Morin Khuur - Origin

Origin

Even though the morin huur does not own a long history, its direct predecessor Chuurqin has a long history. In Tang dynasty (600s~800s), when the ethnic Mongols were still a branch of Shiwei people, there appeared to be records of huqin. In Northern Song dynasty, when the Mongols are forming, horse-tail huqin (馬尾胡琴) appears. Since then, the chuur fiddle has been separated from general huqin till now.

One legend about the origin of the morin khuur is that a shepherd named Namjil the Cuckoo received the gift of a flying horse; he would mount it at night and fly to meet his beloved. A jealous woman had the horse’s wings cut off, so that the horse fell from the air and died. The grieving shepherd made a horsehead fiddle from the now-wingless horse's skin and tail hair, and used it to play poignant songs about his horse.

Another legend credits the invention of the morin khuur to a boy named Sükhe (or Suho). After a wicked lord slew the boy's prized white horse, the horse's spirit came to Sükhe in a dream and instructed him to make an instrument from the horse's body, so the two could still be together and neither would be lonely. So the first morin khuur was assembled, with horse bones as its neck, horsehair strings, horse skin covering its wooden soundbox, and its scroll carved into the shape of a horse head.

Chinese history credits the evolution of the matouqin from the xiqin (奚琴), a family of instruments found around the Shar Mören River valley (not to be confused with the Yellow River) in what is now Inner Mongolia. It was originally associated with the Xi people. In 1105 (during the Northern Song Dynasty), it was described as a foreign, two-stringed lute in an encyclopedic work on music called Yue Shu by Chen Yang. In Inner Mongolia, the matouqin is classified in the huqin family, which also includes the erhu.

The fact that most of the eastern Turkic neighbors of the Mongols possess similar horse hair instruments (such as the Tuvan igil, the Kazakh kobyz, or the Kyrgyz Kyl kyyak), though not western Turkic, may point to a possible origin amongst peoples that once inhabited the Mongolian Steppe, and migrated to what is now Tuva, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.