Nodens
Nodens, a Celtic healing god worshipped in Ancient Britain, received at least one very angry letter. It survives on a lead curse tablet from his shrine, and in translation it reads: To the god Nodens: Silvianus has lost his ring and given half (its value) to Nodens. Among those who are called Senicianus do not allow health until he brings it to the temple of Nodens. A closing line adds that the curse comes into force again.
Silvianus wanted his ring back, and he trusted a god of healing to keep health away from a man named Senicianus until it was returned. That tells us something about how ordinary people used this deity. It tells us very little about the deity himself.
Nodens is much harder to see than his worshippers. No image of the god has ever been found. What remains is a hillside shrine, several inscriptions, and a name that scholars still cannot explain with confidence. Who came to this god, and what did they hope for? How did the Romans living in Britain understand him? And why do traces of him keep turning up in stories written many centuries later?
The temple complex at Lydney Park sits on a steep bluff overlooking the Severn Estuary. Its builders chose ground inside an earlier Iron Age hill fort, a detail that may have mattered to the choice of site.
At the north-western end of the main building, the interior was divided into three chambers, each 6.3 metres deep. Archaeologists describe the whole structure as an imposing Romano-Celtic temple. One reading treats it as an incubatio, a dormitory where sick pilgrims slept and hoped to meet the god in their dreams.
The view from the bluff may explain why the spot was wanted. It offered a clear look at the River Severn near the point where the Severn Bore begins.
Charles Bathurst first excavated the site in 1805. In 1928-1929 Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Tessa Wheeler dug it again and produced an extensive report on what they found. The most telling pages of that report concern what the visitors left behind, including more than 8,000 coins.
A dozen figures of dogs were found at Lydney, and they offer the clearest clue to what the god meant to his visitors. Dogs carried healing symbolism in antiquity, so pilgrims presumably left the figures as offerings. One of them has a human face, which raises the possibility that the god himself was imagined in animal form.
A single bronze arm points the same way. Its hand shows spoon-shaped fingernails, the kind associated with a person suffering from iron deficiency. It is a quiet piece of evidence that visitors came to Nodens with real ailments.
Oculists' stamps turned up as well. Stamps like these were used to mark sticks of eye ointment, and similar ones are known from healing sanctuaries in Gallo-Roman lands.
The list of smaller finds is long. It includes about 320 pins, nearly 300 bracelets, and a bronze plaque of a woman. Bronze reliefs show a sea deity, fishermen and tritons. Together with sun imagery, this watery theme links the deity to other curative shrines of Roman Gaul.
The inscriptions found beside these offerings use several different spellings of the god's name.
Most of the dedications at Lydney equate Nodens with the Roman god Mars. The pairing is surprising, because here Mars acts as a healer rather than a warrior.
Flavius Blandinus, a weapon-instructor, left one such inscription. He recorded that he had gladly and deservedly fulfilled his vow to the god Mars Nodons. Another worshipper, Pectillus, gave a votive offering he had promised to the god Nudens Mars.
A third text names Titus Flavius Senilis, a superintendent of the cult. He paid for a mosaic out of the offerings, and he thanked Victorinus the interpreter for his assistance.
In a curse, Nodens was also linked with Silvanus, a Roman hunting god. Hunting and healing sit side by side in this god's character, and the dogs at Lydney fit both.
Cockersand Moss in Lancashire is the only other place where Nodens is known. A silver statuette was discovered there in 1718 and is now lost. Its base carried an inscription in which Lucianus fulfilled a vow on behalf of his colleague, Aprilius Viator. A second inscription from the moss records that an Aurelius, whose family name is partly missing, set up a statuette to Mars Nodons.
Similar names appear much later in Ireland and Wales, where a king called Nuada and a hero called Nudd were remembered in medieval tales.
Losing a hand in battle cost the Irish king Nuada his throne. He was the first king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and his injury disqualified him from ruling. The physician Dian Cecht and the wright Creidhne gave him a working silver replacement, which earned him the epithet Airgetlám, meaning silver hand. Later Dian Cecht's son Miach gave him a hand of flesh and blood.
In Wales, the Triads count Nudd among the three most generous men in the country. His companions on that list are his cousins Rhydderch Hael and Mordaf Hael. He had two sons, Edern ap Nudd and Gwyn ap Nudd. Nudd may also be called Lludd, and he seems to be linked to the Lludd who is the son of Beli Mawr in Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys.
Gwyn, who rules the Welsh Otherworld, has a name meaning 'white'. The Irish name Finn has the same meaning. Two different figures bear it in the sources. Finn mac Umaill descends from Nuadu mac Achi, while Finn File descends from Nuadu Necht.
