Dr. Schmidt explains the world: Hobby Horsing: Man as horse and rider

During my daughter’s project week there is the Hobby Horsing group. Have you ever heard of this?

I know the word because at some point I read something about the origin of the word hobby, i.e. in the sense of favorite leisure activity. But this is the first time I’ve heard of what’s now coming out of Finland as a trend sport, that people complete a course with a hobby horse they usually built themselves. I haven’t seen anything like that yet.

The hobbyhorse is actually rather old-fashioned. I have costume films in mind where little princes gallop around on something like this in the castle garden.

There are pictures from the 16th century and the ancient Greeks are said to have had something like this. But it actually has more of the character of a children’s toy. And it was used in carnival parades in ancient times. People basically built a horse’s body around themselves out of a few slats and fabric and then ran around the area as a horse and rider. The church had problems with this, they considered it satanic. But that was a long time ago.

Satanic hobbyhorses?

Not the horse, all those costume parades. But it was in vain.

With hobby horsing, children and adults actually learn something like dressage. It’s really quite bizarre.

Vegan dressage riding, so to speak…

… or democratization of riding? Anyone can afford a hobbyhorse.

I’m not a rider, my respect for horses is definitely too great, but from what I hear it’s a completely different story. Even if supporters of radical animal protection don’t see it that way, there definitely seems to be a kind of living partnership between humans and animals.

Don’t underestimate the close connection children have with cuddly toys. But how did the hobby horse game become synonymous with hobby?

The change in meaning originally came from reading an English novel by Laurence Sterne that was quite popular in the 19th century. He probably used it there for the first time in this sense. Some English lordship apparently had a favorite pastime, and it was called a hobby horse.

The hobbyhorse game was certainly not a mass phenomenon. How does a word for something specific become a word for the general?

It’s exactly the other way around. It is precisely the somewhat specific leisure activities that are referred to with this figurative meaning. So if someone read novels, it probably wasn’t what they thought was a hobby. While, let’s say, someone in the 19th century had started traveling along all the newly opened railway lines, they would probably have found it sufficiently special to make it exactly that: a hobby. In addition, significant leisure time only came into life for most people in the 20th century. Anyone who wasn’t part of the upper or upper middle class didn’t have that at all before.

What hobbies were there in the distant past?

Early hobbies probably included traveling, particularly with an archeology or botanizing perspective. In the beginning, there were often no specialist scientists doing this. For example, in England there were quite a few pastors who apparently had well-paid parishes and were not particularly busy with their work. And then they moved around and, in addition to theology, also studied plants, animals and minerals. That was her hobbyhorse.

Nowadays, private hobbies tend not to move the world forward.

You can see it like this. But you can also look at it the other way around. For the regeneration of labor power, it is definitely useful in the sense of capital if I do something in my free time that restores my mental abilities. Hobbies that seem pointless at first glance can also make a contribution to this.