Adventures in skating historiography
Through June 14, you can get my book Skates Made of Bone: A History for 40% off (meaning $27 instead of the usual $45, plus shipping) by entering the code SPORTS40 on the McFarland website. This code also works for their other sports books, like Skating on Air: The Broadcast History of an Olympic Marquee Sport.
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:
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:
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.
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 also used in some areas.
The earliest skate candidates found so far are from Albertfalva, an early Bronze Age site near Budapest. These skates, which were made from horse bones, date to approximately 2500 BC. You can read more about them in Choyke & Bartosiewicz (2005), but their identification seems less certain now. More definite skates start to appear in central Europe during the Late Bronze Age. Skating on bones remained very popular well into the twentieth century, but was most popular during the Middle Ages.
Edberg & Karlsson (2016) argue that in medieval Scandinavia, bone skates were toys for children and used only for recreation, not for any practical purpose, because the hundreds of bone skates from two sites in Sweden are sized for children’s feet. This squares with William fitz Stephen’s twelfth-century account of bone skates in England:
“When the great marsh that washes the north wall of the city is frozen over, swarms of young men issue forth to play games on the ice. … Others, more skilled at winter sports, put on their feet the shin-bones of animals, binding them firmly round their ankles, and, holding poles shod with iron in their hands, which they strike from time to time against the ice, they are propelled swift as a bird in flight or a bolt shot from an engine of war. Sometimes, by mutual consent, two of them run against each other in this way from a great distance, and, lifting their poles, each tilts against the other. Either one or both fall, not without some bodily injury, for, as they fall, they are carried along a great way beyond each other by the impetus of their run, and wherever the ice comes in contact with their heads, it scrapes off the skin utterly. Often a leg or an arm is broken, if the victim falls with it underneath him; but theirs is an age greedy of glory, youth yearns for victory, and exercises itself in mock combats in order to carry itself more bravely in real battles.” (Douglas and Greenaway, 1968:961)
I made a pair of bone skates from bones sold as dog treats and tried them out. I found that it is quite easy to skate without having the skates attached to my feet. In fact, this method has certain advantages: it is easy to jump off the skates if I hit a patch of rough ice, and it is much easier to get up after falling if I do it in my boots and then step back onto the skates.
The main disadvantage of bone skates compared with modern metal-bladed skates is their lack of maneuverability. Bone skates slide forwards, backwards, and sideways equally well. This makes it extremely difficult to stop or turn, problems which were well-known to skaters. In his description of games played on Gotland, P. A. Säve includes the following warning about bone skates:
“When the ice is very glassy, it goes at a burning speed; the most dangerous part … is splitting apart: the bone skates easily run to the sides, and that when sliding, one cannot turn aside or change course, if one sees a deep hole in front of one. The only thing to do in this case is to set the pole between the legs, lean back on it, and let it scratch the ice to slightly arrest the motion; but then, one should not be too close to the danger.” (Säve and Gustavson 1948:77, my translation)
This lack of maneuverability means that playing games like hockey or knattleikr on bone skates would have been impossible, but does not rule out the possibility of doing tricks. I was able to do a two-foot spin on my bone skates. Jumping tricks like those done by skateboarders may be possible, but I have not attempted any (yet).
A good place to learn more about bone skates is knochenarbeit.de, which includes a database of a few thousand bone skates.
References
O. Herman. 1902. Knochenschlittschuh, Knochenkufe, Knochenkeitel: Ein Beitrag zur näheren Kenntnis der prähistorischen Langknochenfunde. Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, 32:217–238.
A. M. Choyke & L. Bartosiewicz. 2005. Skating with horses: Continuity and parallelism in prehistoric Hungary. Revue de Paléo-biologie, spéc. 10:317–326.
R. Edberg & J. Karlsson. 2016. Bone skates and young people in Birka and Sigtuna. Fornvännen 111:7–16.
D. C. Douglas and G. W. Greenaway, eds. 1968. English Historical Documents, Volume 2: 1042–1189. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
P. A. Säve and H. Gustavson. 1948. Svenska lekar, volume 1: Gotländska lekar. Uppsala: Almqvist och Wicksells Boktryckeri AB.