The scholar John Carey argues that the pairs Nuadu and Lludd, and Finn and Gwyn, each preserve different aspects of the god Nodons. Nuadu and Finn share links to water and dogs. Nuadu and Lludd share the silver arm and a royal function. Gwyn departs from the pattern by ruling demons instead of heroes.
Carey adds that names built on finn and gwyn, along with the radiant crown of the Lydney charioteer, may point to brightness as another attribute. Erich Poppe notes that the dog images at Lydney can be compared to the later hunting associations of Gwyn ap Nudd.
Carey sums up the god as "a god of multi-faceted but consistent character: a shining royal warrior presiding over the chaotic in nature, society and the Otherworld (water, war, the devils of Annwn)." Yet Carey himself admits that the name of this god resists explanation.
The forms Nodens and Nodons are reconstructions. Scholars build them from the dative forms Nodenti and Nodonti, which come from a Proto-Celtic stem, *Nowdont-. The Middle Irish Nuadu and the Middle Welsh Nudd are cognates, meaning linguistic siblings from a shared origin. Nudd then turned into Lludd, apparently through alliterative assimilation.
Other relatives exist. The masculine forms Nudi and Nudinti occur in early post-Roman inscriptions from Britain. The Irish genitives nodot and núada(i)t, perhaps meaning 'hand, wrist or arm', also seem related. Their back vowel suggests that Nōdonti was the original form. The shift from long o to long u in Brittonic languages dates to the end of the 3rd century AD.
The Old Breton name Nodent, modern Nuz, may belong here too, though its vowel causes phonological difficulties. The Middle Irish noun núada, 'hero, champion, king poetic?', has been read as the euhemerized name of the deity. That means a god remembered as a human figure.
What the name actually means is another matter. Carey wrote that "it seems at any rate safe to say that no etymology so far proposed can be accepted with full confidence".
The Welsh noun nudd means 'mist, haze, fog'. Both Lludd and Nuadu carry the silver arm epithet, and that could point to a conjectural Proto-Celtic stem snowdo-, from Proto-Indo-European snewdh-, 'mist, cloud'. Latin nūbēs, 'clouds', is a relative. The trouble is the sound shift from sn- to n-, which is not attested elsewhere in Gaulish and is hard to justify in Proto-Brittonic.
A second idea links the names to the stem *néud-. Gothic niutan means 'to catch, attain, acquire' and nuta means 'catcher, fisherman'. Lithuanian naudà means 'property'. This would suit the fishing and possibly hunting motifs at Lydney, as well as the silver arms. However, the stem is unattested elsewhere in Celtic.
A third option is the Proto-Indo-European stem neh2u-t-, found in Gothic nauþs, 'need, compulsion, distress', and Old Prussian nautin, 'need'. It might appear in Proto-Celtic nāwito-, 'need', which gives Old Irish neóit and Middle Welsh neued. The linguist Ranko Matasović finds the relation "formally quite difficult" to explain.
Even the name of Lydney is disputed. In 1906 Arthur Bernard Cook derived it from the Old English Lydan-eġ, 'Lludd's Island', which would tie the place to Nodens. He dated that borrowing to the 7th century, when English speakers first reached the area. A. D. Mills prefers 'island or river-meadow of the sailor, or of a man named Lida', citing the forms Lideneg from about 853 and Ledenei from the 1086 Domesday Book.
One philologist who took up the puzzle, J. R. R. Tolkien, had a very different use for it.
Dwarf's Hill, at Lydney Park, is riddled with old mine shafts. J. R. R. Tolkien was invited to investigate the Latin inscription at the site, and he traced Nodens to the Irish hero Nuada Airgetlám, 'Nuada of the Silver-Hand'. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey thought this a pivotal influence on the invention of Middle-earth. In his view, the find combined a god-hero, a ring, dwarves and a silver hand.
Celebrimbor offers the most direct echo. He is the Elven-smith of Eregion who forged the Rings of Power in The Silmarillion. His name means 'Silver Hand' in Sindarin, the Elvish language Tolkien invented.
The hill itself may have left a mark. Mathew Lyons notes the "Hobbit-like appearance of Dwarf's Hill's mine-shaft holes". According to the Lydney curator Sylvia Jones, Tolkien was extremely interested in the hill's folklore during his stay.
Helen Armstrong suggested that the place may have inspired Tolkien's "Celebrimbor and the fallen realms of Moria and Eregion". Dwarf's Hill has also been proposed as an influence on the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit and on the Mines of Moria in The Lord of the Rings.
Another writer, H. P. Lovecraft, gave Nodens a very different role.
