A Roman gold ring that might have inspired JRR Tolkien’s fantasy novels “The Hobbit” (1937) and his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy (1954) is the star exhibit of a new show opening on April 2 at the former aristocratic house The Vyne in Basingstoke, England. According to the Guardian, the hefty piece of jewellery — which could only fit a gloved thumb — is likely to have been excavated by a farmer ploughing on the ancient Roman site of Silchester, at the end of the 18th century.
The 12-gram solid gold ring bears the motif of a head wearing a diadem and is engraved with the Latin inscription: “Senicianus live well in God.” Although the details of the transaction are unknown, it is assumed that the farmer sold his find to the Chute family at The Vyne, where it has been kept ever since. This could have remained a relatively banal archaeological anecdote, but a few decades later a tablet inscribed with a curse linked to the ring was found at Lydney, Gloucestershire, on a Roman site known as “Dwarf’s Hill.”
In the tablet's text, a Roman man called Silvianus stated that his ring was stolen and he asked the god Nodens to punish the culprit, Senicianus. “Among those who bear the name of Senicianus to none grant health until he bring back the ring to the temple of Nodens,” reads the inscription. Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, knew of the story of the cursed ring. In 1929, the archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who connected the two pieces, had called him in to get some advice on the god’s unusual name.
Whether or not this was the trigger for the author’s popular books is still up in the air, but it sheds a new light on their origins — until now thought to include mainly literary sources, including Norse and Germanic mythology.