Crwth
A medieval Welsh bowed lyre.
What it means
The crwth is a Welsh lyre roughly the size of a violin, played from the European Middle Ages into the early nineteenth century. Originally plucked, it came to be played with a bow from around the eleventh century, and a fingerboard was added behind the strings in the late thirteenth century.
Its original four strings, arranged in pairs, were expanded to six by the fifteenth century. Two of these lie off the fingerboard and function as drones, while the rest run over the fingerboard for the melody.
Musical use
The top string carried the melody while the others sounded as drones; the off-fingerboard strings were bowed or occasionally plucked with the thumb of the bow hand. For centuries the crwth accompanied the poetry of the Welsh bards in the tradition of cerdd dant, "the craft of the string", where instrumental sound and spoken word were woven together.
By around 1800 the instrument had nearly vanished from practice. Only four historical examples survive, including ones held at St Fagans National Museum of History in Cardiff and the National Library of Wales.