Image depicting the copies of the Golden horns found at the National Museum of Denmark. (Photo by Malene Thyssen.)

The Golden horns of Gallehus were two golden horns, one shorter than the other, discovered in North Slesvig, or Schleswig, in Denmark. The horns were believed to date to the fourth century (Germanic Iron Age). 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 depict some actual events or norse saga which is now unknown to us. One theory is that the illustration comes from Celtic mythology rather than Norse.

The horns are believed to originate with the Angles, but several theories of their origins exist. The horns have probably been used for ritual drinking and 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 obviously used for blowing signals rather than drinking.

Both horns have been the same length, but the narrow end of the second (short) horn was plowed up and recovered prior to 1639, and the gold was melt down and lost.

Olaus Wormius drawing of the first horn from 1641. (Photo by Malene Thyssen.)

The first horn (the long, intact one) was 75,8 centimeter measured on the outer perimeter, the opening diameter was 10,4 centimeter, and weighed 3,2 kg. This 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 the Danish 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.

Richard Joachim Paullis drawing of the second (short) horn and its runic inscription. (Photo by Malene Thyssen.)

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 short horn was described in a treatise by archivist Richard Joachim Paulli the same year.

This second horn also featured a runic inscription:

ᛖᚲ ᚺᛚᛖᚹᚨᚷᚨᛊᛏᛁᛉ ᚺᛟᛚᛏᛁᛃᚨᛉ ᚺᛟᚱᚾᚨ ᛏᚨᚹᛁᛞᛟ (Runic Unicode)

which in the Old Norse language reads:

ek hlewagastiR holtijaR horna tawido

with the approximate translation:

I, leeguest from/son of Holt made the horn

this inscription is one of the earliest inscriptions in the Older Futhark, and a line of alliterative verse.

Burglary and destruction

On May 4, 1802 the horns were stolen by a goldsmith and watchmaker named Niels Heidenreich, who gained access to the storage area using two forged keys and immediately afterwards destroyed them in his kitchen to recycle the gold. The thievery was discovered the next day and advertisements were put into present day mass media with a bounty of 1000 rigsdaler and full anonymity for information that would lead to the arrest of the culprit.

The grandmaster of the goldsmith guild, Andreas Holm suspected that Hiedenreich had been involved, since he had tried to trick him into buying forged pagodas (indian coins with god motifs), made of bad gold mixed with brass. Holm and his colleagues had watched Heidenreich and seen him dumping coin stamps in the town moat. He was arrested on April 27, 1803 and confessed the theft on April 30.

He was subsequently sentenced to prison on June 10, 1803 and not released until 1840. Four years later he died. The gold sold by Heidenreich was returned by the buyers, but was not used for creating new copies, instead it was used for coins.

Sketches of the images on the horns and the runic inscription were however made and thus approximate copies could be made. New copies were created in 1980, portrayed in the image above. Exact plaster copies had also been made for a cardinal in Rome, but the ship carrying the copies sunk outside Corsica, so these copies were lost.