Books › The heart of music; the story of the violin, 1906 › scan 135
Scan 135
The heart of music; the story of the violin, 1906
17 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1The Heart of Music
3and none of them were perfected until much later, but we find in this Northern instrument a surprising progress in distinctive features, a progress and improvement beyond that of the contemporaneous instruments of the South.
5The ribible, fidel, and hurdy-gurdy are all English branches of the primitive fiddle. They are spoken of constantly in old poems and chronicles, as, too, are the videls of Germany. The Nibelungenlied refers to the twenty-four videlars of Etzel, richly dressed and starting on a message of importance to Burgundy. They brought back with them, it may be remembered, the famous fiddler Volker, "who," says the old historian, "could do as much with his fiddle as another man with the broadsword."
7Chaucer speaks of Absolon, who "could play tunes on a small ribible," and wrote of the Oxford Clerk:
9"For him had lever have at his beddes hed
10A twenty bokes clothed in black and red,
11Of Aristotle and his philosophy
12Than robes rich, or Fidel, or Sautrie."
14The literature of England is especially rich in reference to the fiddle,—the rebeck, rebible, or rowbyble, as it is called in Old English.
16Many of us know the gay young clergyman of Edward II's time, who did " . . . Ratyl on the
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