Books › The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878 › scan 35
Scan 35
The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878
20 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
12. Icelandic. Fidla.
23. Danish. Fedel.
3Then we have Vedel, Veel, Viool (Dutch); Vedel, Vedele (Flemish), Fiedel, Fidel, Giege (Modern German).
4Fythele, Fithele,—and Fythelers (fiddlers) are alluded to in the Old English Romances. In the legendary life of St. Christopher, written about the year 1200, is this passage:—
6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cristofre hym served longe;
7 The Kynge loved melodye of fithele and of songe.
9The poet Lidgate, at the beginning of the 15th century, writes of
11 Instrumentys that did excelle,
12 Many moo than I kan telle:
13 Harpys, Fythaless, and eke Rotys, &c.
15Chaucer, in his "Canterbury Tales," says of the Oxford Clerk, that he was so fond of books and study, as to have loved Aristotle better
17 Than robès rich, or fidel, or sautrie—
19and his Absolon, the Parish-Clerk, a genius of a different cast, and exquisitely described, is a spruce little fellow, who sang, danced, and played on the species of fiddle then known. An instrument remotely allied to the fiddle—the ribible, a diminutive of rebec, a small viol with three strings—is also alluded to by Chaucer. Referring to a later period, there is evidence to show that an instrument of the violin kind was used in England before the dissolution of monasteries, in the time of our eighth Henry, in the fact that something similar to it in shape is seen depicted upon a glass window of the
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