• Often depicted in carvings c

• 800 AD, the Norse hero Gunther (also celebrated as Gunnar), played a lute with his toes as he lay dying in a snake-pit, in the legend of Siegfried. By 1200 AD, the four string "guitar" had evolved into two types: the http://www.jhguitars.com/ guitarra morisca (Moorish guitar) which had a rounded back, far-ranging fingerboard and manifold soundholes, and the guitarra latina (Latin guitar) which resembled the avant-garde guitar with special soundhole and a narrower neck.

They were greater often used as periodicity instruments in ensembles than as solo instruments, and can often be seen in that role in early popular performances. (Gaspar Sanz' Instrucción de Música sobre la Guitarra Española of 1674 constitutes the majority of the surviving solo corpus for the era.) Renaissance and Baroque guitars are easily distinguished because the Renaissance guitar is very plain and the Baroque guitar is very ornate, with ivory or potbelly stove inlays all over the neck and body, and a paper-cutout inverted "wedding cake" inside the hole.