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Golden horns of Gallehus
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The Golden Horns of Gallehus (DR 12 †U) were two golden horns, one shorter than the other, discovered in a Danish town called Gallehus north of Tønder in South Jutland, in Denmark.[1] The longest horn was found in 1639, and the shortest respectively in 1734, 15-20 meters apart from the first discovery.[1] The horns were believed to date to the fifth century.
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The horns were made of solid gold and constructed from rings, each covered with figures soldered onto the rings, with yet more figures carved into the rings between the larger figures. These figures probably depicted some actual events of a Norse saga which is now unknown to us. The most probable hypothesis is that the illustrations came from Celtic mythology rather than Norse: the illustrations on the horns portrayed a man with horns and a necklace, very similar in appearance to the Celtic god Cernunnos (especially as compared to the Cernunnos portrait on the Gundestrup cauldron, which also was found in Denmark), as well as several additional iconographic elements, such as a he-goat, snakes, and deer, animals commonly associated with Cernunnos. Several other archaeological finds from Denmark also show Celtic influence.
Both horns had originally been the same length, but a segment of the narrow end of the second (shorter) horn, which was missing when it was found (1734), had already been plowed up and recovered prior to 1639. It also was subsequently melted down and lost. The longer horn (intact one) was 75.8 cm. long, as measured along the outer perimeter; the opening diameter was 10.4 cm., and the horn weighed 3.2 kg.
The horns are believed to have originated from Jutlandic tribes, specifically Cimbri and Iutae, but several theories of their specific origins exist. The horns were probably used for ritual drinking and then subsequently sacrificed in the earth or buried as a treasure, though this is also uncertain. Similar horns of wood, glass, bone, and bronze have been found in the same area, some of them having obviously been used for trumpeting signals rather than for drinking.
The longer horn was discovered on July 20, 1639 by a peasant girl named Kirsten Svendsdatter in the village of Gallehus, near Møgeltønder when she saw it protrude above the ground. She wrote a letter to King Christian IV of Denmark who retrieved it and in turn gave it to the Danish prince (also named Christian), who refurbished it into a drinking-horn. The Danish antiquarian Olaus Wormius wrote a treatise named De aureo cornu on the first Golden Horn in 1641. The first preserved sketch of the horn comes from this treatise. In 1678 it was described in the scientific journal Journal de Savants.
About 100 years later on April 21, 1734 the other (shorter, damaged) horn was found by Erich Lassen not far from the first one. He gave it to the count of Schackenborg who in turn delivered it to the king Christian VI of Denmark and received 200 rigsdaler in return. From this moment both horns were stored at Det kongelige Kunstkammer at Christiansborg, currently the Danish Rigsarkivet (national archive). The shorter horn was described in a treatise by archivist Richard Joachim Paulli in the same year.
This second horn bore an inscription in the runic :
- ᛖᚲ ᚺᛚᛖᚹᚨᚷᚨᛊᛏᛁᛉ ᚺᛟᛚᛏᛁᛃᚨᛉ ᚺᛟᚱᚾᚨ ᛏᚨᚹᛁᛞᛟ (Runic Unicode)
which is transcribed:
- [ek hlewagastiz ÷ holtijaz ÷ horna ÷ tawido ÷]
which, in the Proto-Norse, reads:
- ek hlewagastiz holtijaz horna tawidō
with the approximate translation:
- I Hlewagastiz Holtijaz (of Holt, Holti's son) made the horn
The meaning Hlewagastiz is debated and means either "lee guest" or "reputation guest". This inscription is one of the earliest inscriptions in the Older Futhark, and a line of alliterative verse.
On May 4, 1802, the horns were stolen by a goldsmith and watchmaker named Niels Heidenreich, who got into the storage area using forged keys. He took his booty home and immediately destroyed it to recycle the gold. The theft was discovered the next day and a bounty of 1,000 rigsdaler was advertised in the papers.
The grandmaster of the goldsmiths guild, Andreas Holm, suspected that Heidenreich had been involved, since he had tried to sell Holm forged “pagodas” (Indian coins with god motifs), made from bad gold mixed with brass. Holm and his colleagues had kept watch on Heidenreich and seen him dump coin stamps in the town moat. He was arrested on April 27, 1803, and confessed on April 30. On June 10 Heidenreich was sentenced to prison, and not released until 1840. He died four years later. His buyers returned the recycled gold, which ended up in coins, not copies of the horns.
A set of plaster casts of the horns had been made for a cardinal in Rome, but they had already been lost in a shipwreck off the Corsican coast. Approximate copies were instead created from sketches. The horns pictured above are newer copies, made in 1980.
A set of modern gilded silver copies were stolen from Kongernes Jelling museum on September 17, 2007 at 4.30 in the morning, [2], but were recovered shortly after on September 19, 2007. In 1993 another set was stolen from Moesgaard Museum, which was shortly after recovered ditched in a forest near Hasselager. These copies are made of gilded brass. [3]