The name given in Middle German to one of the most widely used plucked string instruments in north-western Europe from pre-Christian to medieval times. (For some related meanings of the term, see Rotte (i).)
This instrument, now usually known as the ‘round’ or Germanic lyre, was a descendant of the ancient Lyre which originated in western Asia, was thence introduced into Egypt and later adopted and developed by the Greeks (see Panum). Representations of lyre-playing figures incised on pottery urns of the 6th century bce from Sopron, Hungary, and on a bucket from Kleinglein in Styria, Austria, both of the Hallstatt ‘C’ culture, show that the early Iron Age peoples of Europe possessed a similar instrument; of the later pre-Christian Celts the historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century bce, records that they played on instruments ‘resembling lyres’. In Wales a curved antler plaque with circular perforations, very possibly part of the yoke of a lyre, was excavated in 1957 from a Celtic hill-fort of the 3rd century bce at Dinorben, Denbighshire (Gardner and Savory, 1964).
The Celtic ‘crwth’, ‘cruit’ and ‘crot’, English ‘rote’ and ‘crowd’, French ‘rote’ and German ‘rotte’ are obviously closely related etymologically. It is uncertain, however, whether the use of the instrument spread to Germany eastwards from Ireland or north-westwards from central Europe, or whether, as seems most likely, it developed in several countries simultaneously. The generic Latin term for plucked instruments, ‘cithara’, comes from a verb meaning ‘to pluck’, as does the Anglo-Saxon word ‘hearpe’. Archaeological findings combined with the evidence of manuscript illustrations and the writings of early theorists suggest that, in Anglo-Saxon and early medieval times at least, the words ‘hearpe’, ‘rotte’ and ‘cithara’ were all used to describe the same instrument, or type of instrument. It seems probable that the 6th-century poet Venantius Fortunatus was referring to varieties of the same class of instrument in his much quoted couplet:
Romanusque
lyra, plaudat tibi barbarus harpa,
Graecus achilliaca, chrotta Britanna canat.
(‘Let the Roman praise you with the lyre, the barbarian with the harp, the Greek with the achilliaca; let the British [or Breton] rotte sing.’)
Instruments of the lyre class consist of a soundbox with two symmetrical arms rising from it and a yoke or crossbar joining them at the top. The strings run across the soundbox and are usually connected to it by a bridge. The rotte, or Germanic lyre, had more in common with the ancient Greek kithara than with the other important Greek string instrument, the lyra. In both kithara and rotte the upright arms formed a continuation of the soundbox and were hollowed out for part of their length to provide an extension of the resonating space. In the kithara, however, the strings were secured to a straight crossbar which projected beyond the arms at either end, whereas in the rotte this yoke section was curved and in almost all cases merged with the arms so that the rounded shape of the upper part resembled, or sometimes exactly mirrored, that of the lower.
Remains of several ‘round’ lyres have been excavated since the mid-19th century, and the combined evidence of these sets of fragments provides us with precise details of the shape, dimensions and construction of rottes during the 5th to 8th centuries. To date three examples have been found in Germany and six in England. Of the two lyres from the Alemannic cemetary at Oberflacht, Württemburg (see Paulsen, 1992), one, from Grave 31, was excavated in 1846 by F. Dürrich and W. Menzel and the other, from Grave 84, is recorded as having been acquired in 1896 by the Berliner Museum für Völkerkunde but was probably excavated at the same time. Just under half of the first instrument, which was of oak, has survived, including the whole length of one side and a considerable portion of the soundbox. The remaining arm is hollow for most of its length and an incipient curve at the top indicates both that the yoke was of a piece with the arms and that, at the point where the vertical line of the grain would have become a disadvantage, the front face was cut away to a depth of 6 mm to accommodate an inserted facing (presumably of wood, with the grain running at right angles to that of the original) to give extra strength to this part of the instrument. The rest of the yoke and the whole of the inserted piece are missing and the number of peg-holes cannot be estimated. The lyre is 7th century, and is now in the collection of the Württembergisches Landesmuseum, Stuttgart. The second instrument, probably from the 6th century, had six peg-holes and was also of oak. It was complete apart from strings, pegs and tailpiece, but was destroyed during World War II. Photographs show that the upper part of this rotte did not have the padlock shape of the other excavated examples; the crossbar slotted into the upright arms and was secured with a wooden nail at either end (fig.1b). The Cologne lyre (fig.1c; Werner, 1954), dating from about ce 700, was discovered in a Frankish grave beneath the floor of St Severin in 1938 by F. Fremersdorf. The pegs disintegrated on exposure to the air but the greater part of the instrument survived until its destruction by bombing during World War II. The arms were partially hollowed out, and there were six peg-holes in the yoke. Remains of a substantial iron tailpiece were also recovered. The lyre itself was of oak, with a maple soundboard.
