So if you do a search for "utrecht psalter lyre," this Wikipedia page (taken from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica) comes up pretty high on the results. Scroll down a bit and you'll see four figures from the Utrecht.
It's really, really easy to miss Player A's second hand. Can you see it? I didn't, and I was looking for it.
Now head over the the University Library Utrecht's page for its famous manuscript and scroll down a bit. There's our boy again. Now do you see his hand? It's faded, but clearly visible in the hand-hole of the lyre, fingers hooked in the iconic "harper" pose you see in so many later manuscripts.
Look! I learned how to use layers in Pixlr Editor to trace digital images!
NB: Picture is named "utrecht_cologne2" because the shape reminds me of the Cologne lyre, no other reason.
Go back to the encyclopedia, and you can see the hand rendered as two circle-ish squiggles at the top of the hand-hole.
(I still don't know what those two pairs of lines on the upper arch of the lyre are. Straps?)
What do I make of this? Is this a later harper-like playing technique? Using the lyre as a micro-harp, more or less? Or is it the application of an emerging visual language to an old icon?
I will say the front (right) hand of the figure looks positioned for three-fingered playing. From what I recall reading (Laurie Riley? Ann Heymann?) there is some iconographic evidence that medieval harpers played with three fingers on either hand, instead of the modern technique of using four. Three fingers right + three fingers left = six strings on a lyre.
Just seems... excessive. And there's good reasons not to "assign" a finger to a string, as far as ease of plucking goes.
I'm not sure if I think this is an accurate depiction or a stylized one.
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