Anglo-Saxon lyre

The Anglo-Saxon lyre, also known as the Germanic lyre, a Rotta, or the Viking lyre, is a large plucked and strummed lyre that was played in Anglo-Saxon England, and more widely, in Germanic regions of northwestern Europe. The oldest lyre found in England dates before 450 AD and the most recent dates to the 10th century. The Anglo-Saxon lyre is depicted in several illustrations and mentioned in Anglo-Saxon literature and poetry. Despite this, knowledge of the instrument was largely forgotten until the 19th century when two lyres were found in cemetery excavations in southwest Germany. The archaeological excavation at Sutton Hoo in 1939, and the correct reconstruction of the lyre in 1970, brought about the realisation that the lyre was "the typical early Germanic stringed instrument."^[1]

The Museum of London Archaeology describes the lyre as the most important stringed instrument in the ancient world.^[2] Differing from the lyres of the Mediterranean antiquity, Germanic lyres are characterised by a long, shallow and broadly rectangular shape, with a hollow soundbox curving at the base, and two hollow arms connected across the top by an integrated crossbar or ‘yoke’. From northwestern Europe—particularly from England and Germany—an ever-growing number of wooden lyres have been excavated from warrior graves of the first millennium AD.