I found this in a folder produced by Partners Reklambyrå I Luleå Ab, Sweden. Their phone number is 0920-679 30.
since there was no copyright I figured I could use it word for
word, if I gave credit to the author. If you KNOW that this
is not legal please
e-mail me and tell me. Thank you.
A more recent fresco from about 480 b.c. in Greece shows six
players in what is nearly the same movement of starting a game.
Since then principles of the game have been applied in various
forms and under various names in many parts of the world.
Historians mention French "hocquet", Irish "hurling", Scottish
"shinty", Enghils "hawkey" and "hockey", Welsh "bandy", Georgian
"lelo" and Icelandic "knattleikr". Bandy, hockey, knattleiker,
and shinty have been played in a field in the summertime and on an
ice sruface in the winter.
The origin of the Welsh word "bandy" can most likeley be derived
from the Teutonic "bandja" (a curbed stick". In a book Sports and
Pastimes.... from 1801 Joseph Strutt identifies the
stick with the bandy (pl. bandies) writing about a field game called
"bandy-ball" from the 13th century. The distinction between the game
and the stick got settled and today it does not exist.
Bury Fen (north-east England) is the original home for the modern
winter game called bandy and it can be dated back to the middle of
the 18th century. Bury Fen bBAndy Club is not doubt one of the
most famous one. Some well-known soccer clubs such as Seffield United
(originally Sheffield Southerand and Bandy Club,1855) and Nottingham
Forest(1865) had to start bandy in their names together with football
The first bandy match between two London Clubs took place in 1875.
But previously matches ahd been played in the country with Bury Fenn BC,
Virgina Water BC, Wenchester BC, and Northhampton BC amongst others.
Rules camel ater. During the early days there were no regualar official rules.
They were compiled in 1891 when the "National Bandy Association" was
established in England. Previously teams had made up rules for the game and
set up boundaries for the playing field before the game began.
Two long willow branches formed the goal posts in early British games with
the bottoms frozen to the ice and tops bent over to define the goal.
goals for each team were most often placed as far apart as the ice allowed
(for example a pond). The stick was preferably made of willow or ash,
curved to fithe the ice and to hit the bandy ball along the ice
The game of bandy of hockey on the ice was introduced tot Sweden in February,
1894 by a Bury Fen player named C G Tebbutt, who was also the organizer of
the first International bandy-match in 1891 between the English team
Bury Fen and the Dutch team Haarlem. A well known Swede, Clarence von Rosen
started up the first Swedish club in Stockholm in 1895.
However, the organized bandy then appeard to some extent in Switzerland,
Germany, Holland in the early 1890's but more officially in Russia 1898,
in Norway in 1903, in Sweden, 1907, and Finland in 1908. Bandy entered
it's present form in 1955, when the International Bandy Federation (IBF)
was founded. Since the founding, the world championships have been
played on odd years beginning in 1957.
The origins of Bandy or Hockey on the Ice go back
to almost 4,000 years. Traces and remains showing the existence
of the ancestors of our players of to-day are mainly to be
found in Iran(Persia), Egypt, and Greece. On the walls of a tomb No. 16
at Beni Hassan in the Valley of the Nile, close to Minia,
a scene of a game appears with two players, stick in hand,
starting a games with a wouldbe ball.