TWO SIDES OF EVERYTHING
In the beginning there is Gravity. Matter gathers and compresses and ignites. Here comes the sun and the earth with mountains and weather and snow. We discover drifting and floating and pull our floats and boats over land and experience glide.
We make sleds and hunt with bows and arrows and follow the retracting edge of endless winter. The boatmaker and the bowmaker becomes the skimaker and the hunter and trace herds of animals in deep snow, the heavier the better.
Like volcanoes of ideas upon experience, our history lie layers deep as new inventions are born with generations of skiers that evolve from barely walking to deadly deep snow hunters. Milennia of inventiveness is stored in ice and bogs and carved on rock. Bølamannen in Trøndelag is a thousands of years old depiction of a crouching skier drawing his bow. Around him are several carvings of reindeer.
In 2014 a wide ski appeared from a melting glacier in central Norway. The other one was discovered a few years later, they still had their bindings on but were older than the vikings. The shape of the skis and the place they were discovered tells a story of hunting in deep snow.
The Reinheim skis, melted out of a glacier in 2014
The Reinheim skis, melted out of a glacier in 2014
These skis were found by a ditch digger in 1924 in northern Sweden.
The Reinheim skis, melted out of a glacier in 2014
The oldest complete skis in the world are 5200 years old, found in 1924 in Kalvträsk, Sweden. These look like something made for water with its keel-like top ridge and oar-like pole. The bindings are mounted through vertical holes, just like skis being made by the Tuva people in Altai. A long buried volcanic layer is still out in the open at the rim of ski culture.
The word ski is ancient Norse for split piece of wood. Many words with ski describe splitting, schitzophrenic minds are split. The skip or the ship splits the waves and was made from pieces of split wood and shoots through water by wind like skis on snow by gravity and arrows through air by bows.
Å skyte is to shoot and the bow and arrow and the ship and the ski would be tools made by the makers of thin pieces of wood. In Swedish they use skjuta for pushing a wagon and the English word scooter came back to us as the snøskuter -the snowmobile.
The birth of skiing is forever a mystery and the words come from roots dividing and rejoining in similar objects many times over. We will never know if the first skimaker visioned the act of gliding on snow before knowing how to ski or imagined how a raft shoots through water while splitting the first log.