The bukkehorn is one of the oldest wind instruments in Norwegian folk music, with roots going right back to the Stone Age. This natural-horn instrument has been used as a signalling, scaring and music instrument throughout Norwegian history, and is tied to a living herding and summer-farm culture that stretches from coast to mountains. Today the instrument is seeing renewed attention among musicians of many genres, and more and more people are taking it up, from old tunes to wholly new and experimental music.
History and origins
The horn is in many ways the ur-instrument itself. By all accounts it belonged to the herder's essential gear as early as the Stone Age, and was then used above all as a scaring and signalling instrument. Early traces of the horn as a musical instrument go right back to the Bronze Age, when people began boring finger holes to play melodies in addition to signals – and hence the byname prillarhorn (from the verb prill, ’to finger, to play with the fingers’).
There is every reason to believe that the trumpet type is the older of the two main types, and that it once covered the whole country. The instrument is so simple that it can be made anywhere there are grazing animals, and it is hard to imagine a Norwegian village in prehistoric times without a horn of one kind or another. Book illustrations from the European Middle Ages often show people making music with finger-hole horns from around the year 1000 onwards.
The oldest dated playing horn in Sevåg's material is an ox horn from Nord-Fron in Gudbrandsdalen with three finger holes – richly carved and only 23 cm long. In rings around the horn is inscribed: «ROLANDS HORN + ESUS + NAFN. ANNO 1656 MID ANE NIELSDATTER» – that is, dated 1656, and marked with a woman's name (Sevåg 1973, p. 36).
Two main types: trompethorn and flishorn
The bukkehorn comes in two main types, according to how it is blown:
Trompethorn
The trompethorn is the oldest and most widespread. Here the tone is produced by lip vibrations («prutting», lip-buzzing), as on a trumpet or a natural horn. The player sets the mouth against a small hole at the tip end of the horn, which serves as a blowing opening, and presses the lips to make them vibrate.
The trumpet type has been geographically dominant in Hallingdal, Numedal, Telemark, Hordaland, Sogn og Fjordane, and also in Valdres from Aurdal and northwards; that is, more or less all of Western Norway and the western part of Eastern Norway. The boundary for this horn type matches the old boundary between the Hardanger fiddle and the ordinary fiddle remarkably well, and it is unclear why they coincide.
Flishorn (tungehorn)
The flishorn, also called the tungehorn, has a loose reed fitted that makes the instrument work like a clarinet. The reed is most often made of juniper.
The flishorn has had its strongest tradition in Trøndelag and the eastern parts of Innlandet: Gudbrandsdalen, Glåmdalen, Trysil, Solør and the lowland villages around Lake Mjøsa. In these areas the flishorn dominated in later times, and several informants in the earlier collecting of folk music did not know of the other horn type at all. It is nonetheless clear that the trumpet type was also known here earlier.
Around the outer area lie districts with both types more or less evenly distributed: Agder, Rogaland, Møre og Romsdal, and Valdres from Aurdal and southwards. Nordland and Troms have both types too.
Trompethorn area
Hallingdal, Numedal, Telemark, Hordaland, Sogn og Fjordane and Valdres north of Aurdal
The tone is made by lip vibration against the blowing hole, as on a trumpet. The oldest type – it probably once covered the whole country.
Flishorn area (tungehorn)
Trøndelag, Gudbrandsdalen, Glåmdalen, Trysil and the lowland districts around lake Mjøsa
A loose juniper reed makes the horn work like a clarinet. In later times it dominated here so completely that many did not know the lip-blown type at all.
Both types
Agder, Rogaland, Møre og Romsdal and Valdres south of Aurdal – plus Nordland and Troms
Mixed zones where the two horn types lived side by side.
Not specifically described
The districts around the Oslo fjord, and Finnmark
The sources say little about horn traditions in these areas.
Tap the zones on the map for more information.
After Sevåg (1973) and Aksdal (2023). The zone borders are schematic – Aksdal's newer material shows lip-blown horns in the flishorn areas as well.
The flishorn has its own article: read more about the flishorn here.
Names and local expressions
The word bukkehorn has become a kind of umbrella name for horns to play on, but it is the billy goat that has been the main supplier of the instrument. Several other animals have nonetheless provided herders and musicians with horns: cow, ox, ram and goat. Local names for the finished playing horn vary a great deal:
- prillarhorn – a horn with finger holes to «prille» on; the best-known name for the finger-hole variant.
- Lokkehorn / lokarhorn – linked to summer-farm use, the calling in of livestock (widespread; hunting horn is the Swedish synonym).
- Spelhorn / spellarhorn – West Telemark, Sør-Trøndelag and Nordmøre.
- Låtarhorn – Kvikne; a more local name.
- Stut / tut – means roughly a short wind instrument; «å stute» means to blow on it. From this come compounds such as bukkehorn-stut and stutehorn.
- Lu(r)(a)hodn / bukkehorns-lur – and lydarhorn from Forsand in Rogaland is probably a variant of the same collective name.
