By ROBERT MACGREGOR.
Though it appears to be impossible to fix on the time when skating first
took root in this country, there can be no doubt that it was introduced
to us from more northern climates, where it originated more from the
necessities of the inhabitants than as a pastime. When snow covered
their land, and ice bound up their rivers, imperious necessity would
soon suggest to the Scands or the Germans some ready means of winter
locomotion. This first took the form of snow-shoes, with two long runners
of wood, like those still used by the inhabitants of the northerly parts
of Norway and Sweden in their journeys over the immense snowfields.
When used on ice, one runner would soon have been found more convenient
than the widely-separated two, and harder materials used than wood; first
bone was substituted; then it, in turn, gave place to iron; and thus the
present form of skate was developed in the North at a period set down by
Scandinavian archæologists as about A. D. 200.
Frequent allusions occur in the old Northern poetry which prove
that proficiency in skating was one of the most highly esteemed
accomplishments of the Northern heroes. One of them, named Kolson, boasts
that he is master of nine accomplishments, skating being one; while the
hero Harold bitterly complains that though he could fight, ride, swim,
glide along the ice on skates, dart the lance, and row, “yet a Russian
maid disdains me.”
Eight arts are mine: to wield the steel,
To curb the warlike horse,
To swim the lake, or skate on heel
To urge my rapid course.
To hurl, well aimed, the martial spear,
To brush with oar the main—
All these are mine, though doomed to bear
A Russian maid’s disdain.
Specimens of old bone skates are occasionally dug up in fenny parts of
the country. There are some in the British Museum, in the Museum of the
Scottish Antiquaries, and probably in other collections. There seems to
be good evidence that even in London the primitive bone skate was not
entirely superseded by implements of steel until the latter part of last
century.
Mr. Roach Smith, F.S.A., describing one found about 1839, says that “it
is formed of the bone of some animal, made smooth on one side, with a
hole at one extremity for a cord to fasten it to the shoe. At the other
end a hole is also drilled horizontally to the depth of three inches,
which might have received a plug, with another cord to secure it more
effectually.”
There is hardly a greater difference between these old bone skates and
the “acmés” and club skates of to-day, than there is between the skating
of the middle ages and the artistic and graceful movements of good
performers of to-day. Indeed, skating as a fine art is entirely a thing
of modern growth. So little thought of was the exercise that up to the
Restoration days it appears to have been an amusement confined chiefly
to the lower classes, among whom it never reached any very high pitch
of art. “It was looked upon,” says a writer in the _Saturday Review_ in
1865, “much with the same view that the boys on the Serpentine even now
seem to adopt, as an accomplishment, the acmé of which was reached when
the performer could succeed in running along quickly on his skates and
finishing off with a long and triumphant slide on two feet in a straight
line forward. A gentleman would probably then have no more thought of
trying to execute different figures on the ice than he would at the
present day of dancing in a drawing-room on the tips of his toes.”
During all this time, when skating was struggling into notice in Britain,
in its birth-place it continued to be cultivated as the one great winter
amusement. In Holland, too, where it is looked upon less as a pastime
than a necessity, nothing has so frequently struck travelers as the
wonderful change the advent of ice brings about on the bearing of the
inhabitants. “Heavy, massive, stiff creatures during the rest of the
year,” says Pilati, in his “Letters on Holland,” “become suddenly active,
ready and agile, as soon as the canals are frozen,” and they are able to
glide along the frozen surface with the speed and endurance for which
their skating has been so long renowned, though these very qualities
are bought at the expense of the elegance and grace we nowadays look
for in the accomplished skater. Thomson thus graphically describes the
enlivening effects of frost on the Dutch:
Now in the Netherlands, and where the Rhine
Branched out in many a long canal, extends,
From every province swarming, void of care,
Batavia rushes forth; and as they sweep,
On sounding skates, a thousand different ways
In circling poise, swift as the winds along,
The then gay land is maddened all to joy.
Nor less the northern courts, wide o’er the snow,
Pour a new pomp. Eager on rapid sleds,
Their vigorous youth in bold contention wheel
The long resounding course. Meantime to raise
The manly strife, with highly-blooming charms
Flushed by the season, Scandinavia’s dames
Or Russia’s buxom daughters glow around.
Though the poet of the “Seasons” speaks of Russia here, it is curious to
note that skating is not a national amusement of the Russians, but is
entirely of foreign and quite recent introduction. It is quite unknown
in the interior, and no Russian—except a few who have picked up the art
in St. Petersburg—ever thinks of availing himself of the many pieces of
water annually frozen hard in so cold a country.
Perhaps it is in Friesland that the skate is most especially a necessary
of life. What stilts are to the peasant of the Landes, skates are to the
Frisian. The watercourses of the summer are his highways when winter
sets in. “He goes to market on skates; he goes to church on skates,” we
are told; “he goes love-making on skates.” Indeed, it may be doubted if
this province could be inhabited if the art of skating were unknown, for
without it the inhabitants would be confined to home for several months
of each year. Frisians of both sexes actually skate more than they walk,
says M. Depping; no sooner is an infant able to stand upright than the
irons are fastened on his feet; his parents lead him on to the ice, and
teach him how to move along. At six years most of the young skaters
have attained great proficiency, but in Frisian opinion even the best
performers improve up to thirty.