Of the instruments found in England, four were excavated from pagan Anglo-Saxon graves in the eastern part of East Anglia, within a circle of less than 18 miles’ radius; not surprisingly, they are very much alike in design and construction. The lyre from the royal ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk (fig.1a; M. Bruce-Mitford, 1983), excavated in 1939, is the best preserved of these because, when the burial chamber housing the grave-goods collapsed, the upper part of the instrument was fortuitously trapped between two bronze bowls, and these protected the wood. The remains consist of a yoke with six peg-holes, fragments of pegs, substantial portions of two parallel arms which are hollow for part of their length, and two bird-headed escutcheons of gilt-bronze covering the joints between arms and yoke. The hollowed area was originally covered by a soundboard secured with headless bronze tacks. The instrument, which is made entirely of maple, with pegs of poplar or willow, dates from the 7th century, before ce 625, and is now in the British Museum. Of the lyres discovered in 6th–7th-century inhumations at Bergh Apton and Morning Thorpe, Norfolk (Lawson, 1978, 1987), and at Snape, Suffolk (Lawson, 1999), the only parts to survive were, again, those which had been in contact with, and thus preserved by, metal: i.e. the bronze fittings covering the joints or attatched to the arms. Although the relatively lowly context of the Bergh Apton and Snape burial indicates that they were probably the graves of scops (minstrels) the rottes found in them are as finely wrought as the royal instrument from Sutton Hoo, and very similar to it in construction. Only the fittings are less elaborate: the bronze joint-plates of the Bergh Apton lyre are polished but undecorated, and those of the Snape instrument consist merely of plain, disc-headed rivits. In both cases, as also in the vestigial remains of the lyre from the warrior's grave at Morning Thorpe, a bronze strip was wrapped around the base of each arm, apparently to secure the soundboard.
The earliest of the Germanic lyres found in England, indeed the earliest-known to date in Europe (unless one includes the 3rd-century bce antler plaque from Dinorben), comes from a 5th-century emigrant's grave at Abingdon, Berkshire, excavated in 1934 by E.T. Leeds and D.B. Harden and now in the Abingdon Museum (R. Bruce-Mitford, 1983). In the absence of any protective metal components, all the wood had perished leaving only the bone facings from the yoke, or arch, which indicate that the instrument had six strings. The remains of the lyre from the royal burial ground mound at Taplow, Buckinghamshire (R. Bruce-Mitford, 1983), not far from Abingdon, which were excavated in 1883 by Joseph Stevens and are now in the British Museum, date from around ce 600 and consist of the yoke section, fragments of the arms at their junction with the yoke and a pair of bronze escutcheons (gilded, ornate and bird-headed, as at Sutton Hoo) covering the joints between arms and yoke. The instrument exhibits features of both the English and the German methods of construction. the bronze joint-plates are a structural detail peculiar, it seems, to English lyres, since they do not appear in any of the German instruments. On the other hand, the peg-hole area of the yoke is reinforced with countersunk facings or inlays (like those at Abingdon but in this case made of horn, held in place by bronze rivets); this method of construction is a feature of two of the three German lyres but was not used for any of the East Anglian instruments. The Taplow, Snape and Bergh Apton lyres appear to have been fitted with wrist-straps, as, possibly, was the one from Grave 31 at Oberflacht.
At Hedeby, the great Viking market and trading centre in Jutland, Denmark, the arch or yoke section of a lyre dating from the 10th century was unearthed in the early 1980s (Lawson, 1984). It is made of yew, at present the only known example of a string instrument constructed from this type of wood, though yew (along with oak, maple and holly) is mentioned in the 53rd riddle of the Exeter Book, which is thought to describe a lyre. The yoke has at least six peg-holes and closely resembles those from Abingdon and Cologne in shape and proportions.
