During the height of the Roman occupation of Britain, Britannia was as Roman as anywhere else in the empire: filled with flourishing walled market towns distributing goods to and from all the other parts of the Mediterranean world, the culture a mix of Roman and local, all gods welcome. This was the secret sauce in the Roman recipe for empire, everybody got to keep their deities. Delicious. Some gods were adopted by the soldiers and traveling sales teams who moved the most from place to place, others got yoked to a Roman deity, two gods pulling the weight for one: interpretatio Romana Tacitus called this practice whilst naming a pair of gods living in a sacred grove somewhere along the Oder River between Germany and Poland. According to the Roman interpretation these deities were Castor and Pollux but maybe they were some version of Nerþus who was maybe Ing who maybe became Freyr and … More
Tag Archives: Freya
Ing is for Nerþus
In the Old English Rune Poem, Ing is specifically masculine pronoun male. He’s a boy. But where Ing came from amongst the East Danes of what is now eastern Denmark and Southern Sweden, Ing appears to be a deity who was sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes both at once. This is not uncommon, there are crowds of intersexed deities in world belief systems. I was going to list them. I don’t have enough space. But anywhere we look, there they are, including if we look toward Ing’s people. We have to look close, we have very little to go on.
We also have to look at Ing’s people at the wrong times which is always tricky. Ing is called Ing in the Rune Poem, which was most likely written down in the 600’s but is probably several hundred years older than that. The runes themselves are certainly older. When Ing is called Ing in the … More
