Jouhikko project: Part 1

You thought I was going to talk about building instruments. Haha, gotcha.

This is actually

PROLOGUE 2: DOCUMENTATION AND RATIONALE

So you want to be a Viking bard...

This is easier said than done. We don't have anything resembling Viking written music, or indeed any way to make sense of it if we found some. We have some poetry, like the Eddas, and those can be made into ad hoc songs. This is how we got My Mother Told Me, which is a couple stanzas turned into a sort of sea shanty for the Vikings TV show.

 

 

Colm's pronunciation differs from the possibly more grounded pronunciation that Jackson Crawford uses, but hey look, he's playing a jouhikko!

Problem is that this is a totally modern interpretation. Maybe we'll have rolled the dice and landed on exactly how they'd have done it, but let's be real: we're in the dark as to how compositions actually went. We have a pretty good guess that poetry accompanied by a backing instrument would have been common, but without any way of knowing how they'd have played them, all we can do is try to rebuild what they had and play the instruments based on regional traditional styles - they're the closest thing we have to the surviving musical sensibility, though even they will have evolved considerably. This Hurstwic article lists references to music in the sagas, but the references are few and far between. Being a musician was seen as a mark of prestige, much like being a skilled poet, but beyond that, not much is to be had.

Most records of music in the area come after the rise of Christianity, which isn't a reliable gauge of what the culture would have been like before.

Looking for extant instruments is also tricky. While we have great records of hygiene tools and other small organic items, instruments actually belonging to the Vikings are remarkably few and far between. From 10th century Birka, there is a simple bone flute. From 10th century Jorvik, there is a set of pan pipes, drilled into a single piece of wood. This has enough surviving holes to play five notes, though the break on one side of the piece suggests at least two more higher notes were available when it was new.

 

Tiny drawing c/o https://panflute.net/history-of-the-panflute.html

 

There also exists an unfinished, possibly damaged in construction, amber bridge for some sort of string instrument. This was found in Dorestad and dates to the 9th century, but what exactly it went to is uncertain. Judging by string number and spacing, a six string lyre seems likely, but even that educated guess as to genre leaves us with a useless number of possibilities.

That was illuminating, but unhelpful. What evidence are you actually using?

So for relatively intact lyres, the Anglo-Saxons and Germanic tribes had better luck than the Vikings did. Two prominent survivors are relevant here. The first is from the 7th century Sutton Hoo burial. The body of the instrument does not survive, but the arms, yoke, and two metal ornamental plates do - for some value of the word.

via Wikipedia, the surviving fragments

 

Of some note is the joinery - the yoke is a separate piece from the rest of the instrument, attached by a sort of pyramidal peg joint partway down the arms. The yoke has its grain perpendicular to the rest of the instrument, so that stress from the pegs doesn't risk tearing out the wood. The arms are mostly hollow, with a soundboard nailed on with bronze pins. The body of the instrument is maple, and came with a beaver pelt carrying bag. Reconstructions suggest a deceptively simple straight-sided rectangular shape with rounded top and bottom.

 

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

 

Meanwhile in Germany, the Trossingen lyre remains in remarkably good condition. The arms are slightly angled outwards, most or all of the pegs are still in place, and the bridge is even still present. The face is richly engraved with a scene of a shield wall.

By No machine-readable author provided. Opodeldok~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). - No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=644808

 

 

 

These aren't the only examples of such instruments; we have a small assortment of instruments matching this general form from around Northwestern Europe and Britain. The bow, however, lacks documentation from this time period, or indeed, much documentation at all. Our earliest example comes from the Klosterneuburg psalter, which features an illustration of King David not with his usual harp, but with a bowed lyre, along with two other musicians on similar instruments. This is from the 1100s.

 

 

The Trondheim Cathedral, opened in the 1300s, features a grotesque of a man very clearly playing a jouhikko-like lyre. The artist must have either been familiar with the instrument or referenced the pose, because the player is playing with the backs of his fingers (as is traditional), sitting down, and gripping his bow correctly.

I wouldn't personally hold it tilted that far over, but in context, there's a pillar immediately to his left, which he's craning his head around. I've broken bows by lack of spatial awareness before, and also had to cram into tightly packed sessions, so I can hardly blame him for scrunching his posture.

