r/CulturalLayer

RELEASED
Corsica is famous for Napoleon, vendettas, explosive cheese—and apparently a 4,000-year grudge. Its mysterious cyclopean towers survive only in the south, while the north contains a suspicious absence where an ancient stone-building culture should have been. Was the island divided by an unknown invasion long before Rome, leaving behind a wound that Corsica never quite forgot? 
Follow armed menhirs, Bronze Age towers, forgotten languages, and some deeply inconvenient geography to investigate who split Corsica in two.
Hope you like the new(ish) video
https://youtu.be/tY1JXNs60bI

In 1929, archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler was working on the Roman temple of Nodens at Lydney Park and asked J.R.R. Tolkien to examine the name Nodens. What makes the episode interesting is that the site was connected with a Roman curse concerning a stolen gold ring.

A gold ring discovered earlier in Hampshire bore the name Senicianus. At Lydney, a curse tablet attributed to a man named Silvianus asked Nodens to deny Senicianus good health until the stolen ring was returned. Tolkien therefore had a documented scholarly connection to the archaeological site and the name of the god involved in the curse.

The obvious temptation is to draw parallels with Tolkien's later fiction: a lost or stolen ring, an owner who desperately wants it back, the person believed to possess it being named, and a ring associated with misfortune. The similarities are interesting, particularly given Tolkien's direct involvement with the Lydney material.

But the part I find more interesting is the limits of the evidence. There doesn't seem to be definitive proof that Tolkien used the Ring of Silvianus story as a direct source for the One Ring. Tolkien's legendarium drew on a huge range of Germanic, Norse, Anglo-Saxon and other mythological material, so resemblance alone obviously isn't enough to establish influence.

So I'm curious how people here would weigh it:

Does Tolkien's documented connection to the Lydney excavation make the Silvianus ring a plausible influence, or are the similarities too generic to tell us much?

And more specifically, is there anything in Tolkien's letters, drafts, linguistic work on Nodens, or the development history of the Ring that strengthens or weakens the connection?

I recently made a short documentary going through the ring, curse tablet, Wheeler's involvement and the arguments on both sides. I'm including it for anyone interested, but I'm mainly interested in the textual/historical question:

The One Ring | Was It Inspired by a Real Roman Curse?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyjISLnafTU