The Gold Horns

Transcribed from the 1913 Thomas J. Wise pamphlet by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org. Many thanks to Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library, UK, for kindly supplying the images from which this transcription was made.
translated by GEORGE BORROW
from the Danish of ADAM GOTTLOB OEHLENSCHLÄGER
Edited with an Introduction by EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.
London: printed for private circulation 1913
Copyright in the United States of America by Houghton , Mifflin & Co. for Clement Shorter .
Early in the present year Mr. Thos. J. Wise discovered among the miscellaneous MSS. of Borrow a fragment which proved to be part of a version of Oehlenschläger’s Gold Horns . His attention being drawn to the fact, hitherto unknown, that Borrow had translated this famous poem, he sought for, and presently found, a complete MS. of the poem, and from this copy the present text has been printed. The paper on which it is written is watermarked 1824, and it is probable that the version was composed in 1826. The hand-writing coincides with that of several of the pieces included in the Romantic Ballads of that year, and there can be little doubt that Borrow intended The Gold Horns for that volume, and rejected it at last. He was conscious, perhaps, that his hand had lacked the
skill needful to reproduce a lyric the melody of which would have taxed the powers of Coleridge or of Shelley. Nevertheless, his attempt seems worthy of preservation.
The Gold Horns marks one of the most important stages in the history of Scandinavian literature. It is the earliest, and the freshest, specimen of the Romantic Revival in its definite form. In this way, it takes in Danish poetry a place analogous to that taken by The Ancient Mariner in English poetry.
The story of the events which led to the composition of The Gold Horns is told independently, by Steffens and by Oehlenschläger in their respective Memoirs, and the two accounts tally completely. Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger (1779–1850), the greatest poet whom the North of Europe has produced, had already attracted considerable renown and even profit by his writings, which were in the classico-sentimental manner of the late 18th century, when, in the summer of 1802, the young Norwegian philosopher, Henrik Steffens, arrived in Copenhagen from Germany, where he had imbibed the new romantic ideas. He began to give lectures on