Golden Horn

“ The long white front of the arsenal is fused in crimson heat, and burns against the dark as if it were one mass of living coal. And over all hangs the luminous canopy of smoke, redoubling its lustre on the waters of the Golden Horn, and mingling with the phosphorescent gleams that play around the oars of the caïques.
A long barge, propelled by sixteen oars, glides around the dark corner of Tophaneh, and shoots into the clear, brilliant space in front of the mosque. It is not lighted, and passes with great swiftness towards the brilliant landing-place. ”

“ It is the tendency of all simple objects to become ornate. The earliest plain horn cups used by the herdsman and the simples developed into silver-mounted richly-chased drinking horns for use at the castle. Of this class is the drinking horn belonging to Lord Cawdor, at Golden Grove, with silver mounts supported by silver dragon and greyhound, which has a history dating from the days of Richard III.
The wooden bowl, as we see in the mazer, became enriched with costly mounts. ”

“ There was warm rhinoceros horn and cold rhinoceros horn, as there was warm jade and cold jade. A Chinese work of the eighth century mentions “cold-dispelling rhinoceros horn (pi han si) , whose colour is golden.97... During the winter months it spreads warmth which imparts a genial feeling to man.” Another work speaks of “heat-dispelling rhinoceros horn (pi shu si) .... During the summer months it can cool off the hot temperature.” Girdles of “wrath-dispelling” horn caused men “to abandon their anger” ”

“ And the fame of thy wondrous beauty in all the West be found."
So Horn found great favour with the King, and he put him in charge of Athelbrus, the house-steward, that he might teach him all knightly duties, and he spared no pains with him, nor yet with his companions; but well trained as they all were, Horn was far ahead of them both in stature and noble bearing. Even a stranger looking at him could guess his lofty birth, and the splendour of his marvellous beauty lit up all the palace; while he won all hearts, from the meanest grooms to the greatest of the court ladies. ”

“ At the beginning of the Christian era it had become fashionable to wear these, and how they were enlarged and made not only badges of sanctity but marks of worldly honor, we may read in the New Testament.
The horn has been an important feature of Christian symbolism, as of pagan, and we constantly see the ram's horn, which was the successor of the bull's horn, made such from economical reasons, all over the ruins of ancient Rome. The married women of Lebanon wear silver horns upon their heads to distinguish them from the single women. ”

“ I sawed part way through the horn, then struck something soft and glittering. Think of it! That horn was a brown shell, a real horn; inside, it was solid virgin gold—and the horn was upon a rhinoceros!
Well, I investigated. I found that this horn-shell filled with gold had been set on a peg of the real horn, and cunningly pegged in place with ivory pegs. Thus it was evident that the animal had been a tame beast somewhere up-country. ”

“ HORN, English hero of romance. King Horn is a heroic poem or gest of 1546 lines dating from the 13th century. Murry (or Allof) , king of Sudenne [1] (Surrey and Sussex?) is slain by Saracen pirates who turn his son Horn adrift with twelve other children. The boat drifts to Westernesse [2] (Cornwall?) , where the children are received by King Aylmer (Aethelmaer) . Presently Horn is denounced by one of his companions as the lover of the king’s daughter Rymenhild (Rimel) and is banished, taking with him a ring, the gift of his bride and a talisman against danger. ”

“ Horns, in English folk-lore, appear to belong rather to elves than to fairies [81] —the elves that haunt hills, and are known all over Europe; dwarfs, trolls, kobolds, pixies, and so forth. Teutonic witches are called horn-blowers. Again, the fairy-train or fairy-hunt is supposed to carry horns; we have seen it already in Sir Orfeo, [82] and in Thomas of Erceldoune, [83] the fairy-queen bears a horn about her neck.
But this Oberon of Huon of Bordeaux is mortal, and is not pictured as being abnormal in stature, any more than Mider. ”

“ Among household curios are drinking horns elaborately etched, and frequently turned in a lathe. They were popular in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the turned patterns then so common were copied by the silversmiths, who made silver tankards and drinking cups on the same models. The cornucopia or horn of abundance figures frequently in sculpture, paintings, and works of art. The horn is one of the early instruments of music (see Chapter XV) , and has long been associated with sports. ”

