Tautirut

The tautirut (Inuktitut syllabics: ᑕᐅᑎᕈᑦ or tautiruut, also known as the Eskimo fiddle) is a bowed zither native to the Inuit culture of Canada.

Lucien M. Turner described the "Eskimo violin" in 1894 as being ...made of birch or spruce, and the two strings are of coarse, loosely twisted sinew.

[2]The Canadian anthropologist Ernest William Hawkes described the tautirut in 1916: It consists of a rude box, with a square hole in the top, three sinew strings with bridge and tail-piece and a short bow with a whalebone strip for hair.

[3]The tautirut, along with the Apache fiddle are among the few First Nations chordophones which may possibly be pre-Columbian in origin.

[4] Ethnomusicologist Anthony Baines and others have noted the similarity of the tautirut to the Icelandic fiðla[5] and Shetland gue.