History of ice-hockey

Stick-and-ball games date back to pre-Christian times. In Europe, these games included the Irish game of hurling, the closely related Scottish game of shinty and versions of field hockey (including "bandie ball," played in England). IJscolf, a game resembling colf on an ice-covered surface, was popular in the Low Countries between the Middle Ages and the Dutch Golden Age. It was played with a wooden curved bat , a wooden or leather ball and two poles (or nearby landmarks), with the objective to hit the chosen point using the least number of strokes. A similar game  had been played for a thousand years or more by the Vikings, as documented in the Icelandic sagas.

British soldiers and immigrants to Canada brought their stick-and-ball games with them and played them on the ice and snow of Canadian winters. In 1825, John Franklin wrote "The game of hockey played on the ice was the morning sport" on Great Bear Lake during one of his Arctic expeditions. A mid-1830s watercolour portrays New Brunswick lieutenant governor Archibald Campbell and his family with British soldiers on skates playing a stick-on-ice sport. Captain R.G.A. Levinge, a British Army officer in New Brunswick during Campbell’s time, wrote about "hockey on ice" on Chippewa Creek (a tributary of the Niagara River) in 1839. In 1843 another British Army officer inKingston, Ontario wrote, "Began to skate this year, improved quickly and had great fun at hockey on the ice." An 1859 Boston Evening Gazette article referred to an early game of hockey on ice in Halifax that year.

Early 19th-century paintings depict shinney , an early form of hockey with no standard rules which was played in Nova Scotia. Many of these early games absorbed the physical aggression of what the Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia called dehuntshigwa'es (lacrosse). Shinney was played on the St. Lawrence River at Montreal and Quebec City, and in Kingston and Ottawa, Ontario. The number of players was often large. To this day, shinney  is a popular Canadian term for an informal type of hockey, either ice or street hockey.

by wikipedia

Today,ice-hockey is one of the most famous sport!!!