More power

The norsaq is the Inuit throwing stick. The harpoon lies along it, hooks onto a peg on the shaft, and off you throw. It makes your arm longer, so the harpoon flies harder, farther and straighter than you could ever manage by hand. Most were carved from driftwood, because that's what washed up.

A better throw meant more food that week. In a bad winter it could mean the whole village made it to spring. Unless the throw flipped you over and dinner swam off with your harpoon in it. Then you had a problem.

Flat for a reason

The design is simple: good grip, lots of leverage. And it's flat, which is the clever bit. Throw hard from a narrow kayak and sooner or later you go over, especially when the seal moves and your throw goes off sideways. You're still holding the norsaq, so you roll up on it. Lost your paddle? The norsaq gets you up and lets you paddle over to fetch it. A round stick couldn't do any of that.

I've practised harpoon throwing a lot and I suck at it, with gusto. It's way harder than it looks. Rolling with a norsaq I can do. Hunting with one, my family would starve.

My guess is that plenty of norsaqs started life as broken paddles, cut down narrower for a better grip. Your kid's paddle, maybe? Correct me if I'm wrong, but where there's mostly snow and ice in the winter you don't throw good wood away. You repair and you reuse.

The one thing with decorations

Still, the norsaq is one of the very few pieces of traditional kit you'll see with carvings on it. Everything else is bare and functional. Some sources say the patterns brought hunting luck, which I can believe. My own theory: if lunch swims away while you're upside down, at least something pretty goes down with it. Ok, joking. More likely you sat by the seal oil lamp in the evening, carving and chatting with the family. There was a lot of evening up there. Around December it's dark more or less 24/7. Down here in Stockholm we get a whopping five hours of dusk for Christmas and still complain.

Picture it: a week's worth of hard-earned seal swimming off, and you're still upside down with brain-freeze, trying to work out which way is up.

Everybody had one

Pretty much every hunting culture came up with a lever-thrower of some kind. The atlatl in Mesoamerica, the woomera in Australia, the Swiss arrow, and the norsaq up north. Put a lever in a hungry person's hand and dinner is in trouble.

Why you should roll with one

For us modern paddlers the norsaq sits right between a paddle roll and a hand roll. Much less blade than a paddle, much more help than your bare hand. It won't let you cheat with arm strength, so you have to use your whole body: hips, layback, timing. That's exactly why it's such a good teacher.

It feels hopeless at first. Stick with it. Put in the reps and one day the norsaq roll feels almost too easy. Then it becomes your warm-up before the harder stuff.

And if your club thinks Greenland rolling is circus tricks, hand them a norsaq and watch.

Hunting without one? Why would you. Rolling without ever having tried one? Same question.

Tell me what you think in the comments. Why you should bother learning to roll at all is another post. You've made it this far without drowning, so I already believe in you 😄

//Tibor