Hoop rolling, also called hoop trundling, is both a sport and a
child's game
This is a list of games that used to be played by children, some of which are still being played today. Traditional children's games do not include commercial products such as board games but do include games which require props such as hopscotch ...
in which a large
hoop
Hoop or Hoops may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Film and television
* ''Hoops'' (TV series), an American animated series
Music
* Hoops (band), an American indie pop band
* ''Hoops'' (album), a 2015 album by The Rubens
** "Hoops" (The ...
is
rolled along the ground, generally by means of an object wielded by the player. The aim of the game is to keep the hoop upright for long periods of time, or to do various
tricks.
Hoop rolling has been documented since antiquity in Africa, Asia and Europe. Played as a
target game, it is an ancient tradition widely dispersed among different societies. In Asia, the earliest records date from Ancient China, and in Europe from Ancient Greece.
In the West, the most common materials for the equipment have been wood and metal. Wooden hoops, driven with a stick about one foot long, are struck with the centre of the stick in order to ensure good progress. Metal hoops, instead of being struck, can be guided by a metal hook.
History
A version of hoop rolling played as a target game is encountered as an ancient tradition among aboriginal peoples in many parts of the world. The game, known as hoop-and-pole, is ubiquitous throughout most of Africa.
In the Americas, it has been played by a great number of unrelated
Native American tribes. The game has exhibited many variations of materials and size of implements and rules of play.
[Andrew McFarland Davi]
''Indian Games''
pp. 44–56. . It is postulated that its wide distribution is a factor of the rich symbolical possibilities of the game, rather than indicating radial diffusion from a single center of invention.
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greeks referred to the hoop as the "trochus". Hoop rolling was practiced in the
gymnasium, and the prop was also used for tumbling and dance with different techniques. Although a popular form of recreation, hoop rolling was not featured in competition at the
major sports festivals.
Hoops, also called ''krikoi'', were probably made of
bronze,
iron
Iron () is a chemical element with symbol Fe (from la, ferrum) and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, right in ...
, or
copper
Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu (from la, cuprum) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish ...
, and were driven with a stick called the "elater". The hoop was sized according to the player, as it had to come up to the level of the chest. Greek vases generally show the elater as a short, straight stick. The sport was regarded as healthful, and was recommended by
Hippocrates
Hippocrates of Kos (; grc-gre, Ἱπποκράτης ὁ Κῷος, Hippokrátēs ho Kôios; ), also known as Hippocrates II, was a Greek physician of the classical period who is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history o ...
for strengthening weak constitutions. Even very young children would play with hoops.
The hoop thus held symbolic meanings in Greek myth and culture. A bronze hoop was one of the toys of the infant
Dionysus
In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus (; grc, Διόνυσος ) is the god of the grape-harvest, winemaking, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, festivity, and theatre. The Romans ...
, and hoop driving is an attribute of
Ganymede, often depicted on
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
vase paintings from the 5th century BCE. Images of the hoop are sometimes presented in the context of
ancient Greek pederastic tradition.
Ancient Rome and Byzantium
During the
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post- Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Medite ...
, circa 100-300 AD, the Romans learned hoop driving from the Greeks and generally held the sport in high regard. The
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...
term for hoop is also "trochus", at times referred to as the "Greek hoop". The stick was known as a "clavis" or "radius", had the shape of a key, and was made of metal with a wooden handle. Roman hoops were fitted with metal rings that slid freely along the rim. According to
Martial, this was done so that the tinkling of the rings would warn passers by of the hoop's approach: "Why do these jingling rings move about upon the rolling wheel? In order that the passers-by may get out of the way of the hoop."(14. CLXIX) He also indicates that the metal tires of wooden cart wheels could be used as hoops: "A wheel must be protected. You make me a useful present. It will be a hoop to children, but to me a tyre for my wheel."(14. CLXVIII) Martial also mentions the sport was practised by
Sarmatian boys, who rolled their hoops on the frozen
Danube
The Danube ( ; ) is a river that was once a long-standing frontier of the Roman Empire and today connects 10 European countries, running through their territories or being a border. Originating in Germany, the Danube flows southeast for , ...
river. According to
Strabo, one of the popular Roman venues for practising the sport was the
Campus Martius
The Campus Martius (Latin for the "Field of Mars", Italian ''Campo Marzio'') was a publicly owned area of ancient Rome about in extent. In the Middle Ages, it was the most populous area of Rome. The IV rione of Rome, Campo Marzio, which cov ...
, which was large enough to accommodate a wide variety of activities.
The Roman game was to roll the hoop while throwing a spear or stick through it. For Romans, this was more an entertainment and military development, not a philosophical activity. Several ancient sources praise the sport. According to
Horace, hoop driving was one of the manly sports.
