538 
THE AMERICAN-SC AN DIN AVI AN REV IE IV 
was his cosmopolitan culture that 
opened its doors to a stream of 
international scholarly litera- 
ture, whereby the collection grew 
so fast that as early as 1667 it 
•/ 
was necessary to begin the erec¬ 
tion of a special building for it. 
It was not until 1673, howeyer, 
after the death of Frederik III 
and after the resignation of Grif- 
fenfeld, who had risen to higher 
positions than that of librarian, 
that the structure was completed. 
This building, which was 
destined to house the collection 
until the beginning of the twen¬ 
tieth century, was at first much 
too large for the requirements of 
the library, and the upper story 
was therefore taken into use for 
the SO-Called art gallery The Winding Stairway in the Old Building 
actually a collection of curios 
which, besides being a catch-all for knickknacks, included some really 
valuable antiquities and art treasures. This arrangement under one 
roof with the library became disastrous to the art collection, for it made 
possible the theft of its greatest treasure, the two golden horns with 
runic inscriptions unearthed in South Jutland. The thief made use 
of the permission to enter the library to familiarize himself with 
the building and manufacture duplicate keys. He was inspired 
only by a desire to come into possession of the gold, which was un¬ 
usually pure and yalued at $4,500, and so these precious relics, con¬ 
taining some of our oldest runic inscriptions and embellished with pic¬ 
torial ornaments of unique importance in shedding light on Norse 
mythology, were melted down for commercial purposes. But it is an 
ill wind that blows nobody good, and this lamentable theft inspired 
Adam Oehlensehlager to write his first great poem, The Golden Horns, 
y hereby romanticism and the Golden Age of Danish literature were 
inaugurated. 
As the years went on, the library was constantly growing. Even 
though the successive Danish kings were not all equally interested in 
books, the affairs of the library were always directed by scholarly men 
v ho all contributed to its expansion and success until, at the opening 
of the nineteenth century, it was with justice regarded as one of the 
foi emost libraries in Europe—a position which it still maintains in 
the field of older literature. This was largely due to its chief at the 
