HAROLD 



HARP 





born maiden named Gyda, hut Hhe declared she 

 would not ! his wife antU lie was Bule king of 

 NMIV. .is : he in hi* turn thereupon took an oath 

 tint In- would neither cut nor i-omb his hair until 

 In* bad accomplished her bidding. After a severe 

 struggle of some years' duration (863-872) he sub- 

 diu-d, first the chiefs between Throndhjem and the 

 Sogne Fjord, and finally the kings of the south- 

 . whom he defeated in a naval battle near 

 Stavanger. The conquered' districts he placed 

 mi. lor the rule of his own jarls, or such as were 

 devoted to his service. This led many of the old 

 nobles to emigrate to the Orkneys, the Hebrides, 

 and to Iceland, whence they conducted a series 

 of piratical expeditions against Norway, until at 

 length Harold was constrained to sail westwards 

 ami chastise them in their own seas. In his old 

 age Harold divided his territories amongst his sons, 

 and died at Throndhjem, which he had made his 

 capital, in 930, leaving the supreme power to his 

 .-on Eric, surnamed Bloody- Axe. 



Harold III., surnamed HAARDRAADE or 

 HARDRADA ('stern in council'), king of Norway, 

 and one of the most famous of the old Viking chiefs, 

 was a descendant of Harold I. Whilst still a lx>y 

 he was present at the battle of Stikklestad ( 1030), 

 in which his brother, St Olaf, king of Norway, was 

 slain. Harold himself sought an asylum at the 

 court of his relative, Yaroslaff, prince of Nov- 

 gorod. Thence, going on to Constantinople, he 

 became captain of the V arangians or Scandinavian 

 bodyguard of the Greek emperors, and in com- 

 mand of them defeated the Saracens in several 

 battles in Sicily and Italy. On his return to Con- 

 stantinople, he drew upon himself the vengeance 

 of the Empress Zoe, whose proffered love he 

 rejected, ana with difficulty made good his escape 

 to Russia, where he married the daughter of Duke 

 Yaroslaff. But he did not remain in Russia. He 

 returned about 1045 to Norway, where his nephew, 

 Magnus (the- son of St Olaf), agreed to divide the 

 supreme power with him, in exchange for a share 

 of bis treasures. The death of Magnus in 1047 left 

 Harold sole king of Norway, and Svend king of 

 Denmark ; but with Svend Harold waged unrelent- 

 ing war until 1064. This king changed the capital 

 of Norway from Throndhjem to Opslo, now a suburb 

 of Christiania. Two years later he landed in Eng- 

 land, to aid Tostig against his brother Harold, king 

 of England, hut was slain in battle at Stamford- 

 bridge, where also the flower of his warriors fell. 



II ;i roil n. surnamed AL-RASCHID (more pro- 

 perly Hariin er Rashid, 'the orthodox'), the most 

 renowned of the Abbaside califs, was born in 763, 

 and succeeded his elder brother, El Hjidi, in the 

 califate, in the year 786. He owed his peaceful 

 accession to the sagacity of the Barmecide Yahya, 

 whom he at once made his grand-vizier. To him 

 and his four sons he left the entire administration 

 of his extensive kingdom ; and the energy of their 

 administration, the enforcement of order, and the 

 general prosperity of the country proved that his 

 confidence was not misplaced. Meantime Haroun 

 gave himself up to the pleasures of life, and his 

 own taste and hospitality quickly made his court 

 at Bagdad a brilliant centre of all the wit, learn- 

 ing, and art of the Moslem world. Himself an 

 accomplished scholar and poet, he gathered round 

 him the best scholars, poets, and musicians of his 

 age, and heaped rewards upon them with lavish 

 prodigality. Towards the end of his reign a strange 

 and deeply-rooted hatred towards the 'Barmecide* 

 (q.v.) filled his mind, and in 803 he caused the 

 vi/ier, his four sons, and all their descendants 

 save one, to be executed, not even excepting 

 his favourite Jaafer (Giafar), who had been his 

 constant companion in his famous but apocryphal 



iioi-t 111 mil rumbles through the street* of Bagdad. 

