- Joined
- Jan 11, 2006
- Messages
- 3,716
- Reaction score
- 1,504
- Golden Thread
- 0
- Location
- Houston, TX
- Detector(s) used
- Deus II/HF2, Manticore, E-Trac, Excalibur II, V3i, Pro-Find 40, Vibra-Probe 585, TRX
- Primary Interest:
- Metal Detecting
- #1
Thread Owner
"In late 18th Century, a curious gold ring was dug up on farmland near Silchester in England. The ring bore the name “Senicianus” and a small engraved image. For decades it was simply an odd relic from the Roman past, its story unknown. Then, more than a century later, archaeologists uncovered a thin lead tablet at the Roman temple complex of Nodens in Lydney Park, miles away from where the ring had been found.
The tablet contained a curse written by a man named Silvianus. It asked the god Nodens to deny health to anyone who bore the name Senicianus until the stolen ring was returned to the temple. This was a typical Roman curse tablet, a way for victims of theft to call on divine justice when earthly justice was out of reach. The ring and the tablet seemed to fit together like two halves of a forgotten dispute from Roman Britain, preserved in metal and lead for centuries.
When the temple site was studied in the 1920s, one of the scholars asked to examine the strange names and inscriptions was an Oxford professor named J. R. R. Tolkien. He was consulted as an expert in languages, and the eerie connection between a cursed ring and a mysterious name has often been noted as an intriguing coincidence in the life of the man who would later write about one of the most famous rings in literature."
Tolkien part is most likely a fabrication.
en.wikipedia.org
The tablet contained a curse written by a man named Silvianus. It asked the god Nodens to deny health to anyone who bore the name Senicianus until the stolen ring was returned to the temple. This was a typical Roman curse tablet, a way for victims of theft to call on divine justice when earthly justice was out of reach. The ring and the tablet seemed to fit together like two halves of a forgotten dispute from Roman Britain, preserved in metal and lead for centuries.
When the temple site was studied in the 1920s, one of the scholars asked to examine the strange names and inscriptions was an Oxford professor named J. R. R. Tolkien. He was consulted as an expert in languages, and the eerie connection between a cursed ring and a mysterious name has often been noted as an intriguing coincidence in the life of the man who would later write about one of the most famous rings in literature."
Tolkien part is most likely a fabrication.
