One God Under Three Roman Names

No Roman dedicant at Lydney Park settled on a single equivalent for Nodens. One inscription pairs him with Mars, god of war and, in his Romano-Celtic guise, also a healer and protector of boundaries; another invokes Silvanus, god of woodland and the hunt; and a votive plaque decorated with images of sea creatures gestures toward Neptune. Rather than reading this as confusion, most scholars take it as a sign of how wide Nodens's own domain ran, spanning the hunt, the wild, healing and the sea, so that no single Roman god mapped onto him cleanly and worshippers reached for whichever comparison fit the favor they were asking. His name is generally traced to a Celtic root meaning to catch or to hunt, and the same root is thought to survive in two better attested figures elsewhere in the Celtic world: the Irish Nuada, king of the Tuatha De Danann, who loses his kingship to a wound and a severed hand and regains it once healed, and the Welsh Nudd, father of Gwyn ap Nudd in later Welsh legend. Whether Nodens, Nuada and Nudd are truly one god carried under different regional names, or three figures that merely share an old and widespread root word, is not something the evidence settles either way, but the shared name across three branches of the Celtic-speaking world is itself suggestive of how old the figure behind it may be.