Another name for the triangular Psaltery (see illustration). In a 12th-century copy made at St Gallen of Notker Balbulus's translation of the psalms, the Greco-Latin word ‘psalterium’ is consistently glossed as ‘rotta’. The copyist has added to the blank last page his own complaint that the ancient ten-stringed psaltery has been adopted by musicians and actors, who have altered its mystic triangular shape to suit their convenience, increased the number of strings and given it the barbarian name ‘rotta’. Among the unfamiliar instruments being brought back to western Europe at this time by returning Crusaders was the santir, a Middle Eastern plucked chordophone which normally had the shape of an equilateral triangle with one point truncated to form a trapezium. It is probable that the similar-sounding biblical name ‘psalterium’ attached itself to this new instrument, which rapidly became popular in secular society. The santir/psalterium appears frequently in illuminated manuscripts from the 11th century, and also, further modified, as the ‘istromento di porco’, so called because its shape resembled that of a pig's head. It was perhaps this sort of alteration that prompted the complaint by the 12th-century copyist of Notker Balbulus. The musicians and actors he speaks of may well also have applied to the new instrument, whatever its shape, the name of one already familiar to them though different in appearance – the Germanic lyre. An epigram in an 11th-century German manuscript refers to ‘psalterium triangulum, i.e. rottam’.
Galpin was of the opinion that by the late Middle Ages there were two kinds of rotte, the Germanic lyre (see Rotte (ii)) and ‘a southern form, somewhat triangular in shape, with many more strings, backed by a sound-board similar to that of the Psaltery but distinct from it …’. He cites as evidence a couplet from a 15th-century poem:
‘rotys
of Almayne
And eke of Arragon and Spayne’
and adds that the Arab writer Ashshakandi had declared in 1231 that the ‘rotteh’ was a musical instrument made in Seville.
The name ‘rotte’ has, in fact, been loosely applied to various kinds of stringed instruments at one time or another. A 15th-century dictionary, for example, gives the definition ‘Rott, rubeba, est parva figella’ (A rotte, or rybybe, is a small fiddle).
ReeseMMA
F.W. Galpin: Old English Instruments of Music (London, 1910/R), 6–7, 58–9
H. Panum: Middelalderens strenginstrumenter (Copenhagen, 1915–31; Eng. trans., rev., c1940/R)
H. Steger: ‘Die Rotte’, DVLG, xxxv (1961), 96–147
MYRTLE BRUCE-MITFORD