On 20 July 1639, a girl named Kirsten Svendsdatter noticed something protruding from the ground near the village of Gallehus, north of Møgeltønder. She wrote to King Christian IV, who took possession of the horn and passed it to Prince Christian; the prince had a golden pommel made to screw onto the narrow end and used it as a drinking horn. Ninety-five years later, on 21 April 1734, a man named Erich Lassen turned up the second horn — shorter, damaged, heavier — no more than fifteen or twenty metres from where the first had lain. He handed it to the count at Schackenborg, who sent it on to Christian VI and received two hundred rigsdaler for it. Both horns went into the Royal Kunstkammer at Christiansborg. Restored, the longer measured 75.8 cm around its outer curve and weighed 3.2 kg; the shorter was 50 cm and weighed 3.7 kg.

Around the rim of the second horn ran a line of Elder Futhark: ek HlewagastiZ HoltijaZ horna tawidō. I, Hlewagastiz Holtijaz, made the horn. It is a small sentence carrying an enormous load. This is among the earliest Elder Futhark inscriptions to record a complete sentence in Proto-Norse, and the earliest to preserve a line of alliterative verse — the metrical principle that would still be running Norse and Old English poetry seven centuries later. Even the name resists us. Hlewagastiz might mean "lee guest" or "fame guest." Holtijaz might be a patronymic, son or descendant of Holt, or a description, something like "of the wood." A maker signed his work, and we cannot quite read his name.

The horns were built from rings of gold, each carrying cast figures soldered on so they stood proud of the surface, with more figures chased into the metal between them. What those figures mean has been argued over ever since. Serpents wind across both horns in the animal style of Dark Age Europe. A figure holding out a horn invites comparison with the figure read as a valkyrie on the Tjängvide image stone; two masked warriors with sword and shield look like the sword-dancers on the Sutton Hoo helmet; antlered figures recall horned-helmet imagery or the Cernunnos on the Gundestrup cauldron. A three-headed figure has been read as a pagan ancestor of the tricephalous Christ. Olrik in 1918 identified Tyr, Odin, Thor and Freyr among the crowd. The historian of science Willy Hartner went further in 1969, reading the figures as constellations encoding a lunar eclipse of 4 November 412 and a solar eclipse of 16 April 413, and reading the upper images of the longer horn as cipher runes. All of it is speculation built on imperfect copies.

Niels Heidenreich was a goldsmith and watchmaker from Foulum, and he was broke. On the night of 4 May 1802 he let himself into the storeroom at Christiansborg with forged keys, carried the horns home, and melted them down in his own kitchen. The gold became jewellery, shoe buckles, and counterfeit "pagodas" — Indian gold coins, which he faked with gold cut heavily with brass. The theft was discovered the next morning and a bounty of a thousand rigsdaler went into the papers. It was the fake pagodas that undid him. Andreas Holm, grandmaster of the goldsmiths' guild, had been offered some of the bad gold and grew suspicious; he and his colleagues watched Heidenreich and saw him tip coin stamps into the town moat. Heidenreich was arrested on 27 April 1803 and confessed three days later. Sentenced on 10 June, he was not released until 1840, and died four years after that. His buyers gave the gold back, and it was remelted at the Royal Mint into ordinary coin. Roughly 6.9 kilograms of fifth-century goldwork went out into circulation as pocket change.

A set of plaster casts had been made for a cardinal in Rome, which would have preserved at least the shapes — but the ship carrying them had already gone down off the coast of Corsica. So the replacements were built from sketches, drawing after drawing standing in for the thing itself. A reconstruction of 1860 was later found to be wrong in several respects; modern replicas in real gold, made in the National Museum's care, are what most people mean when they say they have seen the Golden Horns. Even the copies have been stolen. Gilded brass versions taken from Moesgaard Museum in 1993 were recovered soon after, dumped in a forest near Hasselager, and gilded silver copies lifted from the Kongernes Jelling museum at half past four in the morning on 17 September 2007 were back two days later. At Gallehus, two memorial stones mark where each horn came out of the ground: 1639 and 1734, a few paces apart in a Jutland field.