Tag: bone skates

How long were the races?

Bev1 Comment

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.

Skates Made of Bone

Bev

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.

The cover. Sourced from McFarland.

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.

Skating party in Lödöse

Bev

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.

H. W. Jacobi on bone skates

Bev

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 more times than you’d expect for a student project (which is not at all).

Jacobi catalogs the bone skates in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden and the Groninger Museum, plus five from other places. The 160 artifacts that make it through the identification process (based on their shapes and wear patterns) are then classified into ten groups, which Wiebe Blau has summarized. An eleventh group, containing 20 artifacts, is for sled runners. Unfortunately, none of these skates are dated, or at least, Jacobi doesn’t provide dates for them. General periods in which bone skates were used in the Netherlands (from the 7th to 14th century at different places) are given, but that’s all.

Jacobi completes the project by making three pairs of bone skates and experimenting with them. The experiments are pretty similar to ones conducted by other archaeologists, most notably Arthur MacGregor at about the same time and Hans Christian Küchelmann and Petar Zidarov more recently. The most interesting difference is that Jacobi didn’t use a pole to push for fear of messing up the ice. Instead, Jacobi’s brother was responsible for propulsion: he (wearing his  modern skates) pushed Jacobi around the ice. Surprisingly, Jacobi was able to steer on bone skates. Nobody else has been able to do this, with disastrous results: In 1915, Antti Juvel, a 75-year-old Finn, reported that

if there was open water ahead, you had no choice but going into it, for it would be too dangerous to fall on the ice in such a great speed and turning was impossible.

Antti Juvel, translated by Auli Touronen and quoted in Küchelmann & Zidarov (2005:437)

Overall, Jacobi’s work is quite short (only 20 pages plus figures) but excellent for a student project. It remains the only detailed summary of the bone skates in these museum collections. However, better general sources on bone skates are available now and have been since Jacobi’s paper was finished—Arthur MacGregor’s two articles came out at about the same time, and he remains one of the heroes of bone skates.

References

Arthur MacGregor. 1976. “Bone Skates: A Review of the Evidence.” Archaeological Journal 133: 57–74.

Arthur MacGregor. 1975. “Problems in the Interpretation of Microscopic Wear Patterns: The Evidence from Bone Skates.” Journal of Archaeological Science 2: 385–390.

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.


Kalderhohdi Farm

Bev

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 of excitement when I saw what they were and the mutual satisfaction of the boy to whom they belonged and myself when they changed owners for the consideration of 20 ore (3d). (Allen 1896, 33–35)

I’ve already told you about bone skates. Today’s burning question is, “Where is Kalderhohdi Farm?”

I couldn’t find it. I think Cocks and Balfour, or perhaps the editor of the Reliquary and Illustrated Archaeologist, got it wrong. “Kalderhohdi” is pretty similar to “Kaldárhöfði”—similar enough that it might be what someone who doesn’t speak Icelandic heard. Plus, Kaldárhöfði Farm actually existed at the end of the nineteenth century! It’s even in the right area—southwestern Iceland—and close to a river, though the river is called Ölfusá; I haven’t figured the Log River out yet.

Frederick W. W. Howell visited Kaldárhöfði Farm in about 1900 and took a picture:

kaldarhofdi
Kaldárhöfði Farm in about 1900. Photograph by Frederick W. W. Howell, courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

The original image, with full bibliographic information, is at the Cornell University Library. That little creek in the front yard looks like a fine place to skate!

Reference

J. Romilly Allen. 1896. “The Primitive Bone Skate.” The Reliquary and Illustrated Archaeologist 2:33–36.