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.