Nodens first appeared in Lovecraft's 1926 novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. There he is an archaic god served by the night-gaunts. He is somewhat benevolent, and he stands against the frightening Nyarlathotep.
The god returns in "The Strange High House in the Mist", also written in 1926. When the protagonist, Thomas Olney, enters the house of the title, he sees "primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss" riding in a large shell carried by dolphins.
Lovecraft built this figure from a mixture of Celtic mythology, Roman mythology, and the way the deity appears in The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. Nodens appears in other works by Machen as well.
Christopher Paolini carried the name's afterlife into a new century of fantasy. In his novel Eragon, 'Argetlam', literally 'silver hand', is another name for the gedwëy ignasia, which means 'shining palm'. Both phrases belong to the fictional Ancient Language that Paolini created for the series. The first is adapted from the Irish word Airgetlam, so the epithet of an Irish king now lives on inside an invented tongue.
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Common questions
Who was Nodens?
Nodens was a Celtic healing god worshipped in Ancient Britain. He is known mainly from a shrine at Lydney Park in Gloucestershire and from a second site at Cockersand Moss in Lancashire.
What is the connection between Nodens and dogs?
A dozen figures of dogs were found at the Lydney shrine. Dogs carried healing symbolism in antiquity, so pilgrims presumably left them as offerings. One figure has a human face.
Why is Nodens linked with the Roman god Mars?
Most inscriptions equate Nodens with Mars, though as a healer rather than a warrior. In a curse he is also associated with Silvanus, a hunting god.
What does the name Nodens mean?
Nobody knows. The scholar John Carey wrote that no etymology proposed so far can be accepted with full confidence. Proposals include mist, catching or fishing, and need.
How is Nodens connected to Tolkien and Lovecraft?
Tolkien was invited to investigate the Latin inscription at Lydney Park and traced Nodens to the Irish hero Nuada Airgetlám. Lovecraft made Nodens a god in his Cthulhu Mythos, first in a 1926 novella.
All sources
35 references cited across the entry
- 1MacKillop (2004)MacKillop — 2004
- 4JournalIV. The CeltsArthur Bernard Cook — 1906
- 5BookA Dictionary of English Place-NamesA. D. Mills — Oxford — 1993
- 6BookExploring the World of the DruidsMiranda J. Green — Thames & Hudson — 2005
- 7BookRoman Dress AccessoriesEllen Swift — Shire Publications — 2003
- 9CIL 07, 00140 = RIB-01, 00306 (301–410 AD)
- 11CIL 07, 00138 = RIB-01, 00305 (301–410 AD)
- 13CIL 07, 00139 = RIB-01, 00307 (301–410 AD)
- 14CIL 07, 00137 = RIB-02-04, 02448,03 (371–400 AD)
- 16RIB-01, 00617 = AE 1958, 00095b (71–300 AD)
- 18RIB-01, 00616 = AE 1958, 00095a (71–300 AD)
- 20BookThere and Back Again: In the Footsteps of J. R. R. TolkienMathew Lyons — Cadogan Guides — 2004
- 21Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, GloucestershireDon N. Anger — Routledge — 2013
- 22JournalAnd Have an Eye to That DwarfHelen Armstrong — May 1997
- 23BookTolkien's Lost ChaucerJohn M. Bowers — Oxford University Press — 2019
- 24BookThe Significant Other: a Literary History of ElvesJenni Bergman — Cardiff University (PhD Thesis) — 2011
- 25BookA Companion to Roman BritainMiranda Aldhouse-Green — John Wiley & Sons — 2008
- 26BookLovecraft: Disturbing the UniverseDonald R. Burleson — University Press of Kentucky — 1990
- 27JournalNodons in Britain and IrelandJohn Carey — 1984
- 28BookDiscovering H.P. LovecraftFritz Leiber — Wildside Press — 2001
- 29BookCeltic Culture: A Historical EncyclopediaJohn T. Koch — Bloomsbury Academic — 2005
- 30BookA Dictionary of Celtic MythologyJames MacKillop — Oxford University Press — 2004
- 31BookEtymological Dictionary of Proto-CelticRanko Matasović — Brill — 2009
- 32BookDictionary of Northern MythologyRudolf Simek — D.S. Brewer — 1996
- 33JournalNûtons, Lûtons et dieux celtesClaude Sterckx — 1994
- 34JournalZur Etymologie von keltisch Nodons, Ir. Nuadu, Kymr. Nudd/LluddHeinrich Wagner — 1986
- 35JournalA Note on Nodens in Lovecraft's MythosAndrew Paul Wood — August 2022