How a bukkehorn is made
Making natural horns is something people have done for generations, and the method is surprisingly similar from place to place. The first step is to remove the horn core (kveiken – also called finnen, kviken or sloa). The easiest way is to let the horn rot, but the most common was to leave it in water for a few days, or to boil it. When you then knock on the horn, the core slides out (… or needs a little help on its way).
Once the core is removed, the horn tips were cut off – far enough in that the hollow inside was exposed, or far enough that it was easy to bore the blowing hole from the tip end. People gave it a little extra room for the lips, but large «mouthpieces» of the kind we are used to today were never on the cards. On cow and ox horn you got a round blowing opening, while on goat horn, which is flatter, the hole became oval.
Many did no more than this: they made a simple tooting horn. Those who wanted to take it further whittled and rasped the horn walls (while they were soft and/or warm) and polished them smooth and fine. The size of the horn varies a great deal, and the smallest diameters of the blowing hole are often only 8–10 mm.
Watch «The great bukkehorn film» with the doyen Magnar Storbækken to see how a modern bukkehorn comes into being:
Finger holes and range
The number of finger holes varies from none (pure signal and scaring horns) to eight. In Sevåg's survey of 96 horns they break down as follows:
| Finger holes | Trompethorn | Tungehorn | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 7 | 3 | 10 |
| 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 3 | 17 | 3 | 20 |
| 4 | 19 | 11 | 30 |
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 13 |
| 6 | 5 | 8 | 13 |
| 7 | 0 | 4 | 4 |
| 8 | 0 | 4 | 4 |
| Sum | 56 | 40 | 96 |
Sevåg himself warns against reading firm knowledge out of the figures: the material is small, and geographically skewed: Valdres and Hallingdal alone account for a third of the horns (19 and 15 pieces).
Horns without finger holes make up about 10 of the 96 recorded; those with 3–4 holes are clearly the most numerous (about half). Somewhat rarer are horns with 5–6 holes, and only a few have 7 or 8.
The range is limited. Horns without finger holes give only one strong fundamental tone, and possibly the octave if you can overblow the horn. As a signalling and scaring instrument you needed no more. A good prillarhorn with 4–5 finger holes, on the other hand, can – with overblowing – give a range of more than an octave.
The scale steps were not a row of whole and half tones as we are used to today, but rather an alternation between whole and three-quarter tone steps, without the size of any of them being entirely fixed. Even so, the melodies usually had frame intervals that had to be pure in relation to the fundamental: preferably the fourth or the fifth.
Blowing technique and mouthpiece
The traditional «mouthpiece» on the trompethorn is, then, the blowing hole formed directly in the tube itself. From of old it came naturally to train up the narrow lip flaps at the side of the mouth and thus «buzz» with the corner of the mouth. You can see this in old pictures of bukkehorn players, men and women alike, as with Ingrid Skattebu:
Use and function
The bukkehorn belonged to the summer-farm and herding world for a long time. The instrument was easy to carry along or to keep hanging on a cord over the shoulder. With the horn you could, it is said, direct the herd, call it along in the morning, gather it through the day, and stop animals heading the wrong way.
Many are the accounts that the animals liked the playing: «there was contentment and security in the tones», as Sevåg writes (p. 45). From Viksdalen in Sunnfjord there is, for example, a story that «the bukkehorn was used for various kinds of agreed signals with a set form, e.g. that a sheep had been found again, a lamb had wandered off, and so on» (Sevåg, p. 45).
Where a good player was to be found, the horn was of course used as an ordinary musical instrument too, though people did not play indoors all that much. Otherwise there was so much one could give warning of with a small signal, from one shieling to the next, between the dairymaid and the herder. But in the village itself the horn found several uses too, not least for calling people home to meals. In medieval towns horns were moreover used to summon people to a citizens' assembly; such a summons by horn signal was called to «krefja horns».
As a scaring instrument against bear and wolf the horn is well documented. In «Hølands Beskrivelse» from 1771, Reier Giellebøl tells of wolves and bears that bring down cattle at the shielings in the forest, despite dairymaids and herders constantly tooting horns and lurs to scare them off.
Known players and tradition-bearers
Many of the most important sources on bukkehorn playing come from direct observation of players, or from oral tradition.
Ingrid Skattebu (1887–1971) from Øystre Slidre in Valdres could not play the bukkehorn herself, but she remembered well how her mother held the horn against the corner of her mouth, fingered with the right hand and held the left hand out at the wide end. Ingrid sang two of the little tunes her mother played to the cows, and they show that the mother in one case used one scale step below the fundamental and in the other case two steps (f and e). (Det gjallar og det læt, pp. 40–41.)
The horn in the family was made by Ingrid's father, Ola O. Hegge (1851–1921). Hegge was a teacher and keen on choral singing and newer music, but made the horn nonetheless in the traditional Valdres way, with only three finger holes. (10 of 16 recorded horns from Aurdal and northwards have three finger holes, five have four and one has five.) The holes were on the flat concave side, the diameter was 8 mm and the distance between the holes 17.5 and 16 mm.