In addition to instruments, at least a dozen lyre bridges have been found, most dating from the 7th–9th centuries. Those from a Frankish cemetery at Concevreux, northern France (now in the Römisch-Germanisches Museum, Cologne) and a site near Scole, Norfolk (7th century, now in the British Museum) are both of bronze; the 9th-century bridge from Birka, Sweden, is of bone (fig.2a). An 8th-century lyre bridge from Broa i Halle, Gotland (fig.2b), two 8th-century examples from Elisenhof, Schleswig, and three from Dorestad, the Netherlands, probably dating from the 8th–9th centuries (Werner, 1955; M. Bruce-Mitford, 1983), are all of amber. Buried wooden artefacts tend to survive only in exceptional conditions such as those at the waterlogged 10th–11th-century site at York which in 1979 yielded the only wooden lyre bridge to have been found in England to date (Morris, 1999). Identification of the wood is not possible, but the two 13th-century wooden bridges found at Gamlebyen, Oslo (Kolltveit, 1997), one of which (excavated in 1971) appears to have belonged to a lyre, are both of pine. In no case has a bridge been found together with lyre remains, but notches cut for the strings show that with two exceptions (the Birka and Oslo bridges, apparently intended for seven-string instruments) all the bridges were designed to take six strings.
To the catalogue of ‘accessories’ can be added a single bronze tuning-peg with a spatulate head, which was found with the 7th-century lyre bridge near Scole. Apart from this isolated example and the fragmentary wooden pegs belonging to the Sutton Hoo lyre, all pegs found in England so far are of bone and none predates the 12th century (M. Bruce-Mitford, 1983). There is some doubt as to the age of the four diverse and unstratified pegs excavated in 1925 from the site of the Saxon monastery at Whitby, Yorkshire, but recent opinion inclines to a late 11th- or 12th-century, rather than a 7th-century, date.
On the question of size, Schlesinger argued convincingly that there must have been at least three different sizes of rotte, basing her theory on the evidence provided by an illustration in an 11th-century manuscript at Klosterneuburg, near Vienna, in which three rottes of treble, tenor and bass size are depicted, each held in a different position. However, all these rottes are bowed, not plucked. The bow appears to have been introduced some time during the 9th or 10th century, and the evidence of both archaeological material and manuscript illustrations indicates that during the centuries before the bowed version was adopted only one size of rotte was used. The small lyre-playing figure in the 9th-century Utrecht Psalter, also mentioned by Schlesinger, is too ambiguous to allow a firm conclusion as to the size of the instrument in relation to the player.
The surviving remains, though incomplete, tend to complement each other so that when studied together they yield positive information about almost every detail of the instrument. Thus it appears that (with some variations, notably the Cologne lyre, which measured only 51·3 cm in length) an average rotte of the 5th to 8th centuries was a six-string instrument measuring about 76 cm in length, 20 cm in breadth and 2·5 cm in depth. The strings were attatched to a tailpiece which was either clamped round the bottom of the instrument and fastened at the back or secured by a cord tied round a button or peg as on a violin; they then passed over a bridge and up to the pegs in the yoke. The body and arms, and in German instruments the yoke section as well, were cut from a single piece of wood. The yoke was either oval in section, as at Sutton Hoo, or had flat front and back surfaces which were reinforced with an inlay of bone or horn, or of wood with the grain running at right angles. The resonating space was hollowed out of the solid, extending part of the way up the arms. The hollowed area was covered by a soundboard about 2 mm thick; sometimes bronze pins or strips were used to secure the soundboard to the body. There is positive evidence that rottes of this period had no soundholes (M. Bruce-Mitford, 1983). The shape of the instrument varied, some versions being gently waisted or tapered from top to bottom and from front to back (e.g. Cologne, Morning Thorpe and Oberflacht Grave 84), while others were straight-sided (e.g. Sutton Hoo, Oberflacht Grave 31, Bergh Apton and Snape).
