Bullroarers
One of the joys of reading Fortean Times is that you can get an article on something that you know nothing about, which then fills you with wonder. This was the case with Steve Marshall’s excellent Voice of the Ancestors – the Mysterious Bullroarer [FT414:38-45]. There are a couple of things that I would like to say about bullroarers. The first is that their description took me back to my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s when comics such as Beezer and Topper would every so often have a ‘free gift’ that was a piece of cardboard printed and shaped to look something like a bumble bee across which an elastic band was stretched. This would then be swung around the head on a piece of string and would make a buzzing sound like a bee (caused by the air vibrating through the elastic band). Great fun – not quite a bullroarer, but similar.
My second point is a speculation about how the bullroarer universally came to be used only by men and boys and kept away
from women and girls. Steve well describes the various related stories and legends quoted by men; but it was his description of his experience at Newgrange in Ireland that caught my eye. He states: “My wife went inside the tomb with a large, mixed group of tourists; I stayed outside and whirled the bullroarer by the entrance as usual, so its sound went into the passage. Inside, all the women were startled and shocked when the sound began – the men, on the other hand, seemed not to notice.” This suggests to me that the sounds and frequencies generated by a bullroarer are heard and sensed in different ways by men and women. Therefore, as far back as when the first bullroarer was created, men and boys would have enjoyed whirling it around for fun and because of the noises it makes – and promptly been admonished by their women and girls who found this irritating and/or disconcerting (perhaps with some physical discomfort?) The females would not have been backward in telling the males to not play with the bullroarer anywhere near them (or else!); and so the males would have learned that they should sneak off to somewhere secluded or far away in order to have fun playing with their bullroarer. My contention is that it then naturally evolved (for all peoples across the world) for men and boys to play with their bullroarers away from the women and girls; and that stories and legends were then created to justify this separation, which would have become increasingly and incrementally more colourful with each telling over the ages, as is the case with much folklore.
What exactly might be any differences between how the two sexes hear and sense the bullroarer I cannot say, but it might make for an interesting piece of neurological research. Rob Gandy
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