The jouhikko itself is a traditional Finnish instrument, played with the backs of the fingers. It's traditionally carved from a single piece of wood, though it can be built other ways, and exact planforms vary. Some have tight hand-holes that only let you reach two strings with your fingers; others have slender arms. Some have large pyramidal blocks with holes at the bottom end to admit the tailpiece cord; others have square bottoms and buttons like a violin. Styles of playing include flat-bridge designs where all strings drone at once, which is common for four-string tagelharpas, or curved-bridge designs where only two strings are played at once. The latter approach is the usual for three-string instruments. The instrument's traditional modern practitioners include Lassi Logren and Rauno Nieminen as authority figures, alongside some less traditional pagan bands like Wardruna.

And that's basically it for historical documentation. The bowed lyre is something of a dark horse, and preserved actual instruments are nightmares for archaeological survivability - thin organic materials decay quickly, and one could imagine that high value items like those often didn't become grave goods. Someone wealthy could perhaps afford to bury a lyre, but one could just as easily see a good instrument getting handed down through the years until it fell apart.

 

What does this mean for a reenactor's jouhikko?

No part of what I'm doing is neatly documentable to my own time period, so I'm stuck speculating no matter what. The upshot of this is that I'm free to put my own spin on the project, because my layman's guess is just as wrong as anyone else's. My approach will be to make instruments that blend in with traditional plucked lyres, but still are functionally jouhikkos. Due to fortunate material availability and an extra dose of ambition, I'll be building two instruments: a four-string flat-bridged tagelharpa based on the Sutton Hoo lyre, and a three string curved-bridge jouhikko based on the Trossingen lyre.

Jouhikko project: Prologue

Years and years ago, one of my crafting inspirations (who currently is living the dream as a blacksmith down in Pennsylvania), built a Sutton Hoo lyre, and I thought that was the coolest thing. I've played instruments since I was but single digits of age, and the art of constructing an instrument was something I never thought I'd be able to do on my own. But, to be able to have a period Viking instrument (or as close as possible to one, more on that later) would be amazing.

A few years later, my dad and I built a CnC machine. I used it for several projects, but it eventually fell victim to the need for streamlining and some construction difficulties with the gantry. I never got around to my goal of CADing out a lyre and carving one that way. Not only would that solve my confidence issues, in that all the precision work would have been done by a robot, but it would also eliminate most of the need for tools - at the time, I lived in a literal hotel room. 

So, that dream languished for probably most of a decade. I got to handle one of the lyres on a return visit to my old friend's neck of the woods, but that was as close as I came. 

Last year, I discovered what a tagelharpa was, along with its structural twin, the jouhikko. Not only was the rustic droning sound fantastic, it filled essentially the same niche as a regular lyre for something portable and period I could take to bardics. My old beat-up ukulele (which I had re-tuned as a mandolin stand-in) just wasn't the same, obviously. The jouhikko would also be nice because I have ten years of fiddle experience; thus, I wouldn't have to worry about that part of the learning curve. 

I also found a website that claimed to sell bowed lyres on sale for about $300, which was a fairly affordable price. Lesson learned - don't buy from Staghelm, no matter how good the price is. As of 2024, I don't think anyone on Reddit can prove they've produced a single instrument in the last year, and they certainly didn't make mine. They also didn't make an effort to dispute paypal the second time, so at least I got my money back. But, on the way back from GWW last year, I got into a conversation on Facebook with another SCAdian named Patrick. We'd met briefly at the one event I had gone to in his neck of the woods, and I was impressed with his selection of instruments (which probably included the jouhikko, but I didn't retain the info at the time). But we hadn't really interacted since until we ended up talking about my Staghelm that was probably going to need some TLC if and when it arrived. 

Fast forward to December, Patrick and I met in a coffee shop one morning. It was an absolutely chaotic trip, given that his city is easier to reach by plane than car, but I came back with a loaner jouhikko. That turned into an opportunity to talk more about instruments and their design and building, which culminated in an invitation to Patrick's shop in June. It was, again, something of a chaos trip, given that it was the single free weekend for a month on either side of it, but we had a grand time getting my instruments roughed out. Since then, I've been on my own to do the remaining work. My woodworking time has been divided between 20 minute at a time borrowing the shop at work, and a few weekends of actual work time on the porch.

This is my most complex bit of woodwork so far, and I've put a great lot of thought into it, so this will probably be multiple blog posts as I catch the documentation up to my actual progress.

