] runner until all the rounded corner has removed; then take the file in both hands and draw file all the cross marks off. This will enable you to see exactly what you doing to the skate runner; show where to file and where not to.

Perhaps it may be well to file and then draw file two or three times in succession before the skate has been sharpened to suit. By working alternately thus the skate runner can be brought down to a straight or slightly curved bottom, with square, sharp corners, so much desired in skates to enable the skate to `bite’ the ice. The skate may be grooved with a round file if desirable, but skates so grooved, while good for beginners, are not capable of making as much as when worked off flat on the bottom.

Hobart 1919, 12.

I think it’s interesting that hollow grinding, which is so important to skaters today, was considered only suitable for beginners. This goes all the way back to Robert Jones, who says “fluted skates” are “so bad, that they are not fit to be used” (37). Today, only speed skaters have their skates sharpened flat across the bottom.

Hobart continues with a little more advice:

…when you can sharpen skates with a file you may regard them as not being first class skates The runners of really good skates are so hard a file will not touch them and the sharpening must be done with a grinding wheel of emery, carborundum or something similar. But you can use the same method of alternate cross and lengthwise grinding so as to ‘see what you are doing’ to the runner, and not to grind off too much at one place and little at another.

Ibid.

Using a grinding wheel is the modern technique, but cross grinding (grinding with the wheel perpendicular to the blade instead of parallel to it) is generally frowned upon because most cross-grinding wheels are of a very large diameter. Cross-grinding makes the blade’s radius of hollow equal to the radius of the grinding wheel—something like 5 inches—which is generally not what modern skaters want. The parallel grinding wheel then puts the right radius of hollow on the blade. This process takes off a lot of metal, which shortens the life of the blade. But if the grinding wheel has the radius of hollow you want (and back then, people wanted large ones), it’s less of a problem.

References

James F. Hobart. 1919. “In a Clay County Smith Shop: An Article about a Blacksmith Who Didn’t Want to Do Automobile Repair Work Because it Interfered with His Regular Business.” The Blacksmith and Wheelwright 79.3:10–12.

R. Jones and W. E. Cormack. 2017. A Treatise on Skating. Edited by B. A. Thurber. Evanston, IL: Skating History Press.

Skate sharpening basics

Bev8 Comments

This is the anchor for a series of posts about skate sharpening.

When you get your skates sharpened, the skate technician passes your blade across a grinding wheel in a sharpening machine. In most machines, the grinding wheel is parallel to the skate blade, like it is in this video:

The video mentions dressing the wheel. This means that, before the skate is sharpened, the edge of the wheel is shaped to a portion of a circle with the desired radius. This is called the radius of hollow. About half an inch is common for both freestyle and hockey. Figure (i.e., patch) hollows start at an inch and go up from there. A larger radius of hollow produces a shallower groove on bottom of the blade that feels less sharp. A smaller radius of hollow produces a deeper groove that feels sharper.

Patch skates, which have a shallow hollow, feel very dull and tend to skid, but glide very well and produce few flats (double lines, which occur when both edges touch the ice). This is desirable behavior for figures. Freestyle skaters prefer a deeper radius of hollow, which lets them grip the ice better, making it easier to land jumps and do other tricks.

The optimal radius of hollow depends on the skater’s size (a larger skater should use a shallower hollow) and the ice conditions (a deeper hollow is better for harder ice). The width of the blade also makes a difference. Ice dancers with dance blades generally prefer a smaller radius of hollow (typically 3/8″) because dance blades are narrower than freestyle and patch blades. The narrowness of the blade means a deeper hollow is necessary to get the same bite angle, which is what you feel when you skate. It’s the angle at which the edge hits the ice.

A seemingly small difference of 1/16″ in the radius of hollow can make a big difference in how the blade feels. When you can’t stop after getting your skates sharpened, it may be because the radius of hollow is just a little smaller than what you’re used to. If your blades still feel dull, it’s possible the radius of hollow is a little larger. Or your edges could be uneven.

As the person in the video notes, it’s important for the sharpener to align the blade so that the hollow is centered. If it’s not, the edges will be uneven and have different bite angles. When this happens, your skates may feel ok at first, but soon you’ll be skidding off one edge while the other grips the ice very hard. You can check the levelness of your edges by holding the skate upside down and putting a quarter or other flat object across the blade. If it’s perpendicular to the blade, your edges are level. If it tilts, you need to get your blade fixed. There are also special tools, like this one, for measuring edge levelness.

Next time you get your skates sharpened, ask what radius of hollow your sharpener uses. Then, you can keep asking for that number to make sure you get the same thing every time. Or, you can try changing it to see what works best for you. If you want to really get into the details, read Sid Broadbent’s Skateology: A Technical Manual for Skaters Regarding Skates, Skating Fundamentals, Skate Sharpening. It’s available on his website.

Skate sharpening has changed over time, and future posts will focus on different aspects of sharpening. The radius of hollow needed its own post because it’s so important.

