Note 39 — Chapter VII · Triumphs of the Water-world

This question, however, of the gender of river names, or rather the sex which personification ascribed them, is a most difficult one. If we glance at Ptolemy’s Geography written in the second century, we find in his account of the British Isles that he names more than fifty of our river mouths and estuaries, and that he divides their names almost equally into masculine and feminine. The modern Welsh usage has, it is seen, departed far from this, but not so far the folklore: the afanc is a male, and we have a figure of the same sex appearing as the father of the lake maiden in the Fan Fach story, and in that of Ỻyn Du’r Arđu; the same, too, was the sex of the chief dweller of Ỻyn Cwm Ỻwch; the same remark is applicable also to the greatest divinity of these islands—the greatest, at any rate, so far as the scanty traces of his cult enable one to become acquainted with him. As his name comes down into legend it belongs here, as well as to the deities of antiquity, just as much, in a sense, as the Dee. I refer to Nudons or Nodons, the remains39 of whose sanctuary were many years ago brought to light on a pleasant hill in Lydney Park, on the western banks of the Severn. In the mosaic floor of the god’s temple there is a coloured inscription showing the expense of that part of the work to have been defrayed by the contributions (ex stipibus) of the faithful, and that it was carried out by two men, of whom one appears to have been an officer in command of a naval force guarding the coasts of the Severn Sea. In the midst of the mosaic inscription is a round opening in the floor of nine inches in diameter and surrounded by a broad band of red enclosed in two of blue. This has given rise to various speculations, and among others that it was intended for libations. The mosaics and the lettering of the inscriptions seem to point to the third century as the time when the sanctuary of Nudons was built under Roman auspices, though the place was doubtless sacred to the god long before. In any case it fell in exactly with the policy of the more astute of Roman statesmen to encourage such a native cult as we find traces of in Lydney Park.