Holmegaard Bow

Origins

The bow is older than any surviving bow. Arrows of pine from Stellmoor in northern Germany, about 12,000 years old, prove that archery was established by the end of the last Ice Age, and stone points from earlier still may have tipped arrows. But the bows themselves, made of wood, almost never survive. The Holmegaard bows are the great exception. In the 1940s peat-cutters and archaeologists working the Holmegaard bog on Zealand, in Denmark, recovered two bows preserved in the waterlogged, oxygen-free peat, together with other remains of the Maglemosian culture — the hunter-gatherers who lived around the lakes and forests of the region in the early Mesolithic, when Denmark was still joined to Britain by land. The bows are about 9,000 years old.

Design & Construction

Each Holmegaard bow is a self bow, carved from a single piece of elm, and the most complete is about 1.54 meters long. Its design is sophisticated. The working limbs are wide and flat, so that the wood is stressed evenly across a broad section instead of being bent to its breaking point; they narrow toward a thick, rigid handle in the middle and toward stiff outer tips, which act as levers and do not bend at all. This reduces the mass that moves when the bow is shot and so makes the arrow faster. Elm is not as fine a bow wood as yew, but the flat design lets a lesser wood perform well, and modern replicas built to the Holmegaard pattern draw between about forty and sixty pounds — enough to kill a red deer, an elk or an aurochs at hunting range. Arrows of the period were tipped with small flint blades and microliths, set into the shaft with resin.

Combat Use

The Maglemosians used their bows to hunt the red deer, roe deer, elk, wild boar and aurochs of the post-glacial forest, and to take waterfowl and fish. Whether they also fought each other with them is unknown, but later Mesolithic and Neolithic burials in Europe include men killed by arrows, and the bow became the first weapon that let one person kill another at a distance with real accuracy. It would remain a central weapon of war for the next eight thousand years, from the Assyrian Composite Bow to the English Longbow and the Mongol Composite Bow.

Legacy

The Holmegaard bows are held by the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. Their influence today is practical as well as historical: in the twentieth century traditional bowyers studied them and found that their flat-limbed, stiff-tipped layout outperformed many later designs, and the "Holmegaard bow" is now a standard pattern built by hobby bowyers worldwide. With the Schöningen Spear and the Atlatl, the Holmegaard bows mark the stages by which human hunters learned to kill from farther and farther away.