[William Pulleyn (1830]
The etymological compendium, or, Portfolio of origins and inventions
T. Tegg. p. 139 Ovid
Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (; 20 March 43 BC – 17/18 AD), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the ...
in his
Tristia is more specific, putting the sport in the same category with horsemanship, javelin throwing and weapon practice: "Usus equi nunc est, levibus nunc luditur armis, Nunc pila, nunc celeri volvitur orbe trochus." It was also presented as a virtue in the
Distichs of Cato, which enjoin youth to "Trocho lude; aleam fuge" ("Play with the hoop, flee the dice"). A 2nd-century medical text by
Antyllus, preserved in an anthology of
Oribasius,
Emperor Julian's physician, describes hoop rolling as a form of physical and mental therapy. Antyllus indicates that at first the player should roll the hoop maintaining an upright posture, but after warming up he can begin to jump and run through the hoop. Such exercises, he holds, are best done before a meal or a bath, as with any physical exercise.
East Asia
In China, the game may well go back to 1000 BC or further.
Modern usage
Early 19th-century travellers saw children playing with hoops over much of
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located enti ...
and beyond.
The game was a common pastime of
Tanzanian village children of the
African Tanganyika plateau circa the 1910s. Not long after, it is recorded in the
Freetown
Freetown is the capital and largest city of Sierra Leone. It is a major port city on the Atlantic Ocean and is located in the Western Area of the country. Freetown is Sierra Leone's major urban, economic, financial, cultural, educational an ...
settler community. Christian missionaries encountered it there in the 19th century. Children in late
Edo period
The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional ''daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was character ...
Japan also were known to play the game.
In English the sport is known by several names, "hoop and stick", "bowling hoops", or "gird and cleek" in
Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to th ...
, where the gird is the hoop and the cleek, the stick.
In the west, around the end of the 19th century, the game was played by boys up to about twelve years of age. Hoops would at times have pairs of tin squares nailed to the inside of the circle, to jingle as the hoop was rolled.
[William Clarke (1829]
''The Boy's Own Book: A Complete Encyclopedia of All the Diversions Athletic''
Vizetelly, Branston and Co. p. 28 Up to a dozen such pairs of rattles might be placed around the rim of the hoop. Some preferred the ashen hoops, round on the outside and flat on the inside, to the ones made of iron, as the latter could break windows and hurt the legs of the passers by and horses.
Games
Among the games played with the hoops—besides simply trundling them, which is a matter of driving them forward while keeping them upright—are hoop races, as well as games of
dexterity. Among these are "toll", in which the player has to drive his hoop between two stones placed two to three inches apart without touching either one. Another such game is "turnpike", in which one player drives the hoop between pairs of objects, such as bricks, at first placed so that the opening is about a foot wide, with each gate kept by a different player. After running all the gates, the openings are made smaller by one inch, and the player trundling the hoop runs the course again. The process repeats until he strikes the side of a gate, then he and the turnpike keeper switch places.
Conflict games such as "hoop battle" or "tournament" can also be played. For this game, boys organise into opposing teams that drive their hoops against each other with the aim of knocking down as many of the opponents' hoops as possible. Only those hoops which fall as a result of a strike by another hoop are counted out. In some parts of England, boys played a similar game called "encounters", where two boys would drive their hoops against each other, with the one whose hoop was left standing being declared the winner.
[
The "hoop hunt" is yet another game, in which one or more hoops are allowed to roll down a hill, with the double aim of rolling as far as possible and then of locating the hoop wherever it may have ended up.
]
British Empire
In England, children are known to have played the game as early as the 15th century. By the late 18th century, boys driving hoops in the London streets had become a nuisance, according to Joseph Strutt.[ Throughout the 1840s, a barrage of denunciations appeared in the papers against "The Hoop Nuisance", in which their iron hoops were blamed for inflicting severe injuries to pedestrians' shins. The London police attempted to eradicate the practice, confiscating the iron hoops of boys and girls trundling them through the streets and parks. That campaign, however, seems to have failed, as it was accompanied by renewed complaints about the increase of the nuisance.
Other writers mocked the complainers as grumblers depriving the "juvenile community" of a healthy and harmless pastime that had been practised for hundreds of years "without any apparent inconvenience to the public at large". The passion for passing laws was ridiculed: "Enact, say our modern philosophers, enact. Pass statute after statute. Regulate with exquisite minuteness the cries of the baby in the cradle, the laughter of the hoop-trundling boy, the murmurrings of the toothless old man." In the 1860s, the anti-trundling campaign was taken up by ]Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer.
Babbage is considered ...
, who blamed the boys for driving iron hoops under horses' legs, with the result that the rider is thrown and very often the horse breaks a leg. Babbage achieved a certain notoriety in this matter, being denounced in debate in Commons in 1864 for "commencing a crusade against the popular game of tip-cat
Tip-cat (also called cat, cat and dog, one-a-cat, pussy, or piggy) is a pastime which consists of tapping a short billet of wood (usually no more than ) with a larger stick (similar to a baseball bat or broom handle); the shorter piece is tapered ...
and the trundling of hoops".
