The tautirut (Inuktitut syllabics: or tautiruut, also known as the Eskimo fiddle) is a bowed zither native to the Inuit culture of Canada.
Lucien M. Turner described the "Eskimo violin" in 1894 as being
The Canadian anthropologist Ernest William Hawkes described the tautirut in 1916:
Origin The tautirut, along with the Apache fiddle are among the few First Nations chordophones which may possibly be pre-Columbian in origin.Beverley Diamond, M. Sam Cronk, Franziska Von Rosen, Contributor M. Sam Cronk, Franziska Von Rosen. Visions of sound: musical instruments of First Nations communities in Northeastern America. University of Chicago Press, 1994 , 978-0-226-14476-4. Pg 56. Ethnomusicologist Anthony Baines and others have noted the similarity of the tautirut to the Icelandic fiðlaAnthony Baines. The Oxford companion to musical instruments. Oxford University Press, 1992 , 978-0-19-311334-3 Pg 189. and Shetland gue.
Peter Cooke believed that the tautirut'''s limited distribution around the Hudson Bay area indicated that it was introduced to the Inuit by Hudson's Bay Company sailors from the Orkney and Shetland Islands.Peter Cooke. The fiddle tradition of the Shetland Isles. CUP Archive, 1986. , 978-0-521-26855-4. p. 5.
External links Tautirut in the collection of the Faculté de musique, Université de Montréal
Further reading Hawe's Eskimo Music, in: Scientific American: Supplement, Munn and Co., 1917, p. 187f. E. Y. Arima and M. Einarsson, Whence and Where the Eskimo Fiddle?, Folk'', vol 18, 1976 The academics Maija Lutz and Susan Kaplan have been noted as having studied the Eskimo fiddle.
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