Many thanks to Patrick, without whom I would undoubtedly be flailing about blindly.

Kaftan and leveling up in weaving complexity

Last year, preparing for War took a great deal of effort. I had enough kit for weekend events at most, and in moderate to cold weather. Great Western War would be five days long and hot, which meant I needed to make more garb pieces, and prepare for heat. This is before counting the dozen-Hedeby-bag project.

This year, going to West-An Tir War, my goals were much more modest. All my old gear still worked, so I wanted to have a new piece of showy garb. I already had a section of diamond twill linen from Woolsome.shop, and patterns from my winter kaftan, so putting one of those together would be easy. The hard part would be the four yards of tablet weaving necessary to trim it out.

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A-II-2_guldgubber_depicting_a_man.jpg

For the kaftan itself, I went for the simple bathrobe-style wrap coat, as depicted on carvings. I did a couple of muslins to check the fit, since I wanted to use my more tailored, newer sleeve pattern, but didn’t know how the length of a tunic pattern would interact with the different body panels from the kaftan pattern. The kaftan pattern, being older, didn't necessarily have the same width body panels as my tunics, and the different handling of the neckline meant that the fabric around the shoulders might behave differently. 

 

The old pattern was for a multilayered coat, and all the pieces I could find were for the layer marked “B.” Was that the outside, inside, middle… who knows, past me didn’t think to write that down. Or maybe I did, on the layer marked A. Maybe I figured it would be obvious when I held the pieces up to each other and one was slightly larger; either way, with no comparison, a muslin was the only way to be sure. The new kaftan would only be one layer of a fairly breezy fabric, so I would only need to match the lining for size. Then I needed to verify if I still needed gores and make sure the neckline was adequate.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/473159504599083340/

 

My old coat left the back of the neck as a straight cut, since I wanted the collar to rise up and give coverage from weather, and then the inner front panel was shaped differently than the outer. This was partially to close off the neck more, and partially to emulate the bottom center museum illustration, which seemed to show both panels at different angles. The new one warranted carving out the back of the collar for aesthetics, and also adding a couple of inches of straight vertical before starting the angled edge. This would give me a closer fit around the back and sides of my neck, which I prefer for sun protection.

I also reduced the bottom width of the front panels, as I had made a realization during fabric layout: I had purchased my usual 3m of fabric for making a tunic. A normal tunic doesn’t have two huge front panels, so I would have to be judicious about my fabric use.

When I reached my final muslin, I was close enough that I knew the result would be wearable, so I made it from one of my old linen bedsheets that got damaged in the wash. This received some Pom Pom and tacky flamingo trim, and I wore it for the Selviergard Spring Offensive Ball.

Many thanks to Kinehild for the loan of a serger for this project. The diamond check linen is a fairly open weave to begin with, and then it’s also linen, so it prefers to violently fly apart if left unattended.

My initial plan for the weaving was a fairly wide, simple double face pattern consisting of long, solid rectangles. The idea was that it would have been easy to make, but unusual for either tablet or inkle patterns. But, as I was looking through my pattern books, I realized that it was a very unusual opportunity to have more than eighteen inch length to show off, and wouldn’t it be cool if I did the Skjoldehamn ankle bands, which was the final pattern in my current favorite book. So I cursed my hubris and started warping in my spare time at work, strewing linen thread across most of the lunchroom. 

 

 

The ensuing pattern was six pages long, took thirty inches per repeat, and took a week to weave one of those patterns. Getting confident near the end, I could shave a day off that, but there’s still only about six, maybe seven repeats.

 

At the very end of the band, I dropped the end of my weaving frame half off the table, which this time broke my frame apart. I tried to use the surviving parts to backstrap weave, but that simply broke the front. So, that was where that particular band ended. 

 

 

Post wash, I ended up with 12 feet of weaving, with just enough left after trimming to have most of a repeat to show off as a sample.

 

 

The complexity of the band let the ends match up really well without any particular effort on my part. I keep the trim seam offset from the sleeve seam so that I'm not stacking the multiple thicknesses of everything in the same place and ending up with a massive thick spot. Even though this band only has two threads per card and is thus rather supple, it's still a much thicker thread than the fabric it's attached to, so folding the ends under creates a lot of bulk.

 

 

Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out. Given a little more room in the fabric, or less snaggy material, I might have made it a little longer, but it's super comfortable as a single layer, and it breathes fantastically.