What Tacitus Saw, and What He Was Doing

The earliest sustained description of Germanic religion is the Germania of Tacitus, written around the end of the first century of the common era by a man who had not been there. It reports peoples who worship in groves rather than temples, who think it beneath the gods to confine them within walls or to represent them in human likeness, who cast lots with marked twigs and read the flight and calls of birds, and who keep sacred horses at public expense. It names a goddess Nerthus, carried in a covered wagon through the country in a season of peace, whose attendants are drowned when the circuit is done.

Tacitus is also writing a moral tract. The simplicity, chastity and courage he ascribes to the Germani are a rebuke aimed at Rome, so the ethnography and the argument cannot be separated, and that has to be held in mind wherever the Germania is the only witness.

What can be checked against other evidence broadly holds. Archaeology confirms the sacred groves and the deposits of weapons in bogs and lakes, and the divine names Tacitus renders in Latin appear elsewhere in Germanic form: his Mercury is Wodan, his Mars Tiwaz, his Hercules Thunraz. Those three are the gods whose names the Germanic weekday names still carry.