The golden horns of Gallehus: a lost treasure and a carved verse

In 1639 a young peasant woman, Kirsten Svendsdatter, stumbled over a gold object sticking out of the ground near the village of Gallehus, in southern Jutland, close to Møgeltønder. It was a large decorated horn, more than half a metre long. Almost a century later, in 1734, a farmer named Erik Lassen found a second one a few steps from the first. Together they formed one of the most extraordinary treasures of the Nordic Iron Age.

Two horns covered in figures

The two horns, usually dated to the early fifth century, were made of gold rings set one beside the other, and were covered with applied or engraved figures: horned men, armed warriors, animals, serpents, fish, stars, three-headed figures. Their meaning has been the subject of countless interpretations, mythological or astronomical, none of them proven. They probably represented religious scenes or legends known to those who commissioned them.

The horns were taken to the royal Kunstkammer in Copenhagen, the cabinet of wonders of the Danish kings, and as early as the seventeenth century they were reproduced in printed engravings. These very drawings, carefully made by the scholars of the time, would become extremely precious. Without them, today we would know almost nothing of what the horns looked like.

The inscription

The shorter horn, found in 1734, bore along its rim a line of Elder Futhark runes. The text reads ek hlewagastiz holtijaz horna tawido, that is, “I, Hlewagastiz, son of Holt”, or “of Holt”, “made the horn”. The name Hlewagastiz may mean famous guest or protected guest. It is a short text, but of enormous importance to linguists, because it is one of the oldest and clearest documents of Proto-Norse.

The inscription is also a line of verse. It follows the pattern of Germanic alliterative poetry, in which the important words begin with the same sound: hlewagastiz, holtijaz, horna. For this reason it is often cited as one of the oldest surviving lines of verse in a Nordic language. A craftsman's signature thus becomes, almost by chance, a small work of poetry.

The theft of 1802

On the night of 4 May 1802 a Copenhagen goldsmith and forger, Niels Heidenreich, broke into the Kunstkammer and stole both horns. He melted them down for their gold, some of which he used to counterfeit coins and jewellery. He was caught the following year and convicted, but the horns were lost for ever. The copies now on display in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen were made on the basis of the old engravings and casts.

The theft deeply shocked the Denmark of the day, which was proudly rediscovering its own past. The poet Adam Oehlenschläger promptly composed the poem The Golden Horns, which became a founding text of Danish Romanticism: the horns, the poem says in essence, were a gift from the ancestors that the present generation had failed to deserve.

The story of the Gallehus horns brings together archaeology, linguistics and the history of modern sensibility. Of the treasure there remain drawings, copies and an inscription of a few words. Yet those words, carved by a fifth-century craftsman, are still studied in every history of the Germanic languages, like a voice that has survived even the destruction of the object that carried it.