To sum up the basic story again, if you didn't know: There are two sisters who live in a remote castle by the North Sea. A knight comes courting and favors the younger one, so the jealous older one kills her sister and marries the knight. Some minstrels find the body and make a musical instrument out of it, which then magically reveals the murder.
It's a pretty fun, gruesome story, and a decent bit of music.
Now, when I last wrote about it, I found myself wondering what a harp made out of a dead body would sound like. I wasn't the only one to wonder, and a Finnish luthier named Yrjänä Ermala Soitinrakentaja actually made one to try it out (he didn't use a dead noblewoman, but a deer carcass and hair from a wig). Turns out, it's not the most sonorous instrument ever.
But as I was working on polishing up my own version of the song something occured to me: the lyrics of this particular version describe the "harp" as having three strings, and being played with a bow. Now, I've played the harp for a while and while there's no reason you couldn't build one with only three strings, you wouldn't be able to play many tunes on it. You COULD sound a droning chord on it to accompany singing, in the style of a classical lyre. So that's one possibility, it could have been a single-chord instrument to accompany singing.
Speaking of lyres, we probably shouldn't necessarily think of this harp as the familiar triangle-frame instrument like the contemporary folk harp I play in the video. While these style instruments certainly did exist when the song likely emerged, there was also a tendency - and still is - to refer to a whole range of plucked string instruments as harps. In modern nomenclature, a harp is an instrument where the strings come out and away from the soundboard, while a lyre is an instrument where the strings run across the soundboard, but in older sources things like Anglo-Saxon lyres were sometimes referred to as "harps." It's very possible that this is what the song refers to.
Another possibility, and one that would tie in nicely with some versions where the harp sings all on its own is that it was actually an Aeolian harp. This is an instrument that, rather than being played by a person, makes sound as the wind blows across the strings. My own harp is prone to this when played at outside events, where the wind can cause the strings to make strange moaning sounds. It's a very interesting and somewhat spooky sound, which would be in keeping with the mood of the song.
In other variations of the song, I could very much believe that the instrument in question was an Aeolian harp. I mean, wind is basically magic anyway, and if this thing made out of bones just started moaning away on its own, I bet someone with a guilty conscience would start to feel a bit haunted.
But in THIS version of the song, the minstrels use a bow to play the alleged harp. So what gives? Well, let's go on a bit of a linguistic diversion for a second. In Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the triangular harp is referred to as a "clairseach" or "clarsach" but there is mention of an older small harp referred to as a "cruit." There is a surviving string instrument by that name, though it's most often known by its Welsh name instead, the crwth. The crwth (pronounced like "krooth" if you're wondering), is shaped like a lyre, more or less, and traditionally had six strings, but tuned in unison, so three courses. it has a fretboard, allowing the player to press down on each string to get more than one note out of it, like a guitar or violin, and is played with a bow. It's not really a "harp" but a type of fiddle.
And looking at the shape of the crwth, one could see a vague resemblance to a rib cage, with the central neck being a kind of "breast bone," so with a little imagination one could picture using an actual sternum to make the fretboard of such an instrument. Actually, it's not uncommon for modern fretted instruments such as guitars or mandolins to have bone components, though usually not human bone as far as I know, so while an instrument entirely from bones would be quite unusual, an instrument with a bone inlay or bridge could pass unremarked until it began to work its magic.
So, to sum up, harp=cruit, cruit=crwth, at least in this particular version of the song.