The fuss over boys playing with hoops reached around the globe—in the Colony of Tasmania, boys trundling hoops were blamed for endangering men riding horses and women's silk dresses, and the Hobart newspaper called for their banishment to the suburbs by law and police attention.
Not only schoolboys, but even graduate students at Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge beca ...
enjoyed trundling hoops after their lectures. The practice, however, was brought to an end sometime before 1816, by means of a statute that forbade Masters of Arts to roll hoops or play marbles.
By the early 19th century, the game was already part of the standard physical education of girls, together with jumping rope
A skipping rope (British English) or jump rope (American English) is a tool used in the sport of skipping/jump rope where one or more participants jump over a rope swung so that it passes under their feet and over their heads. There are multi ...
and dumbbells. Girls from four to fourteen could be seen by the hundreds, trundling their hoops across the grass in the London parks. Though held to be common in the early years of the 19th century, the simplicity and innocence of those years was alleged to have been replaced by the 1850s with a precocious maturity, where "Instead of trundling hoops, urchins smoke cigars."
In the mid-19th century, bent ash was favoured as material for making wooden hoops. In early 20th-century England, girls played with a wooden hoop driven with a wooden stick, while boys' hoops were made of metal and the sticks were key-shaped and also made of metal. In some locations, hoops with spokes and bells were available in stores, but they were often disdained by boys .
Another alternate name for hoop rolling is Gird ‘N Cleek. The World Gird ‘N Cleek championships are held annually in New Galloway, Scotland. Winners include Andrew Firth (1983), Alexander McKenna (2009,2018), Arthur Harfield (2019). .
America
A great number of widely separated Native American peoples play or played an ancient target-shooting version of hoop rolling currently known as Chunkey. Though the forms of the game exhibited great variation, generally certain elements were present, namely a prepared terrain over which a disc or hoop was rolled at high speed, at which implements similar to spears were thrown. The game, when played by adults, was often associated with gambling; and quite often, very valuable prizes, such as horses, exchanged hands. The game has been played by tribes such as the Arapaho, the Omaha, the Pawnee and many others.
Since hoop and stick involves spear throwing, it is thought to predate the introduction of the bow and arrow that took place around 500 AD. In the California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...
region in the 18th century, it was widespread and known as "takersia". Canadian
Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...
Inuit
Inuit (; iu, ᐃᓄᐃᑦ 'the people', singular: Inuk, , dual: Inuuk, ) are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, ...
players divide into two groups. While the first group rolls the hoops—a large and a small one—the players in the other group attempt to throw spears through the hoops. The Cheyenne
The Cheyenne ( ) are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. Their Cheyenne language belongs to the Algonquian languages, Algonquian language family. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognized tribe, federally recognize ...
named two months of the year after the game: January is known as ''Ok sey' e shi his'', "Hoop-and-stick game moon", and February as ''Mak ok sey' i shi'', "Big hoop-and-stick game moon". Among the Blackfeet, children would play the game by throwing a feathered stick through the rolling hoop. Salish and Pend d'Oreilles youth played hoop and arrow games "to become skillful at bringing down small game for the village" in early spring, when the men were gone in search of large game.
Among the European settlers, hoop-rolling was a seasonal sport, seeing the greatest activity in the winter. Children, besides rolling the hoops, also tossed them back and forth, catching them on their sticks. In the 1830s, hoop trundling was seen as an activity so characteristic of the young that it was adopted by a fanatic sect in Kentucky
Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virgini ...
whose members mimicked children's activities in order to gain access to heaven
Heaven or the heavens, is a common religious cosmological or transcendent supernatural place where beings such as deities, angels, souls, saints, or venerated ancestors are said to originate, be enthroned, or reside. According to the bel ...
. Hoop driving was also seen as a remedy for the sedentary and overprotected lives led by many American girls of the mid-19th century. The game was popular with both girls and boys: in an 1898 survey of 1000 boys and 1000 girls in , both the girls and the boys named hoop and stick their favorite toy. In Ohio
Ohio () is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Of the List of states and territories of the United States, fifty U.S. states, it is the List of U.S. states and territories by area, 34th-l ...
, the wood of the American elm (''Ulmus americana'') was particularly valued for making hoop-poles.
At Bryn Mawr College, Wellesley College, and Wheaton College Wheaton College may refer to:
* Wheaton College (Illinois), a private Christian, coeducational, liberal arts college in Wheaton, Illinois
* Wheaton College (Massachusetts)
Wheaton College is a private liberal arts college in Norton, Massachus ...
, the Hoop Rolling Contest is an annual spring tradition that dates back to 1895, and is only open to graduating seniors on that college's May Day celebration.
See also
* Chunkey
* Hooping
* Hula hoop
References
Sources
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hoop Rolling
Boys' toys and games
Girls' toys and games
Games of physical skill
Physical activity and dexterity toys
Traditional toys
Ancient Greek sports
Ancient Roman sports
Children's street culture
Wooden toys
Metal toys