Lur

Three thousand years of lur calls

The lur is one of the oldest instruments in the Nordic countries. The line runs from the bronze lurs offered in the bogs nearly three thousand years ago, by way of the Viking ship finds, to the birch bark lurs that sounded between the summer farms well into the twentieth century. That line continues to this day.

What is a lur?

A lur is a long wind instrument without finger holes, where the tone is made with the lips against the blowing end – as on a trumpet. Since the tube has no holes, the available notes are limited to the natural harmonic series, and the player brings out the tones with lip tension and breath alone. Norwegian lurs today are made of wood, often wrapped in birch bark, and range from three quarters of a metre to well over two; most are between 90 and 150 cm.

The word itself is Old Norse: ludr originally meant a hollowed-out log (Nupen 1999, p. 37). The lur should not be confused with the bukkehorn – the same blowing principle, but the horn is short, has finger holes and a quite different use.

The bronze lurs

The oldest branch of the lur family is the bronze lurs. In 1965, 54 complete or partially preserved bronze lurs were known in northern Europe, most of them in Denmark and southern Sweden – and only four in Norway: two well-preserved ones from Revheim by Hafrsfjord and two fragments from Rossum in Oppland (Broholm, via Sognnes 2016). Most are dated to the middle and late Bronze Age, roughly 1200–500 BC, and the Revheim lurs are considered among the youngest.

The Revheim find came to light in 1894: two lurs laid down in a bog, each about 160 cm – one of them restored in 1947 (Sevåg 1973, p. 33). That is how the bronze lurs are usually found: in pairs, deposited in bogs, S-shaped tubes cast in sections that could be taken apart for transport.

Lur players carved in stone

The bronze lurs are not only bog finds – they also appear in the rock carvings. And nowhere in the Nordic countries do more of them appear than at Bardal in Beitstad, just outside Steinkjer. On the great rock art panel there, where figures from the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages are carved across one another, researchers have found at least fifty lurs – all of them on Bronze Age boat figures, drawn as extensions of the crew strokes (Sognnes 2016). Some of the boats are more than four metres long, among the largest boat carvings in the Nordic countries, and the lur players appear in pairs – just as the bronze lurs themselves are found in pairs in the Danish bogs.

The archaeologist Kalle Sognnes reads Bardal as a meeting place across millennia, and pictures boats being paddled in steady rhythm over the Beitstad fjord: the lur players kept time for the paddlers and announced the boats' arrival – for trade, ceremonies and processions at the rock art panel. Warrior figures are almost entirely absent, so whatever the lurs announced was most likely peaceful.

Lur figures are also found elsewhere in Trøndelag: at Bjørngård in Hegra, and at the neighbouring farm of Tessem in Beitstad, where the archaeologist Geir Grønnesby (my father's cousin!) has documented lur figures on two of the panels. These are motifs otherwise rare in Trøndelag, more akin to the rock art of Østfold and Bohuslän (Grønnesby 2006; NTNU University Museum, archaeological report 2016:8). At Hegre in Stjørdal there is even a carving that probably shows a carnyx – the Celtic war trumpet with a boar's head (see the image below).

Lurs from the Viking Age

Two ship finds carry the tradition onwards from the Bronze Age. In the Kvalsund find from Sunnmøre, dated to around AD 600, lay a finely worked, conical wooden lur of 72.5 cm, with no known parallels from its time. And in the Oseberg ship a tube of about 107 cm was found, with an outer diameter of 4 cm, which can hardly be anything but a lur (Sevåg, pp. 49 and 54). The Oseberg lur stands in a class of its own: close to a thousand years separate it from the other preserved wooden lurs. A museum in Dublin does hold a couple of wooden lurs of the same split type, one of them nearly two metres long, which archaeologists have dated as far back as the Bronze Age.

In the saga literature the lur is a signal instrument. The Sverre saga tells of the lur Andvaka, which sounded on several great occasions in both war and peace, and in Snorri the lur and the horn are constant companions on campaign (after Nupen 1999, p. 30). Later in history the lur took on more peaceful duties: lur calls could open fairs and announce that the bishop was on his way (Alm 2015).

