Gallehus horns
Two gold drinking horns, one of them carrying the best-known complete sentence in the Elder Futhark. Both were stolen and melted down in 1802, and everything known about them comes from drawings.
At a glance
- Alphabet
- Elder Futhark
- Date
- c. AD 400
- Found at
- Gallehus, near Møgeltønder, Southern Jutland, Denmark
- Now
- Destroyed in 1802; the National Museum of Denmark holds replicas
- Signature
- DR 12
The text
Transliteration in the conventional runological form. Translations on this site are our own and deliberately literal.
ek hlewagastiʀ holtijaʀ horna tawido
I, Hlewagastiʀ of Holt, made the horn.
Discovery
The first horn was found near Møgeltønder in 1639 by Kirsten Svendsdatter, the second in 1734 by Erik Lassen; both were given to the Danish crown. The inscription is on the second. In 1802 both were stolen from the royal collection and melted down, so the text survives only through 17th- and 18th-century drawings, which is why the reading rests on the accuracy of draughtsmen rather than on an object anyone can re-examine.
Why it matters
A short sentence with a subject, an object and a verb, in a corpus where most texts are a name or a word. It gives the maker's name, an epithet or patronymic, and the fact of manufacture, and it is the standard teaching example of a complete Proto-Norse utterance. The metre is also the earliest attested Germanic alliterative long line.
Common misconceptions
Claims about this object that circulate widely and do not hold up.
Whether holtijaʀ means "of Holt", "son of Holt" or "the man from the wood" is not settled, and translations differ accordingly. The confident renderings in circulation pick one and do not say they have picked.
Runes attested here (1)
Every dictionary entry that cites this object, with the reason it gives.
- AnsuzElder
ek hlewagastiʀ holtijaʀ horna tawido, "I, Hlewagastiʀ of Holt, made the horn." The best-known complete sentence in the Elder Futhark.
Sources
Full references on the sources page.