Ringridning: my grandfather's sport

My father rode ringridning. So did my grandfather. I did not, and until I started writing this blog I had never gone and found out what it actually is.

It is close to undocumented in English, which is most of why this post exists.

What happens

A ring hangs from a gallows across a track. A rider gallops at it holding a lance. The ring is taken when it ends up on the point of the lance.

Then it happens again, with a smaller ring.

The Aabenraa festival runs about fifty rings across two days, thirty on the Saturday and twenty on the Sunday. It has to be done at a gallop; a trot does not count.

And the last ring is ten millimetres across.

Ten millimetres. A centimetre, hanging in the air, taken on the tip of a lance by somebody on a galloping horse. I have read that figure several times now and it has not become more reasonable.

The uniform, and the crown

There is a dress code and it is not optional: white breeches, a dark jacket, and a blue and white ringrider cap.

Up to 500 riders take part at Aabenraa, which the festival calls the largest cavalry festival in Southern Jutland. The winners are crowned king, crown prince and prince, and there is a separate pony king.

A pony king. That detail did more to explain the culture of this thing to me than anything else I read.

Where it comes from

The festival’s own history traces it to medieval tournaments, with elements picked up from Arab horsemanship during the crusades, arriving eventually as carousel riding.

In Aabenraa specifically, the earliest documented instance is 1766, when a mounted corps was established for the reception of Queen Caroline Mathilde. The county’s ringrider association was founded in 1896.

So the thread runs from a knightly exercise, through a royal reception in the eighteenth century, to a four-day summer festival with beer tents that my family took part in.

What I have not written here

The reason I wanted to write about this at all is not the ten-millimetre ring.

It is that my father and my grandfather did this, and I have never asked either of them a single question about it. Everything above comes from a festival’s website. Nothing in it came from my own family.

That is the wrong way round, and it is the only subject on this blog where the best available source is a person I can telephone. What the training was like. Whether you practise the lance without a horse. What a bad day looks like. Whether my grandfather was any good.

I am not going to invent any of it, and I am not going to half-remember it either. When I have asked properly, there will be a second post, and it will be better than this one.

This one is just the shape of the thing, so that the next one has somewhere to stand.