The bark lur and the neverlur

The folk lurs come in two main types, depending on how they are made:

The bark lur is the summer lur: a strip of bark, preferably grey alder (hence the name orelur), cut in a spiral around the trunk, peeled off and wound into a conical funnel. It was quick to make and short-lived: once the bark dried out, the lur went leaky and useless. Many made one just for the day; others coated it with tar to make it last. Simpler still is the angelica lur: a hollowed-out angelica stalk, a metre or so long, is a ready-made tube to blow – the beginner's lur for many a child (Nupen 1999, p. 28).

The split long lur (what most people know as the neverlur) is the lasting instrument. The blank is split lengthwise, hollowed out, joined together again and wrapped. The material is mainly spruce, preferably “straight-split, tough spruce on the root” as Sevåg's informants put it, but pine, hazel, rowan and aspen have also been used – and alder for thin lurs in the north. In Hallingdal pine was held to be the best material, preferably old bog pine that had lain stored in the mire and was less “fat” than fresh wood (Gundersen, via Alm 2015). The wrapping follows old geographical lines: birch bark dominated in the valleys from Telemark to Valdres, Gudbrandsdalen and southern Østerdalen, while roots (tæger) were the rule in northern Østerdalen and Trøndelag. The blowing hole is typically 12–15 mm, round or oval.

How a lur is made

The method has stayed the same for a very long time: split the blank, hollow out the two halves with gouge and round plane, put them together and bind them with birch bark or roots. Pitch or tar can seal the outside. A lur left standing unused and drying suffers quickly – the wrapping loosens and the tube grows leaky; a lur wants to be played.

The length was up to the maker, the blank and the use. Hølje Strand from Ål, one of the documented lur makers of the twentieth century, made lurs “from 1 metre up to 3 metres, yes, even longer” (Sevåg, p. 64).

Lur calls, signals and speech

On the mountain pasture the lur was the means of communication – the Nokia of its day. With fixed signals, dairymaid and herder could send word between pastures, call people home and report animals gone astray. On a long lur the sound carries two kilometres and more in still weather, according to Nupen (1999, p. 70). From Sogn it is said that when the girls wanted to send word, “they went out on high knolls and played the lur down to the villages” (Sevåg, p. 61). Tradition also has it that people could shout and sing i the lur, and that the tones carried the words so they were heard far away but not close by. There is even evidence that a Norwegian rifle corps used the lur for signalling in the early 1800s (Sevåg, p. 60). In Sunnmøre there was also a dedicated “skadelur”, only 35 cm long, used solely to raise the alarm when people had to gather for a search party (Nupen 1999, p. 115).

The lur belonged to the sea as well. In the fjord villages along the coast a nótalur often hung in the big net shed, and when its tones rang out across the village, everyone knew what it meant: “The herring have come – all men to the boats” (Nupen 1999, p. 30). In other boathouses a bukkehorn did the same job. From Nordland the sources tell of fishermen's lurs called galdlur, used for contact between boat and harbour (Sevåg, p. 50).

The lur against bears and wolves

As protection against predators the lur is richly documented. In his Norwegian dictionary from the 1740s, Knud Leem described the lur as an instrument of wood almost a fathom long, clad in birch bark, “which the peasant girls blow, mostly in summer when herding the cattle – partly for amusement, partly to scare off the bear” (after Alm 2015). From Jølster: “They used it much to scare the bear. Just before they went to bed, they played a good while on the lur. The bear could not stand it in his ears – so they believed” (Sevåg, p. 60). From Naustdal: the bear either fled or went straight for the one who blew – “he could not stand lur blowing”. And in the “100 Old Farming Rules” from Valdres, written down as early as 1687, it says that one must not blow the lur before Whitsun eve – if the bear heard lur sound before then, he would not fear it afterwards.

