Lectiō II — The Ring of Senicianus

Reader strand. Grammar assumed: Vols I–VI. Nothing new is introduced here — only a story with two artefacts, sixty miles apart, that may be halves of the same crime.

On a hill above the Severn in Gloucestershire, at a place the locals called Dwarf's Hill, stood a late Roman temple to a god named Nodens. Some time in the fourth century a man called Silvianus lost a gold ring there — lost it, he was sure, to a thief — and did what any sensible Romano-Briton did with a grievance: he took the matter to the god, on a small sheet of lead. Then, in 1785, a ploughman turned up a heavy gold ring in a field at Silchester, thirty-odd miles away. Around its hoop, in crude late-Roman letters, a name: SENICIANVS.

Read the tablet first. The connection can wait.

The god on the hill

Nodens has no classical counterpart — unlike Sulis at Bath, he was never paired with a Roman partner under the polite habit of interpretātiō Rōmāna. He seems to have been a healing god: his sanctuary had a guest range, baths, and a long narrow building read by excavators as a dormitory for dream-incubation — sleep at the shrine, and the god visits with a diagnosis, exactly as at the sanctuaries of Asclepius in the Greek east. Offerings included at least nine figurines of dogs, among them the famous Lydney bronze; dogs, whose licking was thought to heal wounds, were the companions of healer gods across the ancient world.

Hold that in mind for the curse. Silvianus knew precisely which god he was talking to, and it sharpens his request considerably.

The tablet, as carved

Lead, a few inches across, scratched in capitals — RIB 306. Here it is with word-breaks added but nothing else fixed:

DEVO NODENTI · SILVIANVS ANILVM PERDEDIT · DEMEDIAM PARTEM DONAVIT NODENTI · INTER QVIBVS NOMEN SENICIANI · NOLLIS PETMITTAS SANITATEM DONEC PERFERAT VSQVE TEMPLVM DENTIS

Before opening anything below: this is Vol. VI's world, and the whole toolkit applies. Try to find five things — the god in the dative, the verb of giving, a perfect tense, a wish-subjunctive, and at least one spelling wobble. There are considerably more than one wobble.

Line by line

Work each line cold, then open the gloss.

DEVO NODENTI

SILVIANVS ANILVM PERDEDIT

DEMEDIAM PARTEM DONAVIT NODENTI

INTER QVIBVS NOMEN SENICIANI

NOLLIS PETMITTAS SANITATEM

DONEC PERFERAT VSQVE TEMPLVM DENTIS

The whole thing

Aside — REDIVIVA. In a different hand, added later, one more word is squeezed onto the tablet: rediviva — renewed, brought back to life. The plain reading is that the curse lapsed or went unanswered, and Silvianus came back — perhaps years later, still ringless, still furious — and paid to have it re-armed. A curse with a service renewal. Whatever else the tablet tells us, it tells us the ring did not come home quickly.

The wobbles, collected

Provincial Latin, second-language mason — Barates' company from Vol. V. Every slip is diagnostic of how the words were actually said aloud in fourth-century Gloucestershire:

The ring at Silchester

In 1785 a ploughed field near Silchester — Roman Callēva Atrebātum — gave up a gold ring. A big one: heavy enough that it was probably worn on a thumb or over a glove. Its square bezel carries a bust of Venus with her name, VENVS; and around the outside of the hoop, added later in rough letters, runs a second inscription:

SENICIANE VIVAS IIN DE

Two of Vol. I's cases and Vol. VI's mood, all in five words — try it before opening.

Now set the two objects side by side. The tablet wishes Senicianus no health until the ring returns; the ring wishes Senicianus life in God. If it is the same man and the same ring, then the thief's answer to a pagan curse was to have a Christian blessing cut into the stolen goods — re-consecrating them, putting the ring beyond the old god's reach. Bath's dragnet formula seu gentīlis seu Chrīstiānus (Vol. VI) sketched the two communities side by side at the baths; here they may be facing each other across a single object.

The honest caveats: Senicianus was not a unique name, nothing dates the two inscriptions to each other, and the identification can never be proved. What it has is thirty miles, one uncommon name, one ring-shaped hole in a curse, and one curse-shaped blessing on a ring. Most scholars rate it somewhere between plausible and likely; nobody rates it certain. It is allowed to be a good story anyway.

Aside — Tolkien and the Dwarf's Hill. When Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler excavated the Lydney temple in 1928–29, they wanted a philologist to explain the god's name, and brought in the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford — J.R.R. Tolkien. His note The Name Nodens, printed in the 1932 excavation report, traced the god to the Irish Núadu Airgetlám, of the Silver Hand, and Welsh Nudd/Lludd. The hill itself is honeycombed with Roman iron-mines and had long local traditions of little folk — hence Dwarf's Hill. So: a hill of dwarf-mines, a cursed gold ring, and Tolkien walking the site with the excavators. The Hobbit appeared five years later. No evidence connects any of it — Tolkien may never have seen or heard of the Silchester ring — and the coincidence remains exactly that: irresistible, and unprovable. The National Trust, understandably, resists nothing.

Where the pieces are

The two halves of the story are still apart, which feels right. The ring is displayed in its own Ring Room at The Vyne, a National Trust house near Basingstoke. The tablet stays in the small site museum at Lydney Park on the Severn, where the temple ruins survive in the estate gardens (open on selected days). RIB 306 is on the Roman Inscriptions of Britain site with photographs, as ever.

The drill

Read the tablet cold from the capitals — no reveals — and make the five finds: dative god, verb of giving, perfect, subjunctive wish, one wobble. Then do the same for the ring's five words: vocative, subjunctive, formula. When both run smoothly, the field trip is the final stage: The Vyne for the ring, Lydney for the lead, in either order. Stand in front of the ring and read it aloud, quietly. You will be addressing a suspected thief by name in the vocative, sixteen centuries after his accuser did the same — and the curse, remember, was renewed and never lifted.