Fiddling about

Symphony orchestras, with their armies of violinists, are back in season. Is their instrument a violin or a fiddle? Both words come possibly from Vitula, the Roman goddess of joy. Vitula became fithele in the Germanic language brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons, viole in the French brought by the Normans, and viola in Italian. In medieval England, the previously honourable pedigree of the Anglo-Saxon “fiddle” was soon under attack from the more prestigious French word, and then even more so from Italian, so highly prestigious in matters musical. So we now have the more formal “violin” and the slightly less formal “fiddle”.

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