Golden Horns of Gallehus

The shorter horn found in 1734 had six segments, a narrow one bearing a Proto-Norse Elder Futhark inscription at the rim and five ornamented with images.

[2] The two rows of images in the top segment of the longer horn have been taken as a cipher encoding a runic text of 22 letters, although there is no universally accepted decipherment.

[3] The figures embossed on the horns combine depictions of numerous anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and hybrid motifs.

There are large considerable number of serpents, some of them intertwining in the fashion of the wider animal style of Dark Age Europe.

Two masked figures armed with sword and shield on the smaller horn are reminiscent of other Germanic depictions of sword-dances, e.g. on the Sutton Hoo helmet.

Olrik (1918) nevertheless recognized a number of Norse gods among the figures, including Tyr, Odin, Thor and Freyr.

The longer horn was discovered on 20 July 1639 by a peasant girl named Kirsten Svendsdatter in the village of Gallehus, near Møgeltønder, Denmark when she saw it protrude above the ground.

The Danish antiquarian Olaus Wormius wrote a treatise named De aureo cornu on the first Golden Horn in 1641.

Wormius notes that he had not seen the horn in the state in which it was found, and it cannot now be determined whether the rim and the narrow segments devoid of ornamentation were modern additions like the pommel.

He gave it to the count of Schackenborg who in turn delivered it to King Christian VI of Denmark and received 200 rigsdaler in return.

From this moment both horns were stored at Det kongelige Kunstkammer (The Royal Chamber of Art) at Christiansborg, currently the Danish Rigsarkivet (national archive).

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.

In 1993, copies of the horns were stolen from Moesgaard Museum, which were shortly after recovered ditched in a forest near Hasselager.