Scottish Games

I went to a Celtic festival this weekend and saw the caber toss, the sheaf toss, and the weight throw.  They all had the same thing in common, very simple game design.  Toss something heavy around better than other people can throw it around.  There's actually more complexity than that in the scoring of the caber toss, but I feel like that was developed over the years that caber tossing has been a thing.  For two of those games, it makes sense where the idea came from.  People bored on the job develop some strange competition to try to wile away the hours of mindless manual labor, so they bet on who can throw things farther.  But how the idea of throwing a giant log end over end came to be is beyond me.

Supposedly, people would toss logs over narrow chasms to cross them, but that doesn't really make any sense because that would require a lot more accuracy than caber toss does since you'd have to make sure it flipped on your side of the chasm or you'd lose your log.  Unless Scottish people were constantly needing new and interesting bridges across chasms, I don't see this happening often enough for anyone to really be as skilled as caber tossers are.  But what do I know?  I wasn't alive back then.  It is interesting that there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer to how this game came to be.  It also goes to show that random contests you have with your friends may last the ages and become a world-wide phenomenon!