The Cwidder is a fictional musical instrument of the lute family, played in the fictional land of Dalemark. It is described in the book Cart and Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones.

Hornbostel Sachs Classification: 321.321

The cwidder is a stringed instrument similar to a guitar, mandolin, bouzouki or lute. It has a body with a flat top and a round back, similar to that of a Italian mandolin, Greek bouzouki or lute. The neck, known to cwidder players as the 'arm', extends from the body and holds the tuning pegs. The strings are stretched along the neck and are fingered by the left hand to get different pitches. The right hand plucks or strums the strings.

Cwidders come in a range of different sizes. This was normal during the Renaissance - most instruments came in three or four different sizes, for example recorders, viols, mandolins. The smaller instruments produce higher pitched notes so a set of instruments of different sizes can cover a greater range of pitches than a single instrument.

The family in the book Cart and Cwidder are travelling musicians. They have at least three cwidders of different sizes, which they use both for instrumental performances and for accompanying songs. Their big cwidder is over 200 years old and once belonged to the wizard Osfameron. It is a beautiful instrument with lots of inlaid work on the top and arm, in mother-of-pearl, bone and coloured woods.

There are many things we don't know about the cwidder:

• Was it a long necked instrument like the bouzouki or a short-necked one like the lute?
• Were there frets? Probably, but they're not mentioned. Most plucked instruments have frets while bowed instruments tend not to, although there are exceptions to both¹.
• How many strings did it have and how were they tuned? All we can say is that it had at least three: the book talks about the bass string and the other strings.

• Were the strings metal like a mandolin/bouzouki or gut like a classical guitar or lute?

  • Gut strung: The tone of the cwidder is described as [sweet and mellow] which sounds more like gut-strung than metal. The fact that the cwidder used tuning pegs rather than geared tuning heads also suggests gut strings. A metal string is normally plucked by a plectrum - there's no mention of plectrums in the book suggesting the strings were plucked by the fingers directly.

  • Steel strung: On the other hand, the instruments could be played out of doors to a crowd of 80 to 100 people without amplification. This suggests the volume produced by metal strings.

The name 'cwidder' is clearly related to 'guitar' as well as 'cittern', gittern and chittarone. All of these are ultimately from the Greek 'kythara', a type of lute. The combination 'cw' was common in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) but later became spelled as 'qu'; for example, the word 'cwene' became 'queen'.

The cwidder has been depicted by various artists for the cover of Cart and Cwidder, variously as a lute, bouzouki or cittern.