Re: Re: More winter

From: Henk Langeveld <hlangeveld_at_...>
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 23:42:56 +0100

Bryan wrote:
> Also think of the tale "The Silver Skates" It sounds like the dutch
> used a lot of wood skates, which were presumably better than bone
> ones, but clearly metal ones were much faster.

You may consider bone skates to be really a kind of 'sliders' that were bound under one's shoes. The oldest known bone sliders go back 5000 year.

Wooden skates are really metal skates - while metal is quite expensive, and you only need the single metal strip to skate on, people cut a boatlike shape from wood, and fixed the metal as a keel underneath. The skate was then bound around the feet with strips of cloth.

This model was around from approx. 1400 until the last century. My learning skates weren't much different from the model above. But how I hated how they would shift under my feet, as they would never align and never stay in place, which made skating very tiresome.

Source:
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bliceskates.htm?once=true&

> So bone skates are probably too noticeable steps slower than metal
> ones. Of course, someone in Heortling is bound to have metal skates--
> most likely a player hero at that :)