Lars Reinton tells from Hallingdal: «The last master of the prillarhorn was Sander Røo. Every Sunday he would take a walk up onto Hamaren south of Hamarsbøen and sit there humming and playing, so it could be heard across the whole village.» Something similar was done by Nils Dybedokk in Rukkedalen around the turn of the century: on Sunday mornings he would often go out to the point by Dybedokk and play so that everyone at Nes could hear.
Folk verses and tunes
The bukkehorn is richly represented in oral tradition too, and the folk songs show both the musical and the social side of the instrument.
From Aust-Agder we have, for example, this bear rhyme:
Bukkehønn å børseskot
det skorrer felt i mi øre,
men bjølleklang og fløytelåt
det vil eg gjønne høre.
Goat horn and gunshot
grate harsh in my ear,
but bell-chime and flute-song
I gladly would hear.
From Verdalen we have the following herding song:
Guten han steig på ein stor ein stein,
bles i sitt horn så det hauldes heim.
«Mæ vijla dæm jåggå lajnn og strainn,
som ingen sko ha på fotom.»
The boy climbed up on a great big stone,
blew on his horn so it sounded homeward.
They want to chase me from land to shore,
me, who have no shoes on my feet.
From Seljord in Telemark we also have the well-known legend of Kivlemøyane, about three young girls who were skilled at playing the bukkehorn, lur and flute – «… som gik og blæste saa vænt paa Horn» (who walked and blew so sweetly on the horn), as recorded by Andreas Faye (Norske sagn, 1833). The bukkehorn is moreover a central instrument in the story of Prillarguri and the Battle of Kringen (1612).
The bukkehorn today
Today the bukkehorn has arrived at a kind of standardisation in how it is made, with four finger holes on top and one thumb hole on the back. Most bukkehorn are tuned to the nearest tempered tone in the F–B♭ range, tuned to a pure minor scale if you play finger by finger upwards. The resonance tone is (in principle) the tonic, and you use the free hand to produce the leading tone by moving it a little into the horn.
The bukkehorn gained increased attention towards the end of the 20th century through the work of several researchers and performers. Bjørn Aksdal has systematically mapped which horns survive in collections around Norway, and published thorough analyses of types, finger-hole counts and geographical spread. His material (169 horns) nuances the older picture and shows that the trumpet type existed in more of the tungehorn areas than previously assumed. Reidar Sevåg 's «bible», Det gjallar og det læt (1973), is still a central source for anyone wanting to acquaint themselves with folk wind instruments. Atle Lien Jenssen has been central as a performer and disseminator of the bukkehorn and tungehorn tradition from Hedmarken. Instrument makers such as Egil Storbekken and Magnar Storbækken have also been central to its preservation and further development.
Today the instrument is seeing renewed attention among musicians and enthusiasts. More and more people are taking it up in various musical settings – from traditional tunes to modern, experimental music. Courses, kappleik competitions and outreach work in schools have brought younger generations into contact with this ancient instrument anew.
See also the close relatives: flishorn, cow horn, lur and Meråker clarinet.
Frequently asked questions about the bukkehorn
What is a bukkehorn?
A bukkehorn is a Norwegian folk-music instrument made from an animal horn – most often goat horn, but also cow, ox or ram horn. It comes in two main types: the trompethorn (lip-blown) and the flishorn/tungehorn (clarinet principle).
What is the difference between the trompethorn and the flishorn?
On the trompethorn you make the tone with your lips, as on a trumpet. The flishorn (tungehorn) has a juniper reed fitted at the blowing end and works like a clarinet, with a more penetrating sound.
Why is it called a prillarhorn?
Prillarhorn is the name for a horn with finger holes, from the verb prill – to «finger» or play with the fingers. Other local names are lokkehorn, spelhorn and stut.
How many finger holes does a bukkehorn have?
It varies from none (pure signal horns) to eight, but 3–4 finger holes is by far the most common. Modern bukkehorn usually have four finger holes on top and one thumb hole on the back.
Which animals are bukkehorn made from?
The billy goat has been the main supplier – hence the name – but cow, ox and ram have also been used. Goat horn is flatter and gives an oval blowing opening; cow and ox horn give a round one.
What does a bukkehorn sound like?
The trompethorn has a soft, warm tone resembling a muted natural horn, while the flishorn sounds sharper and more penetrating, akin to the clarinet. You can hear the instrument in the video higher up the page.
Sources and further reading:
2023 - Bjørn Aksdal Bukkehornet - a review and analysis of trumpet horns and reed horns
1994 - Atle Lien Jenssen Bukkehorn traditions in Hedmark
1994 - Norvald Omberg - The bukkehorn: nature's instrument
1973 - Reidar Sevåg Det gjallar og det læt : from scare and signal tools to popular wind instruments
