As the hero’s ‘slogan’ it is, as it were, the ‘mott’ – both ‘fanfare’ and ‘saying’ – through which he declares himself, in which his poem ends, and from which (‘ See Edgar’s song in “LEAR” ’ is Browning’s crucial note) his quest circuitously starts.įor centuries the horn remained essentially a megaphone, blowing its melodic speech further than the voice could carry. And this is where young Roland’s ‘slug-horn’ finds its place. The first horns sent signals across dark forests they called the clan together, like Ralph’s conch in Lord of the Flies they sounded a challenge on the battlefield. As Barry Tuckwell, its foremost living exponent, reminds us in his splendid new book, the horn began its history in utterance and has never shaken off its origins. However quaint the ‘slug-horn’ may seem in Chatterton’s ‘Battle of Hastings II’, it has a peculiar rightness in Browning’s poem. But there’s a sense, too, in which Browning the creator saw further than the follower of Chatterton. The poet should have done more homework before employing the word.

For the ‘slug-horn’ which Roland sets to his lips is not an oliphant or lur or bucina or shofar or any other kind of archaic instrument but an early form of the word ‘slogan’ misunderstood by Chatterton and handed down to Browning. Inspired though this writing is, it courts lexical absurdity. His death seems certain –ĭauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,Īnd blew. The hills encircle him like sprawling giants. Weary of questing and pestered by visions, Childe Roland reaches the Dark Tower with the names of fallen comrades ringing in his ears. At the climax of Browning’s strangest poem, a horn-player greets his fate undaunted by Death or Middle English Philology.

Dauntless apocalypse horn