Gjallarhorn

Also Known As: Old Norse Gjallarhorn, “the resounding horn” or “the yelling horn”, from gjalla, to shriek or ring out; also written Gjallar-horn, Giallar-horn, Gjallarhornið
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: Its blast carries through every one of the worlds, so that nothing living or dead can claim not to have heard it.
Role in Mythos: It is the signal the watchman god Heimdallr sounds to wake the gods when the enemies of Asgard finally come, and it is also the vessel Mímir drinks wisdom from at his well.
Relation to Humans: No mortal is ever said to hold it, blow it, or be given the use of it, and the one blast it exists for happens after the age of men is already ending. What people do with it instead is listen for it, since the sound is promised to reach every corner of the world at once.

Under the roots of the world ash, in the wet dark where loam and meltwater work at the wood, something is buried that will be used exactly once. The seeress who narrates the oldest surviving Norse account of the end of things breaks off from Odin’s bargaining to mention it almost in passing: she knows where Heimdallr’s hljóð lies hidden, couched beneath the bright, holy tree. One word, dropped into a stanza otherwise concerned with a well and a pledged eye. Out of that word grew the most famous instrument in northern myth.

Snorri Sturluson, writing in Iceland in the thirteenth century, had no doubt what the seeress meant. Heimdallr keeps a trumpet, he says, and it is called Gjallarhorn, and its blast is heard throughout all worlds. The god who owns it is well matched to it. He needs less sleep than a bird, sees a hundred leagues by night as clearly as by day, and can hear wool growing on a sheep’s back and grass pushing up out of the ground. Give a sentry senses like that and the only thing he still lacks is a way of being heard back.

The name is blunt about the job. Gjalla is to shriek, to ring, to resound, and the same root sits inside Gjöll, the river at the border of the dead. This is not the golden horn or the horn of the gods. It is the yelling horn.

Before it is ever a war signal, though, it is tableware. In Snorri’s account of the three roots of Yggdrasil, one root reaches down to a well kept by Mímir, where wisdom and understanding are stored, and Mímir is full of ancient lore because every morning he drinks from that well out of the Gjallarhorn. Picture the ordinary version of the scene: cold water, a stone rim, an old man lifting a horn and swallowing, day after day, while the tree above him keeps growing. Odin came to that well and asked for one drink of it. He was refused until he put his eye down as a pledge, and the eye is still in the water.

Nobody says who made the horn, or when, or out of what animal. It arrives in the record already old and already hidden, with no smith attached to it and no story of its forging, which is unusual company for a famous Norse object; Mjölnir and Gungnir both come with a workshop and a set of dwarves. The absence is not laziness on the part of the sources. It reflects what the horn is for, which is one sound at one moment, not a history of use. An Old English riddle from the same broad world describes a horn leading a double life, swallowing breath from a man’s chest to summon troops to war and then being filled with drink by a girl at court, and that double life is likely what is going on here too. The Gjallarhorn is a drinking vessel and a trumpet because horns were both.

There is one Viking Age image that may show it. On a red sandstone cross raised at Gosforth in Cumbria in the tenth century, among carvings of the last battle, a figure stands holding a horn and putting off two serpents. Antiquarians reading the stone in the 1880s identified him as Heimdallr with the Gjallarhorn, and the identification has stuck in the standard catalogues of Anglo-Scandinavian sculpture. The stone itself names nobody. It is a reading, made confidently, of a carving that has been weathering in a churchyard for eleven hundred years.

Then the last morning arrives. Mímir’s sons stir, the old Gjallarhorn sounds, Heimdallr blows loud with the horn held high, and everyone on the roads of Hel goes stiff with fear while Odin bends down to consult Mímir’s severed head. Snorri’s version is drier and somehow worse for it: Heimdallr stands, blows mightily, and the gods wake and go to their assembly. Around them the ash shakes on its trunk, the old tree groans, and the giant comes loose. The horn does not fight anything. It simply makes certain that no one meets the end of the world asleep.

That is the whole of its power, and it is considerable. Distance means nothing to it; walls, water and the boundaries between worlds mean nothing to it. It reaches the living, the dead and the giants in the same instant. But it is a warning, and warnings only ever buy time. The gods have known for a long age how this finishes and in what order, and the note that wakes them changes none of it. Heimdallr blows, and then goes out and dies with Loki.

The deepest limit on the horn is not in the story at all. The word the seeress used, hljóð, means “hearing” and “sound” in Icelandic and is not otherwise attested anywhere meaning “horn”. Sigurður Nordal and others before him took her to be saying that Heimdallr’s hearing lay hidden under the tree, and E. O. G. Turville-Petre suggested that hearing might be imagined solidly, as one of the god’s ears buried down there beside Odin’s eye, a matched pair of pledged senses at the roots of the world. On that reading Snorri built the most durable image in Norse eschatology on a word he read too generously. Ursula Dronke thought the poet was doing both at once, punning on sound and instrument, letting the horn ring and the well fill in the same breath. Either way it is a good trade. A god who can hear grass grow gave up the ear that does it, and got back something that everything alive would eventually have to hear.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Gjallarhorn?

The Gjallarhorn is the horn of Heimdallr, the watchman god of Norse mythology, and its name means roughly “the resounding horn” or “the yelling horn”. Its blast is said to be heard throughout all the worlds. It appears in the Poetic Edda once by name and three times in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda.

Who blows the Gjallarhorn, and when?

Heimdallr blows it, and he blows it at Ragnarök, when the enemies of the gods finally gather. In the Prose Edda he stands up and sounds it mightily, and the gods wake and assemble. It is a signal, not a weapon, and it is only ever sounded that once.

Is the Gjallarhorn a trumpet or a drinking horn?

The sources treat it as both. Snorri calls it the trumpet whose blast crosses every world, and in the same work he says Mímir drinks from his well of wisdom out of the Gjallarhorn every morning. Horns in this period genuinely served both purposes, so the two roles are less contradictory than they look.

Where is the Gjallarhorn kept?

The Poetic Edda says it lies hidden beneath the bright, holy tree, meaning the world ash Yggdrasil, near the well where Odin pledged his eye. Heimdallr himself lives at Himinbjörg beside the Bifröst bridge, watching the road into Asgard.

Is there any real doubt about the buried horn?

Yes, and it turns on a single word. The Old Norse word in that stanza, hljóð, normally means “hearing” or “sound” and is nowhere else used to mean “horn”, so a number of scholars read the line as saying that Heimdallr’s hearing, not his instrument, is what lies under the tree. Snorri read it as the horn, and his reading is the one that shaped every later telling.