Give a man a harp...

“Harpists spend ninety percent of their lives tuning their harps and ten percent playing out of tune.”–Igor Stravinsky

The Gaelic for harp is clarsach. I have no idea how this should be pronounced but the older form of the word is cruit & thus a harpist becomes cruitire or clairsair. I like clarsach which seems to have a nice splashy sound.

I began studying about the clarsach when I first investigated the file ~ an order of druidism ~ & initially I made no distinction between the poet [file] & the cruitre, harpist, because in our time & world they are all too often the same thing. That was not the case in the ancient Celtic world. The file was the important subject, the harpist a mere accompanist. The file was allotted magical properties ~ or if like me you are a little more cynical, the file were good students of human nature & they played upon their knowledge.

Why, oh why, would anyone waste their time investigating a dead musical tradition? Well my lovelies, if you know your Celtic mythology you will grasp the inherent possibilities for a fantasy writer when music is credited with the abilities the Celts gave it ~ able to induce sleep, awaken passion, transport the soul. Add in the glam, a curse or two, a pretty maiden & voila! Fantasy 101.

Now I once read an Alan Garner quote, & Alan Garner has a very interesting Celtic tradition of his own, wherein he said of the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, why use a made up word when a real one is available? Yes, both weirdstone & Brisingamen are real words. This thinking intrigued me. Why invent something when you can use a tradition that already exists? Reality gives the sort of hard edge fantasy writers would kill for. It is why their books are riddled with bits & pieces of other people's mythologies ~ though not always well done.

I can be a little obsessive...all right then, a lot obsessive because I read & the first thing that struck me is how the Celts described their harps ~ strung with silver & bronze & gold! Can you imagine how the light would have shimmered through the moving strings?! These instruments were beautifully decorated, lovingly carved & painted. I know nothing about music so I kept reading & read all sorts of people saying all sorts of things about how you couldn't string a harp with gold wires ...& then I read about Brian Boru's harp, the Lamont harp & Queen Mary's harp. These are the oldest Celtic harps in existence ~ The Boru harp is in Dublin, the other 2 at Edinburgh museum. I don't understand the maths or the mechanics but I understood enough to realise that the reconstructionists were having massive problems tuning these things. They just wouldn't tune across the whole soundboard! It didn't matter if you used nylon, hair or wire the harps would not tune. The bottom octave remained stubbornly out of tune.

Then Ann Heymann came along & went into cahoots with a goldsmith & they came up with a way to make a gold wire hard enough & strong enough to be used as harp strings. Guess what? Gold wire tunes on an ancient Celtic harp! The stories are literally true! I was flabbergasted ~ & I'm one for thinking there is always a grain of truth in the old stories. I forget which way it works but a mixture of gold & bronze strings means you can tune these harps across the octaves. Funny that.

Now the old Irish & Scottish harpers grew their nails long because the strings were plucked rather than stroked. This gives the notes a bright sort of tinny sound that lasted & there is some evidence that fake tin nails were used by some harpers or if a nail got broken.

That is all fascinating enough but what has always intrigued me because it is such a Celtic way of thinking are the stories of the great war harps that stood taller than a man & were strung untuned for the wind to wail through. Can you imagine? Serious nightmare stuff I'm sure!

The harps that remain are old & fragile, too old & fragile to be restrung & played now & they are relatively late ~ Medieval pieces. We know that the harps were round earlier than that. There are pics carved on Pictish standing stones showing a left handed orientation & we have the metal harp keys used for turning the tuning pegs. We also know there was an unbroken music tradition in both Ireland & Scotland until Good Queen Bess took it into her pretty red head to outlaw harping & kill off all the harpers. I'm sure she had a good reason for this. I should look into it. Then again the Harpers were druids & the druids were patriots of a rather rampant sort. The only patriotism Bess wanted was the sort that adored her. Neither the Irish or the Scots were good at admiring the English ~ for good reason, but we won't go into all that.

So when I finally get to see one of these harps, a harp I can neither touch nor play, yet passed down through generations of tenured families who held the secrets of the strings in their very souls I hold all this history in myself & the harp becomes more than just a harp. It is the story of a people nearly destroyed, stubbornly clinging to survival.