Fiddlesticks are a pair of sticks you use to hit the strings with

I first came across this about ten years ago via Phil Tyler and we duly experimented with a couple of Japanese chopsticks to quite pleasing effect. As I recall you have to tune the fiddle to an open tuning, playing the sticks on the strings that aren't being fiddled. The term he used was Beating Sticks, and traditionally, seems to be limited to a small region of the USA, with the wife beating her husband's fiddle strings with her knitting needles. I know I certainly hadn't heard of it before, nor indeed since (to be honest I'd quite forgotten about it until now) so I'm not at all convinced that this obscure musical practise is the source of the more widespread term fiddle-sticks, which, according to Here, was recorded from the fifteenth century.