Traditional sports of Europe are those that had their
roots in physical activities that existed before the
spread of modern, internationally organized sport. A
large range of activities, only some of which survive,
were widely enjoyed in the towns and villages of Europe in the Middle Ages and the early modern period.
Despite much local variation, many of the most popular activities share broad similarities.What we do know
of traditional games tends to come from visual material, such as Pieter Brueghel’s paintings of children’s
games of the 1560s, or from literary sources, such as
the inventory provided by Rabelais in 1534 in The Life
of Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel. Charles Cotton’s
The Compleat Gamester (1674) offers the first detailed
account of the varied activities that were to be found in
England after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660
and the return of the full range of traditional sports,
some of which had been banned during Cromwell’s
Commonwealth (1649–1660). During the later 17th
and throughout the 18th centuries some handbooks of
play appeared, culminating in detailed descriptions of
popular games and pastimes in Diderot’s famous Encyclopaedia (1751–1780) and Joseph Strutt’s The Sports
and Pastimes of the People of England (1801). In addition, there were reformers like Guts Muths, whose
Games for the Young (1796) tried to reform existing activities for new educational purposes.
As the forces of modernization broke up old communities and established a new urban industrial way of
life in much of Europe, the loss of the old ways of playing was noticed by ethnographers from the later 19th
century onward, who began to record the survival of
traditional games as part of a vanishing folk culture.
The search for “völkisch” cultural roots—a feature of
the new racial nationalism of the late 19th and early
20th centuries, as well as of interwar fascism—accentuated the fascination for what was seen as “gesunkenes
Kulturgut” (submerged cultural tradition). Children’s
games survived better than many others; thus, traditional games as a whole ran the risk of seeming puerile
and trivial compared to the new sports that were enjoying enormous success throughout Europe after
World War I. Interest in traditional games has revived
in recent years and has received official encouragement
from the Council of Europe.
Ball Games
The rich variety of traditional ball games can either be
played by hand or foot or with a batting device. Traditional European team-handball games include parkspel
on the Swedish island of Gottland, kaatsen in the Dutch
province of Frisia, balle pelote in Belgium and France,
pallone elastico in Italy, and pelota in Spanish Valencia
or in the Basque country. Most of the ancient and violent football forms have disappeared and have been replaced by modern soccer (association football), except
for the traditional calcio fiorentino in Florence (Italy).
Some ball games, such as Gaelic football in Ireland,
are played with both hands and feet. Gaelic football and
hurling were reintroduced in the 1880s in Ireland, with
great success, by cultural nationalists alarmed at the
spread of new British sport.All kinds of batting devices
are used, from racquets, as in real tennis and in
France’s longue paume game, to the sticks that are used
to play crosse, a variant of golf played in northern
France and Belgium, or in the rather rough team games
of shinty in Scotland and hurling in Ireland.
Other ball games use a tambourine (France and
Italy), a forearm cover or “bracchiale,” as in the Italian
pallone, or a “chistera,” as in the spectacular jai alai of
the Basques.
Bowl and Pin Games
Bowl games are played with a solid spherical object that
is either rolled or thrown at a target. In pin games, targets are knocked down. Italian bocce and the French jeu
de boules are now played far from their original home
countries.A special case is the game of closh, which was
popular in the 15th and 16th centuries. In this game a
shovel-shaped bat is used to roll a heavy round bowl
through an iron ring fixed in the ground. Nowadays the
game is still frequently played in the Belgian and Dutch
Provinces of Limburg, where it is known as beugelen,
and in the adjacent region in Germany. The same type
of game has a variant in Portugal (jogo do aro) and on
the Lipari Islands near Sicily (pallaporta). Apart from
the well-known flat green bowls, which spread from
England to the former British colonies, a variety of
bowling games are found in Britain and in the central
and southern European countries.
The modern game of 10-pin bowling as played in
the United States has several historical variants, some
of which are highly standardized and mechanized,
such as kegeln in Germany and bordering countries.
Other pin games range from Karelian pins, in which a
stick is thrown instead of a bowl, to pendelkegeln (Germany and Hungary), in which the bowl swung at the
pins hangs on a wire.
Throwing Games
Throwing a stick or a stone as far as possible or to hit a
target is a basic human movement pattern. In Sweden’s
traditional varpa game the projectiles are heavy discs.
