Making a Celebration Gjallarhorn — The Feast Horn

A feast horn is a large, deep-voiced blowing horn. Its long warm notes open a gathering, welcome guests, mark a toast and call people together for celebration.

Pick the biggest, most curved ox horn you can find. The larger and longer the horn, the lower and warmer its celebratory voice.

Soak the horn in water for a day, or warm it gently, so the soft inner core loosens from the hard outer shell.

Pull and scrape out all the soft core until the horn is a clean hollow cone, open along its whole length for a full, resonant sound.

Saw off the pointed tip to open a mouth hole into the hollow inside. A slightly wider hole suits the deep, easy notes of a feast horn.

File the rim smooth and rounded so it seals softly against your lips, ready for long, comfortable notes.

Wash the bore, dry it fully, and rub the outside with a little oil so the horn gleams for the feast.

Shape a mouthpiece from firm beeswax or a hardwood offcut with a DEEP, rounded, funnel-like cup, and fit it in the mouth hole. A deep cup is the secret to a warm voice.

Press your lips to the cup and buzz them loosely and slowly. The deep cup gives a dark, round, welcoming note that rolls out low and full.

Hold each note long and steady, letting it swell and fade. These broad, unhurried calls are the sound of welcome and celebration.

Open a feast with one long rising note; mark a toast with two; welcome an honoured guest with a slow triple call. Keep them broad and warm, never sharp.

The feast horn is a lip-reed instrument: your buzzing lips are the sound source and the hollow, roughly conical horn reinforces the harmonic series. What makes it warm is the mouthpiece. A DEEP, funnel-shaped cup damps the high harmonics and lets the low ones dominate, so the tone comes out dark, round and mellow — full of body but soft at the edges, exactly the voice you want to fill a hall and gather people without alarming them. A big, wide, long horn lowers the fundamental further and adds even more warmth. This is the same reason the mellow flugelhorn uses a deep, cone-like mouthpiece: deep cup, warm voice. Its opposite is the alarm horn, whose shallow cup does exactly the reverse to cut and pierce. In Norse halls, horns and lurs called folk to gather, opened feasts and marked ceremonies; stretched into bronze, the celebratory horn became the great Scandinavian lur, and its warm-voiced descendants are the French horn and the flugelhorn.