The Horns of Elfland

I’ve been reading one selection each day from Malcom Guite’s poems in David’s Crown. He does one “poetic response” to each of the psalms. Yesterday after reading Psalm 67, I read Guite and he had a line in the poem that will guide this attempt for the day.

“Feel after Him and find Him, learn to hallow

The places where the veil seems very thin:

The forest grove as sunrise or the hollow

In the hills on autumn evenings when

We seem to hear the horns of Efland blowing

And strange unearthly longings draw us in.”

That led me down a really good rabbit hole and here is the way I started down it. “The horns of Efland,” I knew it, but couldn’t place it, so I did what anyone in this day and age would do…I consulted The Google!

Google led me to Tennyson’s poem The Princess: The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls and the line that Guite referenced,

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,

And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

Well, that leads me to, “What are the horns of Efland?” except Tennyson wrote “Elfland.” It’s a magical place that maybe the horns of hunting echoing across a valley which led him to imagine music blowing from a mystical realm of elves.

Well, I decided not to linger there for long, but that did cause my mind to think of another person who heard the horns blowing…in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Pippen hears the horns of Rohan blowing as they arrive to save Minas Tirith. Tolkien said,

“But Pippin rose to his feet, as if a great weight had been lifted from him; and he stood listening to the horns, and it seemed to him that they would break his heart with joy. And never in after years could he hear a horn blown in the distance without tears starting in his eyes.”

As I sat and thought of Tennyson’s horns of Elfland and Pippen hearing the horns of Rohan, I was brought back to the horns we are awaiting.

In two places Paul speaks of God’s trumpet that will blow one day in the future. In 1 Corinthians 15 he said,

“I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”

“O death, where is your victory?

O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

And then in 1 Thessalonians he said,

“For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.”

I’m not sure when that horn will blow, but I know this, when it blows the dead “in Christ” will rise and those who are alive and “in Christ” will be changed and we will see Him and be changed to be like Him and nothing will ever be the same.

I can only say, Blow the Trumpet Lord, I am ready!