Medieval toe picks

Bev1 Comment

The writers of skating history have awarded Jackson Haines credit for inventing the toe pick in the nineteenth century. They must not have known about the prikschaats (prick-skate). This type of skate features an iron blade with a spike at the toe. It’s not quite like a modern toe pick, being a single spike rather than a set of small teeth, but it’s definitely along those lines.

The prikschaats dates to around 1300–1500. Two have been found so far, one in the Hague and one in Rotterdam. It’s also featured in the manuscript image I described in a previous post, and, if you look carefully, one of Lydwina’s companions might be wearing one in the picture of her accident.

Modern toe picks are for jumping. It’s considered bad form to use them to stop in figure skating (which only works if you’re going backwards anyway), and only beginners use them to push (“toe-pushing” is trained out of beginning skaters early on). I’m not convinced that people were jumping in the Middle Ages. I think it probably represents the shift from pole-pushing to foot-pushing. When they used bone skates, skaters had to push themselves along with a pole. The earliest metal-bladed skates don’t have toe picks, and Niko Mulder has argued that they were propelled with a pole, just like bone skates.

The picture in Douce 5, the manuscript from my earlier post, shows someone skating without a pole, but with prikschaatsen. Maybe early skaters decided to move the point from the pole to the skate so that they could push with their toes. Eventually, they learned that pushing from the side of the blade works even better.

Reference

Niko Mulder. 2008. Ten IJse (2)—Schaatsles voor graaf Floris. Kouwe Drukte 12.34:18–23.

The first picture of metal-bladed skates

Bev1 Comment

It’s not the famous woodcut of Lydwina’s accident from 1498. Check out this image from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 5. (I can’t post the image here because of copyright restrictions.)

This picture is from a Flemish manuscript that’s around 170 years older than the famous woodcut. It’s a calendar, and the February page shows two kids at the bottom. The one on the left is sliding on a mandibular sled, and the one on the right is ice skating—on metal-bladed skates! You can tell because he or she is not using a pole. Look carefully at the toes of the skates, and you might even see toe picks.

This picture hasn’t made its way into histories of skating yet (except my edition of Fowler, which mentions it in the commentary), but it has been known to archaeologists studying skating for years. It’s included in Randall (1966). MacGregor (1985:146) mentions the sled on the left, but not the skater, perhaps because he was only interested in bones. Küchelmann and Zidarov (2005) bring it into contemporary skating history in their paper on bone skates.

References

G. Herbert Fowler. 1892. On the Outside Edge: Being Diversions in the History of Skating. London: Horace Cox.

Hans Christian Küchelmann and Petar Zidarov. 2005. “Let’s skate together! Skating on bones in the past and today.” In From Hooves to Horns, from Mollusc to Mammoth: Manufacture and Use of Bone Artefacts from Prehistoric Times to the Present, Proceedings of the 4th Meeting of the ICAZ Worked Bone Research Group at Tallinn, 26th–31st of August 2003, ed. H. Luik, A. M. Choyke, C. Batey, and L. Löugas, pp. 425–445. Tallinn: Ajaloo Instituut.

Arthur MacGregor. 1985. Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn: The Technology of Skeletal Materials Since the Roman Period. London: Croom Helm.

Lillian M. C. Randall. 1966. Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts. Berkeley: University of California Press.

AD 200

Bev

Many books and articles on skating history (I won’t name names) state that metal-bladed skates first appeared in Scandinavia in about AD 200 without citing any evidence, except maybe the claim that Old Norse literature mentions them.

I haven’t been able to find anything to support this statement. There wasn’t any Old Norse literature at that time (Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda, lived around 1000 years later; Codex Regius, the manuscript containing the Poetic Edda, was written around the same time). There are runic inscriptions from around 200, but they say things like “I, Hlewagistiz of Holt, made the horn” that are not really helpful for skating history.

The oldest evidence for metal-bladed skates that I’ve been able to find so far is  described in an article by Olaf Goubitz. It is a skate excavated in the Netherlands  that dates to the thirteenth century, which is about 1000 years later than the supposed first skate.

So where did the AD 200 date come from?

The earliest reference to it that I’ve found is in Vandervell & Witham’s A System of Figure Skating. This was a very well-known book in the late nineteenth century, and it includes a short piece on skating history, translated from Swedish, at the beginning. They “subjoin a translation, merely premising that it fixes the  introduction of the iron skate at two hundred years after the birth of Christ” (2). There’s the date. But here’s what the translated-from-Swedish text actually says:

“The origin of skates in their present form of a wooden shoe with iron runners cannot be reckoned further back than the so-called Iron Age or about two hundred years after the birth of Christ, because iron first came into general use then throughout the North.” (2)

This means that metal-bladed skates couldn’t have been made before AD 200 because people didn’t have iron until then. There’s no evidence that skates were the first thing people made from iron.

References

Olaf Goubitz. 2000. “Nederland’s oudste schaats?” Kouwe Drukte 3.9:4–5.

Henry Eugene Vandervell & T. Maxwell Witham. 1880. A System of Figure Skating: Being the Theory and Practice of the Art as Developed in England, with a Glance at its Origin and History. 3rd ed. London: Horace Cox.