Society of the Golden Egg challenge - Medieval Fyddle

The Society of the Golden Egg is a household that aims to encourages and promotes challenging oneself in the Arts and Sciences within the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA). Being the kind of person who could not keep my hands off new crafts and projects if my life depended on it, I felt immediately drawn to taking on such a challenge when I learned of the existence of the Society of the Golden Egg. Now, a year later, I went ahead and formally took on the challenge of building a medieval fyddle.

I decided to build a fyddle a while back, when I found that it’s quite nice to play my dear violin at various events, but that my 20th century violin clashes with the period setting. Since the fyddle is an ancestor of the violin, I figured that it would be a good period replacement. Why don’t I just buy one from an actual luthier? Well, I’m not really able to go to a luthier that builds fyddles and try one out, so I figured that rather than spending the money and hoping for the best, I might as well spend the time to build it myself. And still, you know.. hope for the best.

The challenge

The Golden Egg challenges are all defined by the person taking on the challenge, both in terms of what the challenge actually is (i.e., build a fyddle in my case), but also in terms of success criteria, exclusions from the project, etc. The only thing that’s more or less a dead given is that it’s supposed to take a year to complete the challenge, give or take. Since I took the challenge on during the Double Wars of Anno Societatis 58 (or 2023 in mundane time), I’m expected to present the finished project during the Double Wars of AS 59.

With that explained, the challenge that I have set for myself is the following:

• Build a playable fyddle using period appropriate tools, methods and materials.
• Write an article on this here blog about the build process
• Construction of a bow, the strings and the tuning pegs are out of scope for the project
• Finish the project by May AS 59 (or 2024, for non-SCA folks).

As I am still in the planning stage despite having had a good three months to get some work done on the project, there are a log of uncertainties left. For instance, I need to decide on shape and size of the instrument, both of which seems to have been all over the place from what it seems.

Regardless, what this challenge essentially comes down to is that I am to build a fyddle, where the body, neck and pegbox is carved from a single piece of wood, and the lid and finger board are glued on using hide glue. The body will be made from what we believe is basswood, and the lid will be made from spruce (proper instrument grade wood this time). Possibly plum for the fingerboard? The fyddle will be built without the use of power tools.

As stated, I am aiming for playable, not fantastic, which I think makes the challenge realistic. However, I am of course hoping that I can put together something that actually sounds good.

The reason I’m excluding making a bow, strings and the tuning pegs from the challenge are mostly practical. Making a good bow is quite a different beast than making a good instrument, and even today bow making is its own trade. Same goes for making gut string. In addition to being difficult, it also requires access to extremely fresh intestine (essentially, straight from slaughter, while it’s warm), which I don’t have. Finally, I learned from making my tagelharpa that it’s quite hard to make good tuning pegs without the appropriate tools. These tools are single-purpose tools and quite expensive, so I’d rather buy good tuning pegs instead.

Closing thoughts

So, that’s the gist of the project I’m taking on. I have about nine months to finish it, which I do genuinely think is quite reasonable. I’ve already done quite some research into it, and I have a good idea of how to approach the project. I think it’ll be a lot of fun and that I’ll learn a lot from it, and with some luck I’ll remember to post progress updates here along the way.