Scan 21
The violin & its story : or, the history & construction of the violin, 1905
16 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 7. See the scan on archive.org.
1strate in what direction the story of the origin of bowed instruments is to be looked for. A more important matter is—When did stringed instruments played with the bow come into use in the west?
3Before the end of the eighth or the beginning of the ninth century no trace is to be found of the existence of stringed instruments on the continent of Europe, but a poet named Venans Fortunat, Bishop of Poitiers, who died about A.D. 609, and who is said to have written some elegant poems about the year 570, tells us that the Crwth or Crouth of the Welsh Bards was known in his day, and that it was probably known in England before his own time. In the following verse the poet spells the word as "chrotta" :—
5"Romanusque lyra plaudat tibi, Barbara harpa,
6Græcus achilliaca, chrotta Brittanna canat."
8which may be vernacularised thus :—
10"The Romans praised thee upon the lyre, the Barbarian with the harp;
11The Greeks with the cither, and the Britons with the crouth."
13About the middle of the fifth century, as is well known, the Saxons conquered a part of England, and it may be thought that they brought the Crouth with them. But this idea, plausible as it is at first sight, will not hold water when we remember that the Welsh were never subdued by the Saxons; that the Crouth remained for a long time unknown to any other people than the Welsh in these islands: and that later on its use was restricted almost entirely to Wales. The researches of our savans have proved beyond doubt that the Welsh people are of Indo-Germanic descent, and we have no grounds for believing otherwise than that the original home of the Crouth was India. That the Crouth was improved in the course of the centuries, is evident from some of the pictures of it which have come down to our own day.
15The most ancient form of this instrument is the "Crouth trithant," that is, the crouth with three strings,
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.