The Myth of Skating History: Building Elitism into a Sport

Abstract

Figure skating’s origin story relates the sport to Norse mythology, but this claim does not stand up to a careful analysis. Its roots can be traced to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquaries interested in the old north. The popularity of skating and early scholars' imperfect understanding of Old Norse led to skating appearing in translations and adaptations of medieval Scandinavian literature despite being absent from the original. The origin story's development can be traced through manuals and popular histories of figure skating from the eighteenth century to the present. This paper exposes figure skating's origin story as the invention of a privileged class to elevate a popular leisure activity and explains its enduring function in supporting the upper-class image of figure skating.

Keywords:

• Figure skating
• Old Norse
• Victorians
• Vikings

Notes

1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. This one first appeared in Thurber (2013, p. 199) as part of a full discussion of skating in Old Norse literature.

2 Details of the history and use of bone skates can be found in Thurber (2020).

3 A pair of bone skates in a museum in Iceland was reputedly in use as recently as 1972 (Hagberg, 1976, p. 330). Thurber (2020, pp. 135–146) collects modern accounts of bone skates in use.

4 The manuscript's shelfmark is Auct.F.1.16; the gloss is actually scridfoos, according to Madan (1877, p. 99, #196), and occurs on line 239 book 4 of the Aeneid. Gallée (1894, p. 162) corrects the gloss to scridscos and notes that it occurs on folio 126b.

5 Throughout this paper, I use “Frithiof” to refer to Tegnér's character and “Friðþjóf” to refer to the character in the saga.

6 A possible fourth translation is Rasmus B. Anderson and Jon Bjarnason's, published in 1877. It is unclear whether this counts as a new translation or a reprint of Stephens' (Kennedy, 2007, p. 62).

7 For a full discussion of the saga's appeal to the Victorians, see chapter 5 of Wawn (2000). Wawn (2000) devotes chapter 8 to a discussion of Stephens' work and its reception.

8 This is another place where Percy (1763, p. 98) made a mistake: the original, as he quotes it, is “Skrida kann ek a skidum” (I can slide on skis).

9 Robert Jones's high class—in status if not in action—is highlighted by the royal pardon that allowed him to escape the death sentence imposed when he was convicted of sodomizing a young boy (Norton, 2014).

10 Cleasby & Vigfusson (1874) was the standard Old Norse dictionary until the advent of the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, currently in progress at the University of Copenhagen (http://onp.ku.dk/).

11 Orchard (2011, pp. xiv, xvi–xvii) calls the attribution of Codex Regius—the manuscript containing the Elder (or Poetic) Edda—to Saemund “traditional and apocryphal,” dates it to around 1270, and avoids giving a date for the poems' origin.