 15ut the. retribution of heaven quickly followed ; 

 bis affairs fell into irretrievable confusion ; treason 

 and rebellion, no longer dreading the far-reaching 

 arm of the able vi/ier, showed themselves in every 

 miner of the empire; and, when it was too late, 

 Haroun repented bitterly his ferocious cruelty. To 

 quell a formidable rising in Khorossan, in the 

 north-east of the empire, Haroun marched in per- 

 son against the relwilH, but an attack of apoplexy 

 obliged him to remain behind in TUB, where he 

 soon afterwards died, in the month of March 809. 

 Haroun the Magnificent is the hero of many of 

 the stories in the Arabian Nights, which nave 

 thrown a false halo round his memory ; for with 

 all his enlightenment, there was room in his heart 

 for the most merciless and blood-thirsty ferocity. 

 See Gibbon's History, Weil's Gesch. der Chalifen, 

 and Professor E. H. Palmer's sketch in the ' New 

 Plutarch ' series ( 1880). 



Harp* a musical stringed instrument, much 

 esteemed by the ancients. In Egypt it attained 

 an early and unequalled maturity, and is deline- 

 ated in the sculptures from the earliest ages in 

 many different forms. The great Egyptian harp 

 stood nearly 7 feet in height, and carried 18 

 sonorous bass and tenor strings. Its immense 

 frame shimmered with all the colours of the rain- 

 bow, and was further ornamented with massive 

 carvings, gold, and precious stones. The Assyrian 

 and biblical harp was a small instrument, easily 

 carried in the hand, and resembling more a Lyre 

 (q.v.) than a true harp. The harp was not in use 

 among the Greeks and Romans ; but the kantela, 

 to which the Finns chanted the Kalevala, was a 

 sort of primitive harp. The Celtic bards held 

 the instrument in the greatest honour. The old 

 Scottish harp was about 3 feet high, a foot and 

 a half broad, and carried about thirty strings. 

 Seven harps earlier than the 18th century are 

 in existence, and are described in Hipkins' Musical 

 Instruments, Historic, Rare, and Unique (1889). 

 The Welsh triple harp is a large instrument, 

 furnished with three rows of strings. Of these, 

 two rows are tuned in unison and in the diatonic 

 scale, the remaining one in the sharps and flats 

 of the chromatic. In Ireland the harp was so 

 celebrated an instrument in the remotest times 

 that the Italians of the middle ages believed their 

 harp to be derived from Ireland. The most familiar 

 forms of harp are the Italian, the medieval, and the 

 pedal harp. The first is strung with two rows of 

 wire-strings, separated by a double sound-board ; 

 this kind is now little used, being very imperfect. 

 The second is in the form of a triangle, with a 

 sound-board and gut-strings ; it is always tuned in 

 the principal key of the music, while the strings 

 are altered to suit any modulations out of the key, 

 by pressure of the finger, or turning the tuning-pins 

 or certain notes. The adaptation of the harp to the 

 modern chromatic scales led to the invention of the 

 pedal harp, which has seven pedals, by which each 

 note of i be diatonic scale, in all the different 

 octaves, can be made a semitone higher. The 

 compass of the pedal harp is from contra F to D of 

 the sixth octave above. In order to have the B 

 flat, it must be tuned in the key of E flat. The 

 music for the harp is written in the bass and treble 

 clef, the same as pianoforte music. A celebrated 

 bat] list, Hochbrucker, in Donauworth, invented the 

 pedals in 1720; others say they were invented by 

 J. Paul Verter, in Nuremberg, in 1730, who at least 

 added the piano and forte pedal. The facility of 

 playing chromatic intervals, and in different k 

 was still more completely attained by frhe inven- 

 tion of the double-action pedal harp by Erard in 

 Paris, in 1810. By means of EranTs invention, 

 each string can be sharpened twice, each time a 