Smaller discs or coins, or sometimes stones, are used in
both children’s and adults’ throwing games. Barra, a
particular type of javelin throwing, is practiced in
northern Spain. This iron bar weighs 3.5 kilograms (7
pounds, 11 ounces) and measures 1.5 meters (1.6
yards); it is launched after several body rotations.
Hammer throwing and tossing the caber are typical
events of the well-known Scottish Highland Games. A
log-throwing event virtually identical to caber-tossing
is found in Portugal, where it is known as jogo do
panco, and in Sweden, where it goes by the name of
stang-störtning. The latter game was demonstrated at
the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, together with
pärkspel, varpa, and glima. Stone-putting is practiced
in the traditional festivals of Swiss farmers in the Alps.
The game known as road bowls in Ireland, klootchieten in the Netherlands, and bosseln or klootschiessen
in East Frisia (Germany), is an interesting example
both of the expression of regional ethnic identity and
of the growing international awareness of traditional
games. In 1969 these three independent groups of
bowling enthusiasts joined together to form the International Bowl Playing Association.
Toad in the hole is the name of an English pub game,
which has several continental variants such as jeu de
grenouille in France, which in turn is called la rana in
Spain, jogo do sapo in Portugal, and pudebak in Flanders.
The toad is a thick, heavy, brass disc. The hole is enshrined within a specially made wooden box on four legs.
Shooting Games
Shooting games have flourished in all cultures and
have evolved into modern high-tech sports. Popinjay
shooting, in which the target is a “jay”or set of “jays”attached to a tall mast is still a very popular traditional
sport in Flanders (Belgium). It was even featured in the
1900 Paris Olympic Games and the 1920 Antwerp
Olympic Games.
Some present-day crossbow guilds in Flanders
originated in the 14th and 15th centuries and can thus
be considered as the first sports clubs in Europe. The
impressive crossbow-shooting festivals of the Italian
balestrieri (crossbow), such as are held in the magnificent city of Gubbio in the Umbrian hills and elsewhere,
also have a long historical pedigree. Witnessing the pageantry of such competitions of crossbowmen competing to win a palio (flag) is like stepping back into the
living past.
When firearms were introduced, many archery and
crossbow societies replaced their traditional weapons
with culverins or carbines. These associations of riflemen, especially in Germany and Austria, but also in
Denmark, are highly organized and have preserved to a
notable extent their character as patriarchal men’s
clubs, especially in rural areas.
Fighting Games
Wrestling is probably the oldest and the most universal
traditional sport of humankind. So-called Greco-Roman wrestling, which has acquired official Olympic
status, has no connection with the wrestling styles of
Greek and Roman antiquity, and the type of wrestling
practiced during the ancient Olympic Games has much
more in common with present-day pelivan (Turkish
wrestling) or even with modern judo.
In Europe, international competitions have already
been staged, in which glima (game of gladness)
wrestlers from Iceland were matched with adepts of the
lucha canaria (Canary wrestling) style practiced in the
Canary Islands.Moreover, an International Federation of
Celtic Wrestling was founded in 1985, bringing together
Icelandic glima, Scottish backhold, and Breton gouren.
In savate, also called French boxing, both fists and
feet are employed to hit the opponent; this traditional
sport is structurally related to Thai kickboxing. La
canne (stick fighting) was also once popular in France.
Jogo do pau is a Portuguese version of stick fighting
with some similarities to Japanese kendo.
Tilting, the favorite sport of the knights of medieval
Europe, was officially abolished in France in 1559 when
King Henry II was mortally wounded in a confrontation with his captain of the guard. However, some of its
variants have survived. They include ring tilting and
quintain, which can be practiced either on land or water. Ring tilting is still very popular in the Dutch
province of Zealand; quintain is practiced at the yearly
festival of Foligno in Italy, and similar jousts are held
on water, as in the case of the joutes girondines (jousts
from the Gironde area) in France and the fischerstechen
(fishermen-tilting) in Germany.
Forms of sword play have been practiced throughout Europe for centuries. Many of these sports have
been highly ritualized and stylized to make them less
lethal. Special protective gear is worn by practitioners
of sports such as fencing, which has had Olympic status since the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. Tug
of war was practiced for the last time as an Olympic
event during the Antwerp Games in 1920, but it is still
organized in international competition by the Tug of
War International Federation (TWIF).