The scanty remains of the rotte from Taplow are of maple wood, as is the whole of the Sutton Hoo instrument, the best-preserved English specimen. In the German rottes, however, maple or some other equally fine-grained wood was used for the soundboard only, and the rest of the instrument was made of oak. The pegs at Sutton Hoo were of softwood but the facings strengthening the peg-hole area in many of the excavated lyres suggest that hardwood or bone pegs may have been equally common during the 5th to 8th centuries, though no bone pegs of earlier than 12th-century date have yet been found in western Europe. There were wooden pegs in position in the yoke of the Cologne instrument but they disintegrated on exposure to the air. The use of harder materials for bridges and for the reinforcement of peg-holes is a possible indication that strings were made of metal; the technology for wire-drawing certainly existed in Anglo-Saxon times. The Sutton Hoo lyre, however, was very probably strung with gut (though twisted or plaited horsehair is a possibility), for even this cuts into softwood under tension and the pegs would soon have been destroyed by the pressure of metal strings. Lyres with softwood pegs and gut strings would probably have been equipped with wooden bridges. Wood is, of course, much less likely to survive, but may well have been the most commonly-used material for both pegs and bridges.
With one exception (fig.3) there is as yet no archaeological material to show how the rotte developed during the centuries between the Hedeby instrument and the Welsh Crwth (a folk instrument, directly descended from the rotte). Representations in illuminated manuscripts and sculpture reflect the evolution of the instrument during this period. The earliest illustrations of the rotte, in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of the 8th century, show an instrument closely similar to the excavated specimens of the same period (fig.4), but within two centuries several important changes can be observed. Two French manuscripts of the 9th century depict a plucked instrument of rotte-like shape (though executed in late antique style) with a fingerboard running down the centre parallel with the upright arms. In south German manuscripts the waisted shape persists, with the curves becoming increasingly pronounced (fig.5); from the 10th–11th centuries it frequently resembles a figure 8 (fig.6). Round-topped lyres on Irish stone crosses of the 8th–10th centuries, on the other hand, are usually straight-sided with a squared-off bottom edge (Rimmer, 1969). Soundholes are occasionally depicted from the 10th century onwards, and in the Klosterneuburg manuscript bow and soundholes appear together. A particularly interesting example in a mid-11th-century French manuscript (St Martial Troper, F-Pn lat.1118, f.104r) shows a bowed rotte with fingerboard and bridge, but without soundholes – an early version of the crwth. In all these representations the instrument is shown being played by King David.
The plucked rotte was usually held on the lap either upright or inclined slightly away from the player. An 8th-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript (GB-DRc B.11.30, f.18v) shows a strap extending from the base of one of the arms of the instrument and encircling David’s left wrist. The left hand is plucking the strings, while the right lightly touches one arm near the top, providing additional support. Remains of leather straps and bronze strap-terminals, very probably from lyre wrist-straps, were found at Taplow, Bergh Apton and Snape; a similar device may also have been a feature of the lyre from Grave 31, Oberflacht. In iconography where no wrist-strap is shown, left- and right-handed players appear with equal frequency. In many instances one hand is shown gripping the frame – very often at the top with the index and middle fingers clamped round the yoke – while the other plucks the strings in the open area (SachsH). There is a possibility that the instrument was held with the front facing the player; manuscript evidence is conflicting on this as on almost every other point, but several illustrations clearly show it in this position, and the lyre in the Cologne grave was buried bridge-side down. Both here and in Grave 31 at Oberflacht the instrument was clasped in the right arm of the deceased (Werner, 1954).
There is no record of how the rotte was tuned; the prevalence of the six-string version suggests either a pentatonic scale or the first six notes of a heptatonic scale after Hucbald, as favoured by Lawson, although other solutions are possible. Tuning-keys are often depicted in use, possibly suggesting the need for frequent retuning to different modes, or perhaps pointing to the use of gut for strings, since gut is more susceptible than metal to changes in temperature and humidity.
The triangular harp, which first appears in manuscripts and sculpture about 900, gradually supplants the round lyre in representations of King David the musician, and from the 13th century the lyre occurs less and less frequently, its disappearance from manuscripts reflecting its loss of status as an instrument associated with royalty and the nobility. A 14th-century lyre from Kravik, Numedal (now in the Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo; see fig.3), which probably belonged to a prosperous farmer, is crudely designed and finished in comparison with the clean lines and superior craftsmanship of earlier instruments.
