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History of the Jews harp

Finds, folklore and the Jew’s harp

Michael Wright has a passion for the Jews harp.
He tells us their connection with witches and fairies, love - and much more.

Michael Wright
Jews harpist and researcher

Instrument History
folkleads.org.uk

The Jews harp

Travelling back from the Morpeth Gathering in early April this year I called into the North Lincolnshire Museum at Scunthorpe where I had a meeting with Kevin Leahy, the Keeper of Archaeology and Natural Science. Here I was presented with nine Jew’s harp finds for my collection, provided by the Grimsby Metal Detector Society that had been recovered from fields all over the North Lincolnshire area.

Finds in the middle of fields are not uncommon, though they are almost exclusively the frame only, the tongue or lamella of the instrument either having broken or complete rotted away.

Talking to Paul Davenport of Maltby, South Yorkshire, at the National Folk Festival later in the month, he was reminded of field note he had taken from a certain Alan Foster, who talked of the plough boys using the Jew’s harp while wandering across the fields and presumably throwing them to one side when they broke, for, as they say in Ireland:

‘There are three things that are least useful: a trump (Jew’s harp) without a tongue, a button without a loop, and a fox without teeth.’

I’ve also heard it said that in times past it was considered a good idea to produce music as you walked over the fields after dark to keep away evil spirits and fairies. Whistling was not a good idea as it conjured up the devil, but playing a Jew’s harp, now there was a safe and satisfactory way of music making without fear of who or what you might inadvertently summon up.

Iron, fairies and witches ...

Iron was a sure way of keeping fairies and witches at bay. Anne Wright (no relative) in ‘Folk Lore of Holderness’ states that,

‘Witches were believed to be afraid of iron (and the) man who worked with iron , the blacksmith , was quite immune to witchery. He alone could afford to hang up his horse-shoes pointing ends down .....’

The idea of repelling evil spirits with iron is also mentioned by John Gregorson Campbell, Minister of Tiree, in his ‘Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland’, collected entirely from Oral Sources, who writes:

‘There are ways of doing this that are discreet The great protection against the Elfin race (and this is perhaps the most noticeable point in the whole Superstition) is Iron, or preferably steel (cruaidh). The metal is any form , a sword, a knife, a pair of scissors, a needle, a nail .... a fish hook, is all powerful. Playing the Jew’s harp (tromb) kept the Elfin women at a distance from the hunter, because the tongue of the instrument is of steel. So also a shoemaker’s awl in the door-post of his bothy kept a Glastig from entering.’

Glastigs were blood-sucking fairies that took the form of a loved-one only to drain the living juices from their victims. In the story mentioned, ‘The Four Hunters and the Four Glastigs’, only one hunter survives by playing the Jew’s harp or trump (Scottish and Irish name variation) to keep his tormentor at bay. She mocks him with,

‘Good is the music of the trump, Saving the one note in its train. Its owner likes it in his mouth, In preference to any maid.’

and personal safety ...

So the theory goes that Jew’s harps were a useful and small means of ensuring personal safety from unknown terrors and that these scattered finds reflect the discarding of broken instruments. What you did if your Jew’s harp talisman broke in the middle of your walk is not recorded. Swiftness of foot might have been the best response.

Execution ... and smuggling ...

There are a number of quotations and mentions of the relationship between Jew’s harps and fairies.

Donald McIlmichael was executed in 1677 for consorting with evil spirits when, at his trial for cattle theft, he confessed to playing two Jew’s harps at various fairy gatherings in Appin, West Scotland.

William Bottrell in 1880 in his collection ‘Stories and Folk-Lore of West Cornwall’, has the fairies who were playing the Jew’s harp in one story. A smuggler waiting for horses to take his goods inland is drawn to the sound of music,

‘Going nearer, he beheld, perched on a pretty high bank in their midst, a score or so of little chaps; many of them blew in mouth-organs (Pan's pipes); some beat cymbals or tamborine; whilst others played on jew's harps, or tweeted on May whistles and feapers.’

and Melville ...

In Herman Melville’s semi-autobiographical story, ‘Redburn, his first voyage’ the following comes out of the blue,

‘ For even a Jew’s harp may be so played as to awaken all the fairies that are in us, and make them dance in our souls, as on a moonlit sward of violets; But what subtle power is this, residing in but a bit of steel, which might have made a penny nail, that so enters, without knocking, into our inmost beings, and shows us all hidden things? ’

Boy with Jews Harp - GP Chalmers c1860

Mentioning our inmost being reminds me of a dreams analysis from 1901 by Gustavus Hindman Miller,

and dreams and love ...

‘ To dream of a Jew’s-harp, foretells you will experience a slight improvement in your affairs. To play one, is a sign that you will fall in love with a stranger’

Girl with Jews Harp - FW Jopham c1850

Also, in Iowa, USA, there is a saying that

‘ Woman is said to be like a Jew’s harp because she is nothing without a tongue and must be pressed to the lips. Then she is music for the soul’

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