The Ring, the Excavator and the God Whose Name Meant Nothing Yet

One of the curse tablets recovered at Lydney Park was left by a man named Silvianus, cursing whoever had stolen a gold ring and asking Nodens to withhold that person's health until the ring was returned to the temple. The tablet on its own is unremarkable among Roman Britain's many surviving curses, but the excavation that found it, led by Mortimer Wheeler and Tessa Verney Wheeler in 1928 and 1929, is remembered for a second reason entirely: unable to explain what Nodens meant or where the name came from, Wheeler consulted a young Oxford philologist named J. R. R. Tolkien, who contributed a short appendix on the god's name to the excavation report. Tolkien scholarship has since debated, without ever settling the question, whether the site's combination of an ancient ring, a curse laid on its theft, and a god's name Tolkien spent real philological effort puzzling over left any trace in the mythology he was already privately developing at the time.

Whatever the truth of that connection, the excavation itself changed how Romano-British religious sites were studied. It was one of Wheeler's earliest major British digs, and the meticulous stratigraphic method he and Tessa Wheeler applied at Lydney Park became a model for British field archaeology more broadly, carried forward into their later, more famous excavations at Verulamium and Maiden Castle. A site that might otherwise be remembered only as a minor regional healing shrine is instead a genuine crossing point between archaeological method, philology and, however speculatively, the imagination of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers.