En Hornlåt

En Hornlåt

A Horn Tune
By Erik Axel Karlfeldt
For Zorn, on the occasion of the horn
blowing competition at Gusunda in 1906

Where are the people who blew the horn
and rejected the pipe and flute?
Where is she who last raised to the contest,
amongst players, a lowing bullhorn?
Where is the bard from the swamps made yellow
by the abandoned cloudberry crop,
and from the moor, cloudy in the autumn,
destroyed by the racing fire?

Is there a horn in Dalarna’s storehouses
which still has kept its sounds from before?
Where is the goat herder’s spring calling horn?
Which echoed against the pastures’ door?
Over ridges where the May grass thickens,
at the time of the newly burst groves,
let it dance, its own song, the forgotten,
of a spring dance of bleating goat kids.

Will he awaken rejoicing and blow,
he, the god of the moss-laden forests,
he whose lungs strain in the night wind
like a prisoner’s, with painful sounds?
Will it resound from burgeoning skies
of a bone-deep and heathen music,
when he steps forth from ancient villages
down to Gesunda’s glistening bay?

We got to watch a concert of local folk music last week in Mora. It was wonderful. This poem was written for a cowhorn music competition held in 1906. the cow horn is a local instrument that was used for herding in the summer by the women, when they went to the summer cottages alone in order to watch the herds, and later became an integral part of the folk music.