“ Above this snag, the horns have a shiny surface, are rounded, and taper gradually to a sharp tip, bent into a hook. The horns vary greatly in the males. I have sometimes shot them with the prong hardly developed, sometimes springing from the horn near the tip, and in others growing close to the head, where it is always uneven and warty. The female is devoid of horns, or only has them in a rudimentary condition. ”

“ The horn of the fabulous unicorn, in reality none other than that of the rhinoceros, is much valued as an amulet, and in west Africa, where the horns of wild animals are greatly esteemed as fiend-scarers, a large horn filled with mud and having three small horns attached to its lower end is used as a safeguard to prevent slaves from running away. ”

“ Satisfied on this point, he loosed all the bonds and jumped back to avoid the indomitable youngster’s retort of beak and claws. Unamazed by his sudden freedom, the young eagle flopped angrily away to the farther end of the ledge; and Horner, having resumed his useful shirt, started to climb down the mountain, whose ascent he had so heedlessly adventured nearly two weeks before. As he lowered himself over the dizzy brink, he glanced up, to see the male eagle circling slowly above him, gazing down at him with the old challenge in his unwinking, golden eyes. ”

“ There is a little tune which every Englishman knows, for it serves to call dogs with, when they are on tour in the streets. That tune is the theme which young Siegfried carols rejoicing in the forest; at least, he is supposed to do it; in reality it is the first horn-player placed in the wings of the theatre. The horn there illustrates rapturous vital power. ”

“ His horns grow and form their prongs, when growing we call them in their velvet; feel of them and they are soft, through the summer and fall, and they keep growing until they form a perfect horn, hard as a bone. By the prongs we are able to tell the number of years old they are.
In the fall of the year when an old buck has his horns fully grown to see him running in his native forest is a beautiful sight. ”

“ Dreams we are the forest's breath
Waking to the touch of day;
Recks not 'tis the horn of Death
Dying in the distance grey.
Hound and horn give voice and tongue——
And through it all the horn, now clear and ringing, now caught and dying in the echoes of the forest, now lost in the echoes of the Brocken, the wild notes flying before the phantom of the flying stag; ever the horn threading the gushing music of the violins, the voices of the musicians, and the chorus of the jägers. ”

“ The horns so fastened are said to bring good luck to those who pass under them.
The medicinal properties ascribed to horns among primitive peoples have a corollary interest here. In a letter accompanying his legend of “The Horn Worshipers,” Mr. Bertillion says: “As late as ten years ago I bought a beautiful pair of buck horns, several points of which I had to sharpen because they had been sawed off a half inch or more for the purpose of curing some disease, which, to the best of my memory, was measles, the cure being a dose of pulverized horn, about a teaspoonful.” ”

“ The horns are lagest at their base, and occupy the crown of the head almost entirely. they are compressed, bent backwards and lunated; the surface swelling into wavy rings which incircleing the horn continue to succeed each other from the base to the extremity and becoming less elivated and more distant as they recede from the head. ”

“ The touching-pieces (tousches) or proofs (espreuves) employed for the purpose, and considered especially efficacious against poison, were toadstones, glossopetræ, serpentine, jasper, agate and particularly the unicorn's horn. What was foisted upon the credulous public as the horn of the fabled animal was in reality the horn or tusk of a fish—the narwhal or sea-unicorn of the northern seas. Being an object of very great value, the horn was only occasionally kept entire, like the one preserved to this day at New College, Oxford. ”

“ It is not generally known that common ox horns can be so worked and decorated as to make both useful and ornamental objects. The modern spelling of lantern is rather unfortunate, inasmuch as it loses sight of the origin of that extremely useful article, the lanthorn of King Alfred's invention, in which thin plates of translucent horn were used to guard that monarch's candle clocks from the wind. ”