The English mountaineer W. C. Slingsby saw the tradition alive in Olden in 1875: children carrying lurs of seven to nine feet (over two metres), blowing hard to scare off the bears, which had just killed sixteen cows in the course of eight days (Sevåg, p. 65).

The notes of the lur

Without finger holes the lur is bound to the natural harmonic series, and the length decides how much of it the player can reach. Short lurs give few notes; on long lurs practised players reach the ninth and tenth harmonics, and more. When Arne Bjørndal recorded Aslaug Røyrvik from Vik in Sogn in 1956, she played a 196 cm lur in a register from the eighth to the twelfth harmonic, with notes reaching up towards c³ (Sevåg, pp. 66–67).

On a good long lur the fifth to eighth harmonics lie easily to hand, and the triad they form is the same one that carries many of the cattle calls. The lur and the dairymaid's call share the same tonal world, and that is hardly a coincidence: they served the same purpose in the same landscape (Nupen 1999, pp. 30 and 104).

You don't have to imagine how the series sounds: you can hear it here. Tap the numbers to play each harmonic from a lur in G, or play the whole series in sequence. Listen especially for the tones that don't exist on the piano: the low seventh (no. 7) and the half-sharp fourth (no. 11).

The lur today

When mountain pasture farming declined, the lur lost its practical function. But not its life: from the late 1800s the folk music movement and researchers like Reidar Sevåg preserved the knowledge, and today the lur is played in traditional music and in newer, more experimental settings alike.

See also the other instruments: bukkehorn, flishorn and Meråker clarinet.

Frequently asked questions about the lur

What is a lur?

A long wind instrument without finger holes, where the tone is made with the lips, as on a trumpet. Norwegian lurs are of wood or bark, often wrapped in birch bark, and play the natural harmonic series.

What is a neverlur?

A wooden lur where the two hollowed halves are bound together with birch bark. The name is often used for the whole long-lur type; in northern Østerdalen and Trøndelag roots were used instead of birch bark.

How old is the lur?

The bronze lurs of the Nordic countries are some 2,500–3,000 years old, and from the same period there are lur players carved into the rock art, among other places at Bardal and Tessem in Steinkjer. The wooden lur tradition is documented from about 600 AD (the Kvalsund find) and has survived unbroken to this day.

What is a Viking lur?

From the Viking Age itself there is the Oseberg find, which held a wooden tube about 107 cm long that is probably a lur. Together with the even older Kvalsund lur, these are the only surviving wooden lurs from the Nordic Iron Age.

How is a lur made?

A blank of spruce or pine is split lengthwise, hollowed out, joined together again and wrapped with birch bark or roots. The bark lur, the summer variant, is wound from a spiral-cut strip of grey alder bark.

What is the difference between a lur and a bukkehorn?

Both are lip-blown, but the lur is long, straight and without finger holes, and is limited to the natural harmonic series. The bukkehorn is short, made from a billy goat's horn, and usually has finger holes for playing melodies.

Sources:
1973 - Reidar Sevåg Det gjallar og det læt : from scare and signal tools to popular wind instruments (pp. 32–33 and 47–67)
2016 - Kalle Sognnes - «Med båt og lur – bronsealdermusikk i Trøndelag?», Årbok for Nord-Trøndelag historielag, vol. 93, s. 10–22
2016 - Geir Grønnesby - Kalkering av helleristninger i Beitstad, Steinkjer 1997–2015 (NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet arkeologisk rapport 2016:8)
2006 - Geir Grønnesby - «Helleristningene på Tessem i Beitstad, Nord-Trøndelag – som del av en muntlig kunnskapsoverføring», i Samfunn, symboler og identitet. Festskrift til Gro Mandt, Bergen
1999 - Dagfinn Nupen - Eldre folkemusikkinstrument: læring på gamlemåten, s. 28–31
2015 - Torbjørn Alm - «Birch (Betula, Betulaceae) bark horns and similar instruments in Norway», Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas 9(2), s. 433–448
1875/1966 - W. C. Slingsby - Til fjells i Norge (via Sevåg s. 65)