Bronze Lurs

Bronze Lurs – Voices from Denmark’s Greatest Age

There was a time when Denmark, the ancient Nordic Volk’s cradle, was not only the center of a powerful, radiant Volkish movement; but was also the core area of a culture far superior in every respect to the Europe of that time; the Bronze Age. Never before or later has the powerfully advancing creative power of the Germanic nature produced such outstanding and typical characteristics in such a small space. This development reached its climax when it produced a type of sword whose beauty has never again been equaled by its other Volk on earth. Because here the sword, the manliest weapon in the world, was conceptually conceived and crafted in the highest perfection. A time that produced such works of art had to be heroic like no other – and for this reason the Germanic Bronze Age is for us the truly sacred age of our prehistory.

This fits also with the historical picture which prehistoric research, especially Scandinavian, has worked out of that time. In our excerpts on prehistory and early history, we have often described the great historical events through which Germany was conquered from the north by the Germanics from the early Stone Age until shortly after the end of the Bronze Age (cf. especially episode 34/1936). The gradual expansion of the Germanic settlement area from the large stone burials in the northern German coastal area, Denmark and southern Scandinavia far into Central Germany happened in the epoch in which the striving for form in the Bronze Age (cf. series 43/1935) reached its zenith.

Witnesses of great times

The center and the source of power of all this Volkish and cultural surplus of willingness to act was the current Denmark – more precisely the island world between Jutland and southern Sweden. The number of reports from this narrow area exceeds that of all other Germanic radiation areas by a factor of fourteen. Their quality surpasses that of the peripheral areas in every respect. And yet another, highly convincing proof of the central importance of this area falls heavily into the scales: only here was the most perfect product of the Bronze Age design-will produced and found: the Lur in its most highly developed form – the sacred war horn of the Germanics.

For in Denmark, southern Sweden and southern Norway a total of twenty-five of these fabulously old musical instruments have been found – in the northernmost part of North Germany only nine, of which only four belong to the fully developed large type, while the rest show a far more primitive character.

Nowhere else in the rest of the world, however, were wind instruments so highly developed before and after; even today’s technology finds it difficult to even imitate these lurs.

The majority of Germans will be astonished to find out that in the period around 1100 before the turning point – or, to put it in layman’s terms, a little after the Trojan wars – Denmark of all places must have possessed the most highly developed music. In our imagination, the well-known assertion: ‘‘Frisia non cantat!’’ is so common knowledge that we infer from our northernmost Volk comrades, the ‘‘non-singing Frisians’’, to their neighbors and think that the music is more at home with the Southern peoples.

Everyone will, without realizing it, be of the opinion that the trumpet or trombone must have come to us from the South. And the lurs and their precursors, the animal horns extended by metal bells and mouthpieces, testify that the home of all wind instruments is to be found in the North.

It would take us too far to go into detail here about the complicated prehistory of the origin of the Lurs. It should not go unmentioned that such older forms survived in the sterile remaining areas of the Volkish aura of the Nordic race until later times, even to the present day. The alphorns, whose odd plaintive tone struck strangely many a visitor to Switzerland, greatly resemble other wide tone instruments in Iceland and – in Tibet, where they are a remnant in a completely unchanged form from the time of the Aryan immigration.

No primeval find – except for the golden horns – stimulates the imagination as much as the large bronze lurs. Even their mysterious sight fills us with strange timidity. Because these three thousand year old bronze objects still let their voices be heard today – and when they ring out it is as if ancestors were speaking to us over a period of a hundred generations. Their proud, heroically admonishing voices are for us a greeting from our own forefathers – they also call us like them to the sacrifice or fest.

What are lurs? The inspector of the Danish National Museum, Dr. Bröndsted, examined in detail. The highest developed lurs are not cast in one piece, but are composed of several parts. Each of these parts is cast with a lost form. That means: around a clay core, wax in the width of the pipe to be cast was placed and this was again surrounded on the outside with clay. The wax was then brought to flow out by heating. To prevent contact between the clay shell and the clay core, small bronze lamellae were inserted in the wax layer, which prevented the clay core from falling onto the outer wall of the clay when it was melted out.

