Fullmarks to Olly!

Q. Moog
R. viola d'amore
S. crumhorn
T. hurdy-gurdy

Here's something else to thicken the plot.

Richard's Third Man-ish guitar is, I believe, a bandura.

Some very silly name like a Stratolin or a Viocaster?

I think I'll have to give you that one - it's actually a TogaMan GuitarViol, and comes also in an acoustic version. Like the Arpeggione in its own time, it's a guitar whose body-shape, bridge and fretboard are adapted for bowing, and apparently if can be played both as a "leg-viol" and strapped on in familiar electric-guitar style.

I have a CD of Ukrainian bandura music which is rather beautiful.

Reiner's second looks like an ophicleide-serpent-type thing and the third is a morin khuur or Mongolian horse-head fiddle, is it not? The first one is a bit of a mystery though. Does it have a brass-type mouthpiece or does a reed go in the end?

That first one of Reiner's - is it a sort of oliphant? Do they have holes?

Another:

Fie on ye for shame, Richard...  my top pic is the closest to home of all for you

But quite right, Muurin Khur it is for the third one, the horse-head lyre of the Siberian & Mongolian steppes.  Properly speaking half the hair of the bow is supposed to pass around the upper of the two strings (ie so that the string is "wedged" by horsehair both back and front) so that you can never take the bow "off" the instrument... although most modern players (who tend to play modern strings too these days) prefer not to do this.

The big dragon-looking thing is an ophicleide...  which developed from a largely keyless predecessor which was a kind of straightened serpent,  intended for use in military bands (where the serpent's ungainly form made use on foot inconvenient).  The dragon-head was a Russian addition, and the straight keyless proto-ophicleide was sometimes called the Russian Bassoon (of course, it wasn't a reed instrument, although it was similar to a bassoon in appearance).  They had descended from bass versions of the Russian bark-birch rozhok, orginally found in SATB sizes, and for which a small repertoire of part-music still exists.  (The C18th liberal aristocrat Count Scheremetyev taught his serfs to play rococo music in rozhok bands,  and other landowners took up the idea.  Moscow's modern international airport, Scheremetyevo, is located on his former farmland).  Although trumpets, clarinets etc took over the upper parts in military music, the Russian bassoon (and subsequently the ophicleide) plodded on until the late C19th in both France and Russia.  The ungainly scramble one hears with modern tubas in Tchaikovsky's works (viz the rapid arpeggios in the MAZEPPA overture that precede the ff tutti) should be ophicleides...  presumably they wouldn't sound like an explosion in a sousaphone factory if they were?


PS There's a short sound excerpt from a Kummer piece, "Variations for Ophicleide", played by Nick Byrne, here: http://www.ophicleide.com/audio/03_Track_3.wma

PPS The rozhok is, essentially, a straight cornett (although I don't think it's related to the straight cornett mentioned by Praetorius as a "stille Zink", effectively a "mute cornett" - but who knows?).  They're still made and played in the countryside in Russia - I must try and get one someday?