Fiðla
Fiðla , also fidhla, fidla (derived from " Fidel "), was a bow-drawn box zither in Iceland , which disappeared at the end of the 19th century. According to the only two surviving specimens, which are now in the Icelandic National Museum, there was a fiðla with two strings in the north of the island and a four-string fiðla in the south . Similar stringed instruments, which are counted among the drone zithers because of their narrow shape and small number of melody strings , used to exist in Scandinavia . There are fidla called plucked instruments known from the legendary world.
Design and style of play
The corpus consisted of a long rectangular or narrow trapezoidal wooden box with a wooden ceiling. The strings were stretched from one narrow side to the tuning pegs on the other side. It is unclear whether the strings of all instruments ran over a movable bridge placed on the ceiling . The four-string fiðla in the National Museum , made around 1800, has a bridge near the four lateral vertebrae. There was no fingerboard. The strings were made of horse hair, sheep intestine or brass wire.
One of the two strings was touched from below with a finger of the left hand to form the melody, while the right hand stroked the bow over all the strings.
Similar instruments
- Langspil , an Icelandic drone zither
- Gue , a historic, elongated box lyre from the Shetland Islands
- Tautirut , a painted box zither of the Inuit in Canada
literature
- Amanda M. Burt: Fidhla. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Vol. 2, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, p. 278
Web links
- Hildur Heimisdóttir: Langspil and Icelandic Fiðla. (Student thesis) Det Jyske Music Conservatory, Aarhus 2012