Tautirut
The tautirut is a bowed zither native to the Inuit culture of Canada.
Lucien M. Turner described the "Eskimo violin" in 1894 as being
The Canadian anthropologist Ernest William Hawkes described the tautirut in 1916:Origin
The tautirut, along with the Apache fiddle are among the few First Nations chordophones which may possibly be pre-Columbian in origin. Ethnomusicologist Anthony Baines and others have noted the similarity of the tautirut to the Icelandic fiðla and Shetland gue.
Peter Cooke believed that the tautirut's limited distribution around the Hudson Bay area indicated that it was introduced to the Inuit by Hudson's Bay Company sailors from the Orkney and Shetland Islands.
