Origin of the harp in Europe

The origins of the triangular frame harp are unclear. Triangular objects on the laps of seated figures appear in artwork of the Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales, as well as other parts of north-west Europe. This page outlines some of the scholarly controversies and disagreements on this subject.

The connection of Scotland its love of stringed instruments is both ancient and recorded. An Iron Age lyre dating to circa 300 BC was discovered on the Isle of Skye making it Europes earliest surviving stringed instrument. The earliest descriptions of a European triangular framed harp i.e. harps with a fore pillar are found on carved 8th century Pictish stones. Pictish harps were strung from horsehair. The instruments apparently spread south to the Anglo Saxons who commonly used gut strings and then west to the Gaels of the Highlands and to Ireland. Exactly thirteen depictions of any triangular chordophone instrument from pre-11th-century Europe exist and twelve of them come from Scotland. Moreover, the earliest Irish word for a harp is in fact 'cruit', a word which strongly suggests a Pictish provenance for the instrument. Only two quadrangular instruments occur within the Irish context on the west coast of Scotland and both carvings instruments date two hundred years after the Pictish carvings. The first true representations of the Irish triangular harp do not appear till the late eleventh century in reliquary and the twelfth century on stone and the earliest harps used in Ireland were quadrangular lyres as ecclesiastical instruments, One study suggests Pictish stone carvings may be copied from the Utrecht Psalter, the only other source outside Pictish Scotland to display a Triangular Chordophone instrument. The Utrecht Psalter was penned between 816–835 AD. While Pictish Triangular Chordophone carvings found on the Nigg Stone dates from 790–799 AD. and pre-dates the document by up to thirty-five to forty years. Other Pictish sculptures predate the Utrecht Psalter, namely the harper on the Dupplin Cross c. 800 AD.

The earliest drawings of triangular-frame harps appear in the Utrecht Psalter, written and illustrated in the early 9th century from a scriptorium in Rheims. Ten of the illustrations show figures holding harp-like instruments, and in six of them the forepillar is clearly shown. The Utrecht Psalter was penned between 816–835 AD. and found its way to the scriptorium at Christ Church in Canterbury, England 970AD. where several copies were produced. Although portraits of the biblical King David playing a stringed instrument were already a feature of European religious manuscript art, manuscripts before this time show David with a medieval lyre rather than a harp.

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