Discover

:''For the ethnic group, see Lurs.''
'Lur' is a name given to two distinct types of wind musical instrument. The more recent type is made of wood and was in use in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages. The older type, named after the more recent type, is made of bronze, dates to the Bronze Age and was often found in pairs, deposited in bogs, mainly in Denmark.
A total of 56 lurs have been discovered: 35 (including fragmentary ones) in Denmark, 4 in Norway, 11 in Sweden, 5 in northern Germany, and a single one in Latvia.

Contents

Wooden lurs

Bronze lurs

Lurs today

External links

Wooden lurs

The earliest references to an instrument called the lur come from Icelandic sagas, where they are described as war instruments, used to marshall troops and frighten the enemy. These lurs, several examples of which have been discovered in longboats, are straight, end-blown wooden tubes, around one metre long. They do not have fingerholes, and are played much like a modern brass instrument.
A kind of lur very similar to these war instruments has been played by farmers and milk maids in Nordic countries since at least the Middle Ages. These instruments were used for calling cattle and signalling. They are similar in construction and playing technique to the war instrument, but are covered in birch, while the war instruments are covered in willow.

Bronze lurs

The bronze instrument now known as the lur is most probably unrelated to the wooden lur, and has been named by 19th century archaeologists, after the 13th century wooden lurs mentioned by Saxo Grammaticus.
Bronze lurs date back to the Nordic Bronze Age, probably to the first half of the 1st millennium BC. They are roughly S-shaped conical tubes, without finger holes. They are end blown, like brass instruments, and they sound rather like a trombone. The opposite end to the blown one is slightly flared, like the bell on a modern brass instrument but not to the same degree. A typical bronze lur is around two metres long.
Bronze lurs were frequently found in pairs, with the "sex" of one instrument going in and the other going out.
It is perhaps no accident that the shape of a lur pair resembles the right and left tusks of the mature woolly mammoth. For millennia, animal horns (in this case, tusks) have been used for signaling. Bronze-age technology made possible the fabrication of replacements for what would have been a diminishing supply of tusks from mammoths, animals now thought to have become extinct perhaps a few millennia earlier.

Lurs today

Interestingly enough, the word ''lur'' is still very much alive in the Swedish language, indicating any half-moon shaped implement used for producing or receiving sound. A mobile telephone, for instance, is commonly referred to as a ''lur'' in contemporary Swedish (derived from ''telefonlur'', telephone receiver).

External links

★ The Lurs (chem.au.dk)

★ Lurenmusik der Bronzezeit German language page with mp3 sound samples.