THE HISTORICAL IRISH HARP: MYTHS DEMYSTIFIED

Andrew Lawrence-King, Katerina Antonenko & Natalia O' Shea

 

ABSTRACT

 

This article presents the work of three scholars from three disciplinary areas, surveying the history of the Irish Harp through the lenses of organology and musicology, supported by literary & mythological studies.

 

Perhaps the most powerful tool for demystifying myths is careful attention to distinctions of date. We should establish as precisely as possible a chronology for all those tunes, texts, artefacts and cultural practices described in nineteenth-century accounts as ‘ancient’ or ‘very old’.

 

The Old Irish word cruit is cognate with European names that refer not to a harp but to the four-sided lyre. Between the 8^th and 11^th centuries, European names referring to lyres (vernacular harpa and Latin cithara) become associated instead with the gut-strung triangular harp.

 

In Gerald of Wales’ 12^th-century Latin, cithara is assumed to mean triangular harp; tympanum is cognate with tiompán and assumed to mean a four-sided lyre. These meanings are highly plausible, but not proven. Gerald states that metal strings are used: it is plausible that he means to link this statement to Ireland. But he does not specify which instrument had metal strings.

 

There is a long gap between the first representation of a triangular harp in Ireland (eleventh century) and the first occurrence of the name cláirseach  (fourteenth century). That name is securely linked to some 18 surviving historical instruments with carved-out bodies and thick metal strings.

 

The simplest explanation of the available data is that the wire-strung cláirseach did not appear until the late 14th century. 

 

In 1820, harp-maker John Egan began to sell his Royal Portable Harps, built like a French harp with gut strings, but equipped with ditals, little finger-levers at the pillar, instead of the foot-pedals. The twentieth-century successor to Egan’s Dital harps is the modern Celtic Harp, also known as the Neo-Irish harp, and often referred to as the ‘lever harp’. This is a small, light-weight, simplified version of a modern orchestral harp.

 

In all those sagas that give a musical instrument high status and otherworldly powers, we simply do not know precisely what type of stringed instrument was meant. But it is highly plausible that from the fourteenth century onwards, cláirseach players were happy to believe that their renaissance harps were the inheritors of the high status and otherworldly powers of the ancient cruit. Certainly, the equation of ancient cruit with the renaissance Irish harp was made explicit during the revival of the harp in the nineteenth century; it is still widely accepted today. However, this romantically inspired equation now needs rigorous examination.

 

Perhaps the most cherished illusion is that ancient Irish harps were made of willow. The Scottish ‘Queen Mary’ harp has recently been identified as willow, but most surviving harps appear from expert visual inspection to be sycamore, alder or lime, timber typical of instrument-building in general. Modern high-tech analysis of each surviving harp is needed.

 

Probably most players are tempted to imagine themselves as re-embodying Tristan the mythical bards of ancient tradition, playing repertoire of Gaelic melodies preserved unchanged from a far-distant golden age. There certainly was such a repertoire, but apart from a few tantalising hints, it is now almost entirely lost to us, for it was handed down aurally. The period from which we begin to have reasonable amounts of hard information is around the year 1800, but by this date the repertoire had changed dramatically.

 

We can no longer support the romantic view of Carolan as the font and origin of ‘ancient Gaelic harp music’, but we can justly celebrate his achievement in uniting French and Italian, baroque and older styles. We will never know for sure precisely how the lost Gaelic repertoire originally sounded, but we should certainly continue to experiment, combining artistic sensitivity with intellectual rigour.