A cast technical masterpiece

It is a work of admiration, the way in which the foundry masters three thousand years ago prevented these bronze lamellae from melting during the casting that is now taking place. They made the lamellae with a lower tin content than the tubular bronze. Since the melting point is higher the less tin a bronze alloy contains, the inflowing tubular bronze could not destroy the lamellae.

After the casting of the individual pipe parts, their assembly was then accomplished in an equally technically advanced manner. The patches were clamped together, a series of indentations made with a chisel, and the whole covered first with wax and then with clay. The casting that took place after the wax had melted created an organic bond, since the casting material used was richer in tin than that of the pipe, it did not melt and only laid itself around the pipe ends as a solid bonding ring after it had flowed into the indentations laid.

The reader may ask how this manufacturing secret was discovered. That is quite easy. The material used was analyzed (of course on a piece that was already damaged) and found:

You can see: the foundry master three thousand years ago knew exactly how he had to grade the melting points in order to achieve the desired success.

A further wonder, even for today’s highly developed technology, is the extraordinarily skillful design of the lurs. They are curved in two senses – ie. the pipes of the perfected type describe curves in two levels, the remarkable thing being that regular for all finds of a pair of lurs is that they are mutually symmetrical.

The wonderful thing about it is, that in each case absolute sound purity was achieved in both of the paired exemplar – a technical precision that makes today’s imitation extraordinarily difficult.

Now what does this pairwise emergence of the lurs mean? Not only do the finds themselves show that they were used in pairs – one usually finds two complementing instruments, in one case even three pairs – but as further important evidence there are Bronze Age pictorial representations, the famous Bohuslän rock carvings. Now it is undoubtable, that two voices were unavoidable, especially when a wind player played the wrong blow, and we can therefore get an idea of the basic principles of harmony at that time.

We can deduce that at the beginning of the history of music, around the year 1100 before the turning point, there was a series of tones that were constructed quite differently from ours. The natural tones of the lurs would have resulted in fanfare-like stanzas which, with the help of the scale-forming overtones, developed melodies that were substantially very different from our tonal system.

However, one must not assume that the people of the Bronze Age limited themselves to a small range of tones due to ‘‘technical imperfection’’. Because with their casting skills it would have been easy for them to get a scale of a whole octave out by lengthening the pipes and increasing their slenderness, if they had felt the need to do so.

Interesting conclusions

So one has to assume that they were satisfied with the tonal range that was there. It is therefore always interesting to note that the largest collection of lurs, which was made in 1797, consisted of a pair of lurs tuned to C and two pairs of the sweeping linework of the lurs already show the difficulty of making lurs tuned to E-flat – A four-part harmony, which, partly in interaction, partly in interplay, made possible an extraordinary richness of sonority. It can be taken as proven that a lur player of the Bronze Age not only mastered the fundamentals, but also the overtones of their instruments, because otherwise the fact that they always appeared in pairs could not be explained.

This fact justifies the conclusion, that the emergence of the theory of harmony is owed to the Germanics of the Bronze Age. This fact, which is extremely important for the entire history of music, is currently the subject of detailed investigations by the Music Inspector of the DNSAP. (Danish National Socialist Movement) which are ongoing and which will show why the art of harmony owes its existence to Denmark’s Bronze Age inhabitants.

Meritorious task

The DNSAP has set itself the honorable national task, in the sense of their frame for the Nordic cultural life in our neighboring brother Volk, of reviving the already lively feeling for the unity between Denmark’s past and present and, as sounding proof of the energy of the past, has made two pairs of lurs as copies of the originals and had them presented to the Reichsfuhrer SS.

May their proud voices – comforters and admonishers in difficult times, and in happy times jubilant gratitude – announce that, this Nordic Volk has also found its way back to the path determined by preference to its own kind.

Translated from: Das Schwarze Korps: March 20, 1941, p. 6 / ep. 12