It was a good find for the British farmer, though. Made of gold and dating back to the fourth century, the ring was worth some money and held historic interest. But that’s as far as it went for a time. Again, Great Britain is nubby with buried artifacts. The farmer sold the ring to the Chute family, who were wealthy and politically connected and lived in Hampshire at a sixteenth century estate called the Vyne. The ring was added to the family’s large collection of antiquities and probably would have been forgotten about had another artifact not been unearthed in the next century about eighty miles from the farmer’s field.
In Gloucestershire are the ruins of a Roman temple dedicated to the god Nodens. He’s in charge of healing, hunting, and the sea. (Most ancient gods are multitaskers.) The land where the ruins are located is officially called Lydney Camp, although it was also known as Dwarf’s Hill in honor of the type of supernatural creatures that were thought to inhabit the area after the Romans left.
Found in those ruins in the nineteenth century was a small, thin lead tablet with a curse inscribed on it. Thousands of these lead or stone curse tablets (called defixiones) have been found across Europe, such as the seventh-century defixio found in Cyprus bearing the message: “May your penis hurt when you make love.” And the Porcellus defixio, which features the image of a snake-haired demon above a mummified curse victim. Defixiones are a lot of fun.
On the defixio found on Dwarf’s Hill, the following curse was inscribed:
For the god Nodens. Silvianus has lost a ring and has donated one half its worth to Nodens. Among those named Senicianus permit no good health until it is returned to the temple of Nodens.
That’s right. A ring engraved with the name Senicianus was found eighty miles away from a tablet calling down a curse upon a man named Senicianus who had stolen a ring. And in those days, the name Senicianus was no John Smith.
In 1888, a century after the ring was found, Chaloner William Chute, the heir to the Vyne estate, wrote about the connection between the lead tablet and the ring in his family’s possession in his book A History of the Vyne in Hampshire. He hypothesized that Senicianus stole the ring from Silvianus while both were visiting Nodens’s temple. There were a lot of opportunities for such thievery at the temple, where pilgrims would stay overnight and dip into healing baths. It’s the ancient Roman equivalent of somebody stealing your phone from your locker at the gym.
But if the ring had belonged to Silvianus, why was it engraved with Senicianus’s name? Perhaps Senicianus, knowing how easy it is to curse somebody while at a temple dedicated to a god, quickly had his own name engraved on the ring, as well as an anti-curse of sorts. Such a rush job could explain the misspelling. Or maybe the ring originally belonged to Senicianus and he lost it to Silvianus in a wager but kept it anyway. Whether Silvianus’s defixio worked is a part of the story we’ll never know…unless somebody digs up yet another artifact to shed more light on this 1,700-year-old drama.
But the story doesn’t end there. In fact, it gets even stranger — and relevant to anybody who is a fan of fantasy literature. In 1929, an archaeologist named Sir Mortimer Wheeler was researching the ring and the tablet while excavating Dwarf’s Hill when he inadvertently inspired another story, one that eventually became one of the most popular works of literature of the twentieth century.
Wheeler needed help researching the etymology of the god name-checked in the curse, Nodens. He called up an expert in Anglo-Saxon, a well-respected professor at the prestigious Oxford University: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Known to history as J. R. R. Tolkien.
And then, not long after that encounter, J. R. R. Tolkien published his genre-defining fantasy novel, The Hobbit, which tells the story of an engraved gold ring that was made by dwarves and cursed. That ring is lost and found, and its finder is chased by the previous owner, who knows the name of the thief: Bagginses.
We don’t have proof that the Ring of Silvianus directly inspired the famous fantasist, nor do we have watertight evidence that the ring found in the Silchester field is the same ring that’s mentioned on the curse tablet from the Roman temple ruins. But the most improbable circumstances and seemingly coincidental connections can sometimes turn out to be the true story. And in the absence of proof either way, isn’t it more fun to believe?
Today, you can see the ring for yourself. The Vyne is a historic site, open to the public, and dedicates an entire room to the piece. It’s called the Ring Room. In it is the shiny Ring of Silvianus on display beside a copy of the curse tablet. The original defixio can be viewed at the museum in Lydney Camp.
The ring and the copy of the curse tablet are displayed with, of course, a first edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
Cursed
in the
Graveyard
All graveyards and cemeteries are spooky. But sometimes, they’re also cursed. Too often, objects meant to be reverential memorials to the dead morph into vectors of harm, misfortune, and even death for the living. The dead can be a jealous and vengeful lot. In this section, you’ll find headstones that kill, statues that haunt, and a tomb that summons dictators. William Shakespeare even makes an appearance. It’ll give you a whole new reason to whistle past the graveyard.
The Black Aggie
PLACE OF ORIGIN:
DRUID RIDGE CEMETERY, PIKESVILLE, MARYLAND
SCULPTOR:
EDWARD PAUSCH
CREATED FOR:
GENERAL FELIX AGNUS
YEAR OF INSTALLATION:
1925
CURRENT LOCATION:
HOWARD T. MARKEY NATIONAL COURTS BUILDING, WASHINGTON, DC
When a cemetery has a name like Druid Ridge, you expect it to have a creepy grave statue or two. And Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville, Maryland, has a doozy of one. Or, rather, it did. Today, if you walk its pleasant, winding paths, you’ll eventually come across an empty, chair-like pedestal with the name Agnus engraved into its base.
This is the abandoned throne of the Black Aggie, a cursed funerary sculpture with a strange past and an almost stranger present. The Black Aggie is a six-foot-tall shrouded figure in bronze. She sits on a stone. Her eyes are closed. Her hand lifts to rest beneath her chin. She is, in a word, creepy. And the legends that surround her are even more so.
They say her eyes glow red at night and that if you look into them, you’ll go blind. They say that if a pregnant woman walks through her shadow, that woman will miscarry. They say that at night, the spirits of the cemetery gather around her. They say that if you sit on her lap, you will die. They say if you stay overnight with her, you will die.