Animal Games
Several animal games have gained a reputation as
“blood sports” in the course of history and have been
officially banned in many countries. Such cruel sports
as bull-baiting and bear-baiting were popular in medieval and 16th- and 17th-century England, but these
baitings, in which specially trained bulldogs were
used, have not survived the so-called civilizing
process. Cockfighting, however, is still very popular in
the north of France. In Belgium and other countries
where cockfights are illegal, these games still have
clandestine but loyal supporters. Animals are also
matched in fair competitions, as in pigeon racing and
dog racing. In most of these animal competitions, people train and coach the animals. In other cases, people
engage in direct and hazardous confrontation with animals, as in bull-running in France and Spain, and
bullfighting in France, Portugal, and Spain. Goose-riding and other “games” in which animals such as geese,
ducks, or cocks are decapitated, survive in most of the
Catholic regions of Europe.
Locomotion Games
Some traditional hill races are part of the Scottish
Highland Games and the Grasmere sports festivals in
the English Lake District. Fierljeppen (jumping for distance—with a fen-pole) has survived in the Dutch
province of Frisia as a spectacular form of pole vaulting over smaller rivers. Even more spectacular, however, is the salto del pastor (shepherd’s jump) practiced
on the Canary Islands, in which a leaping pole is used
to jump off cliffs and hill slopes.Among the Saami people of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, who depended almost entirely for their subsistence on their reindeer,
traditional sports tend to highlight riding skills during
reindeer-sledge races. The famous Palio of Siena, a traditional annual horse race in the very heart of the old
Italian town, attracts so many visitors that it is now an
internationally known tourist attraction. Traditional
rowing contests (for men and women) are yearly held
during the regata storica (ancient regatta) of Venice in
Italy and during the regatas de traineras (whaling boats)
in the bay of San Sebastian in the Spanish Basque country. In Cornwall the Falmouth Working Boat Association
was formed some years ago to regulate the old-style regattas for the Truro River oyster dredgers.
Acrobatics
In all cultures, people try to keep in good physical
shape by performing coded sets of physical exercises.
Because of the limitations of the human neuromuscular system, which has hardly changed since the emergence of Homo sapiens, acrobatic performances are
strikingly similar regardless of historical period or culture. The acrobatics that we see in the modern circus
are, for example, very similar to those performed in the
arenas of ancient Rome. Nor are the vaults and somersaults of modern gymnastics very different from the
tumbling exercises described in 1599 by the Italian
professional acrobat Tuccaro (1536–1604).
The Cong-Fou gymnastic exercises of the Chinese
Taoist monks described by the French Jesuit Amiot
(1779) had so much in common with the Swedish
gymnastics system of Per Henrik Ling (1776–1839)
that the French physician Nicolas Dally (1857) was
tempted to believe that Ling had simply copied them.
Turnen, the typical German apparatus gymnastics
created by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852), has
evolved into the internationally established discipline
of Olympic gymnastics. The early Turnen movement
nevertheless cherished so-called volkstumliche Spiele
(ethnic games) as a part of its nationalist philosophy. A
striking example of traditional acrobatics are the
castells or human pyramids formed by amateur gymnasts in Barcelona (Spain) as towering symbols of their
Catalan identity.
The extraordinary range of traditional sports shows
the great richness of the European games heritage.
Modern sport faces the major danger of losing diversity
as the global market and mass communications provide
an ever narrower range of activities for the young. Similarly, traditional sports may be lost forever or they are
preserved here and there merely as examples of quaint
old customs.Yet, apart from their intrinsic worth, traditional sports are valuable as a kind of alternative model
of sport, showing how earlier generations did things differently and providing the basis for a critique of some of
the more absurd competitive excesses of modern sport.
Whereas earlier generations tended to see sport as
part of a distinctive folk tradition, the recent tendency
is to import sports that have deep roots in the traditions of other cultures, notably Asian. Yet judo, for all
that it may be carried out under the same rules in the
Netherlands as in Japan, has very different cultural associations in the two countries. Similarly, the sumo
contests that from time to time are presented in Europe
risk appearing to be freak shows or exotic spectacles.
As to the survival of existing traditional games, the
enormous increase in traffic in the latter half of the
20th century has had a strikingly destructive effect on
the street as a place for play. Children, who until recently have been the most effective agency for the
transmission of a living culture, increasingly live indoors, watching television and “playing” computer
games, some of which bear marked similarities to
older games, rolling balls and throwing objects around
a screen. Pouring old wine into new bottles is always
happening in cultural history, and it may be that the
traditional games will live on in new forms.
—ROLAND RENSON