Dear Martin, Dear All,

The source is J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘The name “Nodens”’, appendix 1 to Mortimer Wheeler and Tessa Wheeler, Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire (OUP, 1932). He felt that the Irish epic character Núadu and the Welsh legendary character Nudd had related names; that the god-name Nodens was related to Núadu/Nudd; that the Welsh legendary character Lludd had a name related to Nudd; and that the first element of Lydney was related to Lludd. I’m saying ‘related to’ because I don’t quite understand whether the first name in each pair is supposed to derive from the second, or whether it’s the other way round, or whether both are cognate, and if they are cognate, from what common ancestor in what language they are supposed to derive…

For instance, how do we get from Nodens to Lydney? Are we to assume that the name Nodens existed as an element in a British place-name beside the Severn where it evolved independently through the forms >Nud>Lud>Lida before finally being adopted by English settlers as the qualifier in a newly coined OE place-name, coincidentally at the same time that it was also evolving >Nud>Nudd>Ludd>Lludd amongst the writers of early Welsh literature? Or are we to assume that there was an otherwise unrecorded Nid-Lid saga which was familiar to everybody from every linguistic background in early medieval Britain, so that an Anglo-Saxon resident in Gloucestershire would have said to a visitor, ‘That’s the island of Lida, you know, the chap with the silver arm, father of Gwynn, the one who found the dragons buried at Oxford’?

Jeremy Harte