Studies in primitive looms / by H. Ling Roth.

  • Henry Ling Roth
Date:
[1934]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies in primitive looms / by H. Ling Roth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    21/174 page 9
    3.—The Ainu Loom. The Ainu loom is a primitive affair, with characteristics well worth studying. It has not been described before to any extent except in a very crude and unsatis¬ factory way by Hugo Ephraim,1 and hence I have chosen it as a fit subject for discussion. FIG. 3.-AINU WOMAN WEAVING. (After Romyn Hitchcock.) FIG. 4.-AINU WOMAN WEAVING. (As reproduced by Ephraim, after Romyn Hitch¬ cock. Note the distorted heddle and spool, and the gratuitous and incorrect addition of the feet.) Both reduced by one-fourth lineal. We are told by the Rev. John Batchelor that “ the chief article of dress worn by the Ainu is a long garment which they call attush. This word really means elm fibre or elm thread, and, as the words indicate, the dresses are made from the inner bark of elm-trees. Such garments are very brittle when dry, but when wet they are exceedingly strong/'2 According to MacRitchie, in the legend descriptive of the illustration of Ainu peeling the bark off the tree, it is “ Microptelea parvifolia, in Aino ohiyo, but Hitchcock says the people use the bark of the elm (Ulmus montana), called by them ohiyo, and sometimes U. campestris.3 Batchelor continues: “ Elm bark is peeled off the trees in earl}/ spring or autumn, just when the sap commences to flow upwards or when it has finished doing so.4 When sufficient bark has been taken, it is carried home and put into warm, stagnant water to soak. It remains here for about ten days till it has become soft; then, when it lias become sufficiently soaked, it is taken out of the water, the layers of bark separated, dried in the sun, and the fibres divided into threads and wound up into 1 “ Ueber die Entwickelung der Webetechnik . . .” (Mitt. a. d. stcidisch. Mus. f. Voelkerk. zn Leipzig, 1905). 2 The Ainu and their Folklore, Bond., 1901, 2nd ed., p. 144. 3 “ The Amos of Yezo,” Rep. U.S. Nat. Mus. for 1890, p. 463. 4 “ The men bring in the bark, in strips 5 feet long, having removed the outer coating ’ (Bird).
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