Adam Oehlenschläger

In poetry class we're reading some works by Adam Oehlenschläger {scroll down for English bio}, a Dane responsible for introducing Romanticism to that country. His most famous poem is Guldhornene [The Golden Horns], written after the theft and destruction of two golden drinking horns from about 300-400AD from Denmark's National Museum.

The horns, one with a Runic inscription, and both betraying signs of Celtic origin, were seen in Denmark as a link to a heroic Viking past. Discovered separately in the same area in 1639 and 1734, they are stylistically linked with the Gundestrup Cauldron, which was fabricated by Celts in what is today modern Hungary. The loss of both horns to petty thievery was seen as a tragedy and the story dominated newspaper headines in Copenhagen for weeks.

As a poet, Oehlenschläger was influenced by the lectures of the Norwegian Henrich Steffens, whose attacks on Rationalism in philosophy and poetry were influenced by his experience studying in the German city of Kiel. Through this chain of ideas from mainstream Europe, Oehlenschläger's Guldhornene became Denmark's first Romantic poem to garner widespread attention, in 1803.

Disclaimer: the following is my own rough translation for the first two stanzas.