A bowed instrument of lyre type continued to flourish in rural cultures for several centuries. The Finnish jouhikantele, Swedish stråkharpa, Norwegian giga, Shetland gue and Welsh crwth, all varieties of bowed rotte, were still being played until well into the 19th century and even later (see Andersson, 1923). A similar instrument also existed among the east European peoples. 13 gusli, dating from the 11th to 15th centuries, were found during the 1960s at Novgorod, Russia, and in Poland others of the 11th and 13th centuries have been excavated in Opole and Gdańsk respectively. The medieval gusli, or gęśle, was a plucked instrument with strings varying in number from three to eight according to size. There appear to have been two types: one with a ‘playing window’, no fingerboard and an asymmetrical top, the other a kind of psaltery which was held flat across the knees like a zither. This instrument, too, persisted until well into the 19th century.
MYRTLE BRUCE-MITFORD
SachsH
K. Schlesinger: The Instruments of the Modern Orchestra and Early Records of the Precursors of the Violin Family, ii (London, 1910/R)
H. Panum: Middelalderens strenginstrumenter (Copenhagen, 1915–31; Eng. trans., rev., c1940/R)
O. Andersson: Stråkharpan: en studie i nordisk instrumenthistoria (Helsinki, 1923; Eng. trans., 1930/R, as The Bowed-Harp)
J. Werner: ‘Leier und Harfe im germanischen Frühmittelalter’, Aus Verfassungs- und Landesgeschichte: Festschrift … von Theodor Mayer, ed. H. Büttner, O. Feger and B. Meyer, i (Lindau, 1954/R) 9–15
A. Simon: ‘An Early Medieval Slav gęśle’, GSJ, x (1957), 63–5
H. Steger: David rex et propheta (Nuremberg, 1961), 41–75
W. Gardner and H.N. Savory: Dinorben: a Hill-Fort Occupied in Early Iron Age and Roman Times (Cardiff, 1964)
J. Rimmer: The Irish Harp (Cork, 1969, 3/1984), 13–27
F. Crane: Extant Medieval Musical Instruments: a Provisional Catalogue by Types (Iowa City, 1972)
G. Lawson: ‘The Lyre from Grave 22’, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Bergh Apton, Norfolk, ed. B. Green and A. Rogerson (Gressenhall, 1978), 87–97; figs.78, 102–09
M. Bruce-Mitford: ‘The Musical Instrument’, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, iii, ed. R. Bruce-Mitford and A.C. Evans (London, 1983), pt ii, 611–701
R. Bruce-Mitford: ‘The Sutton Hoo Lyre in Relation to the Taplow Lyre’, ibid., 701–20
G. Lawson: ‘Zwei Saiteninstrumente aus Haithabu’, Berichte über die Ausgrabungen in Haithabu, xix (1984), 151–9
G. Lawson: ‘Report on the Lyre Remains from Grave 97’, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Morning Thorpe, Norfolk, ed. B. Green, A. Rogerson and S.G. White (Dereham, 1987), i, 166–71; figs.460–63
P. Paulsen: Die Holzfunde aus dem Gräberfeld bei Oberflacht und ihre kulturhistorische Bedeutung, xli/2 (Stuttgart, 1992), 147–55
V. Povetkin: ‘Musical Finds from Novgorod’, The Archaeology of Novgorod, Russia, ed. M.A. Brisbane, trans. K. Judelson (Lincoln, 1992), 206–23
G. Kolltveit: ‘Spor etter middelalderens musikkliv: to strengestoler fra Gamlebyen, Oslo’, Viking, lx (1997), 69–83 [incl. Eng. summary]
G. Lawson: ‘The Lyre Remains from Grave 32’, Snape Anglo-Saxon Cemetery: Excavations and Surveys 1824–1991, ed. W. Filmer-Sankey and T. Pestell (Bury St Edmunds, 1999)
C.A. Morris: Craft, Industry and Everyday Life: Wood and Woodworking in Anglo-Scandinavian and Medieval York, Archaeology of York, xvii/13 (York, 1999)
