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Appendix 10

For the first Irish harp (cruit), see Eugene O’Curry, *On the Manners and Customs of *the Ancient Irish, vol. 3 (1873), pp. 236f.; see also Rudolf Thurneysen, *Die irische *Helden- und Königssage bis zum 17. Jahrhundert (1911), pp. 264f.

There once lived a couple . . . And the wife conceived a hatred to him, and she was flying from him through woods and wilderness; and he continued to follow her constantly. And one day that the woman came to the sea shore of Camas . . . she met a skeleton of a whale on the strand, and she heard the sounds of the wind passing through the sinews of the whale on the strand, and she fell asleep from the sounds. And her husband came after her; and he perceived that it was from the sounds the sleep fell upon her. And he then went forward into the wood, and made the form of a Cruit; [1] and he put strings from the sinews of the whale into it; and that was the first Cruit that was ever made.

Marbhan’s legend about the beginnings of instruments and verses continues:

And again Lamec Bigamas had two sons, Jubal and Tubal Cain were their names. One son of them was a smith, namely, Jubal; and he discovered from sounds of two sledges (on the anvil) in the forge one day, that it was verses (or notes) of equal length they spoke, and he composed a verse upon that cause, and that was the first verse that was ever composed.

The legend goes on to report, why the timpan — another stringed instrument, different from the cruit — was called Timpan Naimh (or saint’s Timpan), because “at the time that Noah, the son of Lamech, went into the Ark, he took with him a number of instruments of music into it, together with a Timpan, which one of his sons had, who knew how to play it:” When they finally left the ark, Noah caused his son to name the instrument after his own name, and only under this condition would he give it to him. “So that Noah’s Timpan is its name from that time down; and that is not what ye, the ignorant timpanists, call it, but Timpan of the saints.”

We introduce the legend for several reasons; first, because we felt reminded at once, as O’Curry did (p. 237), “of Pythagoras, who is said to have been led to discover the musical effect of vibrations of a chord by observing he sound of various blows on an anvil, though the Irish legend . . . does not appear to bear on the tones so much as on the rhythm of music.” Second, because here we learn again about two successive stringed instruments, separated, so to speak, by a flood; Vainamoinen lost his Kantele when going to steal the Sampo, and had to construct a new one from wood, afterwards. These traditions must be thoroughly compared, one day, with the different lyres of Greece; we know that one was destroyed by Apollon — allegedly in a fit of repentance — after he had flayed Marsyas, and that Hermes made another one and presented it to Apollon; pike and whale of the northern seas have apparently replaced the turtle of Greek myth. We also know that the Pleiades, called the Lyre of the Muses by the Orphics, existed side by side with Lyra And Michael Scotus still knew about a turtle figuring, so to speak, as prow of Argo, and “out of which the celestial lyre is made.” [2] But before being trapped between the devil and the deep sea, we prefer to stop, although this turtle seems to be placed exactly there, where it “should” be, considering that upon its back the Amritamanthana was accomplished. We shall hear more about that considerable and mysterious man, Michael Scotus, later (see p. 258).

The long and the short of the various traditions is that with a new age new instruments, new strings, or, as in the case of Odysseus, a new peg are called for: new “Harmony of the Spheres.”

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1. “The word Cruit . . . signifies literally, a sharp high breast, such as of a goose, a heron, or a curlew” (O’Curry, loc. cit.).

2. Testudo eius (navis) est prope quasi prora navis . . . de qua testudine facta est lyra caeli. Cf. F. Boll, Sphaera, p. 447.