“ Horn spoke up for them all, for he was wisest and most skilled in the use of courteous words. "We are from Suddenne, sire, of good lineage and Christian faith. The pagans came to our land, and slew my father and many others, and drove us from our homes. We thirteen whom you see were set adrift in a boat, to be the sport of the sea; a day and a night have we travelled without sail or rudder, and our boat brought us to this land. We are in your hands, sire: slay us, or keep us bound as prisoners; do with us as you will."
The good king was no ungentle boor: he spoke them fair and graciously. ”

“ The hunting- and post-horns were favourite emblems on medieval coats of arms, more especially in Germany33 and Bohemia.
It is necessary at this point to draw attention to the fact that the French horn is a hybrid having affinities with both trumpet and primitive animal horn, or with buccina and cornu, and that both types, although frequently misnamed and confused by medieval writers and miniaturists, subsisted side by side, evolving independently until they merged in the so-called French horn. ”

“ Pretty little lesson-toys, these gilded horns must have proved, but not so fine as the hornbooks of silver and ivory used by young [123] misses of quality in England. Scores of pictures by seventeenth-century artists—on canvas and glass—show demure little maids and masters with hanging hornbooks. Even the pictures of the Holy Family [124] show the infant Christ, hornbook in hand, tenderly taught by the Virgin Mother.
The hornbook was called by other names, horn-gig, horn-bat, battledore-book, absey-book, etc.; and in Dutch it was the a-b-boordje. ”

“ But he was tired.
“I assure you, it is only a fog-horn,” she laughed.
“Of course. But it is a depressing sort of sound.”
“Is it?” she said curiously. “Why? Well—yes—I think I can understand its being so to some people. It’s something like the call of the horn across the sea to Tristan.”
She hummed softly, then three times she sang the horn-call. Siegmund, with his face expressionless as a mask, sat staring out at the mist. The boom of the siren broke in upon them. To him, the sound was full of fatality. Helena waited till the noise died down, then she repeated her horn-call. ”

“ Two great steers chafed and pawed as agile men gilded their horns, avoiding them, the lowered horns, meanwhile as well as they could. Each horn-gilder had two other men beside him, protecting him with long bamboo poles, cruelly sharpened at one end, with which they prodded and bled the beast’s sides as often as it seemed too inclined to charge. ”

“ From an ethnological point of view, the legend, or more properly myth, of “The Horn Worshipers” is the most interesting in this collection of legends. None of the scholars at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Society held in New York, December, 1923, knew any parallel for it among the aborigines of America.
However, horns have been significant among many primitive peoples. Many of the Plains Indians of America, notably the Sioux, wore buffalo horns, and if I mistake not the totem of one tribe was a head of buffalo horns. ”

“ A horn sounded in the woods, wild, clamorous and exultant. It was as the voice of a prophet cleaving the despair of a godless world. Even the trees stood listening. Far below in the green shadows of the valley a horseman moved brilliant as a star that portents the conception of a king. ”

“ Vicarious ale is now more approved, and the tankard almost everywhere politely preferred to the Churn.
This Churn (in our provincial pronunciation Kern) is the Hebrew Kern, or Keren, from its being circular, like most horns; and it is the Latin 'corona',—named so either from 'radii', resembling horns, as on some very ancient coins, or from its encircling the head: so a ring of people is called corona. Also the Celtic Koren, Keren, or corn, which continues according to its old pronunciation in Cornwall, etc., and our modern word horn is no more than this ”

“ The strength of the monster, devouring and trampling mercilessly on all things, is in harmony with its iron nature, and in its ten horns its powerful armour is depicted. The very concrete expressions regarding the little or eleventh horn contain only ideal traces respecting the position of the king or kingdom represented by it, which distinctly show, indeed, the elevation of the same above all human and divine authority, but give no indication at all of any special historical connections. ”

“ Nature has furnished it with seven horns, which are straight, black, strong, and pointed; and in those which are of full age, they are above two feet in length, but when the animal is young, they are not more than six inches: they are then enveloped in a rough kind of hair to within two or three inches of their extremity; but this hair drops off when the horn has attained a certain length. It resides in the woods and on the highest mountains. ”