Here, as elsewhere in Holland, ice races are of frequent occurrence
during the winter. “The races on the ice,” says Pilati, “are the
carnivals of the Dutch: they are their fêtes, their operas, their
dissipations;” naturally, therefore, the people manifest the greatest
interest in them; skate long distances to be present, and cherish the
names of distinguished winners in a way we should never expect from such
an unemotional people as the Hollanders appear when the ice is gone and
when most travelers see them.
The women have races of their own; but most interesting of all the
contests are those in which the sturdy dames, whom their own painters
delight in depicting as gliding along to market with baskets on their
heads and knitting-needles in their busy fingers, are matched against the
best of the other sex. Though, as a rule, these “Atalantas of the North”
excel the men rather in beauty of style than in speed, yet the prize
often enough goes to one of them.
Frequently on the Continent skates have proved themselves excellent
engines of war, both in actual fighting—as when a Dutch army on skates
once repulsed a force of Frenchmen on the Scheldt—and as a rapid means
of communication. During the winter of 1806, Napoleon, after the battle
of Jena, wished to send an order with the utmost dispatch, to Marshal
Mortier, directing him to make himself master, without delay, of the
Hanseatic towns. The officer charged with this order found himself at
the mouth of the Elbe at a point where it was seven and a half miles
from bank to bank. To cross in a boat was impossible, as the river was
coated with a surface of newly-frozen ice; to get over by a bridge would
necessitate a detour of more than twenty miles. The officer, knowing how
precious time was, determined to skate over the thin ice; and though it
was too weak to bear a man walking, he skimmed along so rapidly that he
got across in safety, gaining great honor for the ingenuity and boldness
that enabled him to deliver his despatch six hours sooner than he
possibly could have done by the ordinary route.
In Holland, regiments have regular parades on the ice; but Norway is
probably the only country where it has been considered necessary to
embody a special corps of skaters. In this regiment, “the men are
furnished,” says Mr. Russell, in his translation of Guillaume Depping’s
book, “with the skates in ordinary use in the North, that fixed on the
right foot being somewhat longer than that on the left. Furnished with
these, the soldiers descend steep slopes with incredible rapidity,
re-ascend them as quickly, cross rivers and lakes, and halt at the
slightest signal, even while moving at the highest speed.”
Skating has had many enthusiastic votaries, but probably none more so
than the two illustrious names that continental skaters are so proud to
reckon in their guild.
Klopstock, even in his old age, was so ardent a lover of it that, after
skimming over the ice of Altona for hours, “to call back that warmth of
blood which age and inactivity had chilled,” he retired to his study
and wrote fiery lyrics in its praise. His friend and great successor,
Goethe, took to skating under peculiar circumstances. He sought relief in
violent exercise from embittered memories of a broken-off love affair.
He tried in vain riding and long journeys on foot; at length he found
relief when he went to the ice and learned to skate, an exercise of which
he was devotedly fond to the last. “It is with good reason,” he writes,
“that Klopstock has praised this employment of our physical powers which
brings us in contact with the happy activity of childhood, which urges
youth to exert all its suppleness and agility, and which tends to drive
away the inertia of age. We seem, when skating, to lose entirely any
consciousness of the most serious objects that claim our attention. It
was while abandoning myself to these aimless movements that the most
noble aspirations, which had too long lain dormant within me, were
reawakened; and I owe to these hours, which seemed lost, the most rapid
and successful development of my poetical projects.”
That skating has been in certain circumstances something more than mere
elegant accomplishment, is well illustrated by two anecdotes, told by the
author of some entertaining “Reminiscences of Quebec,” of two settlers in
the far West, who saved their lives by the aid of their skates. In one
case the backwoodsman had been captured by Indians, who intended soon
after to torture him to death. Among his baggage there happened to be
a pair of skates, and the Indians’ curiosity was so excited that their
captive was told to explain their use. He led his captors to the edge
of a wide lake, where the smooth ice stretched away as far as the eye
could see, and put on the skates. Exciting the laughter of the Indians by
tumbling about in a clumsy manner, he gradually increased his distance
from the shore, till he at length contrived to get a hundred yards from
them without arousing their suspicion, when he skated away as fast as he
could, and finally escaped.
“The other settler is said to have been skating alone one moonlight
night, and, while contemplating the reflection of the firmament in the
clear ice, and the vast dark mass of forest surrounding the lake and
stretching away in the background, he suddenly discovered, to his horror,
that the adjacent bank was lined with a pack of wolves. He at once
‘made tracks’ for home, followed by these animals; but the skater kept
ahead, and one by one the pack tailed off; two or three of the foremost,
however, kept up the chase, but when they attempted to close with the
skater, by adroitly turning aside, he allowed them to pass him. And after
a few unsuccessful and vicious attempts on the part of the wolves, he
succeeded in reaching his log hut in safety.”