Nils Månsson Mandelgren, Carl Säve och runorna på Gånge-Rolfs horn

Abstract

This article investigates an ornate ivory horn of West Scandinavian origin with runic inscriptions which is now in Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, Italy. The horn, known as “Rollo’s drinking horn”, originally belonged to Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, France, but later came into the hands of an antique dealer who donated the object to the museum in Italy upon his death. It has traditionally been assumed that the runes were first read and interpreted by Sven Söderberg, who reported on the rune-inscribed horn in 1890, but correspondence between the artist and cultural historian Nils Månsson Mandelgren and Professor Carl Säve shows that Mandelgren had sent information on this object as early as 1860 and that Säve was in fact the first to interpret its runic inscription. It is also evident that the characters on the horn were recognized as runes in France as early as the late eighteenth century.