Since I was very young, I have been
fascinated by harps and dragons. That may be because three of
my great grandmothers were Welsh. (My ethnic ancestry is almost all Irish,
however. My maternal grandmother was born in a village in County
West Meath called Tyrrellspass, and all my other forebears were also from Ireland.) The Celtic harp is the national
instrument of both Wales and Ireland, and the national emblem
of Ireland. The dragon is the national emblem of Wales.
When my friend Richard Hutt and I began making folk harps in the mid-seventies, we decided to call our partnership Pendragon Harps, which seemed natural enough. Pendragon was an ancient British (i.e., Welsh) title given to military leaders who organized the Christian kingdoms against invasions by Irish pirates and land-hungry Saxons and Angles who had succeeded in occupying the southeastern coast. The most famous of the legendary Pendragons were Uther and his son Arthur, who lived in the fifth and sixth centuries. (For a fascinating account of the role played by horses and horseshoes in Arthur's campaigns against the Saxons, see Anne McCaffrey's prize-winning novel, Black Horses for the King, published by Harcourt Brace. Anne and I also collaborated on A Diversity of Dragons, which was published by HarperPrism in 1997.)
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I still make harps on a request basis. I specialize in reproductions of the ancient instruments at Trinity College, Dublin (the "Brian Boru" harp) and the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland in Edinburgh (the "Queen Mary" harp that belonged to Mary Stuart). Working from detailed blueprints, sketches of my own, and photographs, I construct the harps from oak and willow - the same woods the early harps were made from. I also carve them according to the original patterns and outfit them with historically accurate fittings. The old harps had metal strings, but I can string them with nylon or gut as well. I have also made gut-strung Welsh harps (the Telyn Cymru) and small lap harps. |  The "Queen Mary" |
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