The Horn That Waits

Sunniva Aalto
Field Correspondent, The Northern Reaches

Fieldnotes — a fjordside village, north Norway, midwinter

I went looking for Gjallarhorn the way one goes looking for a sound rather than a thing: through texts, mostly, since no reliquary case holds it and no museum drawer is labelled with its name. The horn belongs to Heimdallr, the watchman god who stands sentinel at Bifröst, the trembling bridge between Asgard and Midgard, and whose senses the old poets swore were sharper than any other being's, keen enough to hear grass grow on the earth and wool grow on the backs of sheep. It is Heimdallr who will lift Gjallarhorn to his mouth when the giants and the fire come at last, and its sound, the sources agree, will be heard in all nine worlds at once, the note that tells the gods their long watch is over and the last battle has begun.

The word itself, gjallarhorn, is usually rendered as yelling horn or resounding horn, from a root that also names the river Gjöll, the icy water that runs past the gates of the dead. Snorri Sturluson, writing his account of the old beliefs in thirteenth century Iceland, describes the horn plainly: Heimdallr keeps it, and it can be heard everywhere. But go back further, to the Völuspá, the seeress's prophecy preserved in the Codex Regius, and the picture blurs. There the horn is named in the same breath as Mímir's well, the spring beneath the world tree Yggdrasil where wisdom is bought at the price of an eye, and some who have spent longer with the verse than I have argue the two might once have been the same vessel, a horn for drinking doubling as a horn for warning. I could not settle which came first, the cup or the trumpet, and I am not certain the poem meant for anyone to.

Heimdallr himself is a strange figure to hang a warning on. He is said to have been born of nine mothers, sometimes read as the nine waves of the sea, and he stands apart from the other gods even in his own hall, always awake, always watching the road to Asgard for the frost giants he knows are coming. There is a prophecy that he and Loki are fated to kill one another at the end, a settling of some older grievance the surviving texts never quite explain. When that end comes, it is Heimdallr's horn that opens it, the single sound that gathers the gods to Vígríðr for the last fight, after which very little of the old order is left standing.

I spent an evening on a shingle beach further north trying to hold the scale of that sound in my head. People who lived their whole lives within one fjord knew what a shout carried from headland to headland, and no further. A horn heard in nine worlds at once is not loud in the way a foghorn is loud. It is total, present everywhere simultaneously, which is a different and older kind of enormity, nearer to thunder or to the sea itself than to anything a smith could hammer out of metal.

The nearest thing to a physical echo I ever found was not Gjallarhorn at all but the golden horns of Gallehus, dug out of a Jutland field in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, covered in figures and runes nobody has fully read, stolen and melted down in 1802 and known to us now only through old drawings and careful replicas. They are Iron Age objects, not myth, and no serious source ties them to Heimdallr. But standing before the replica in Copenhagen, gold catching the museum light, I understood why people reach for that object anyway when they want the horn of the sagas to be something they could hold. The myth resists it. It wants to remain a sound coiled at the edge of the world tree, silent for as long as the watchman keeps his post, and unmistakable the one time he does not.

Sunniva Aalto is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Northern Reaches. High latitudes, deep winter, standing water — she works in the months when the light is briefest, on the theory that the north's stories were made at that time of year and are best understood in it. She travels alone and says little about it.