A Ring and A Curse

In the Summer issue of Britain's "National Trust Magazine" there was an interesting article about two "finds" in Britain that might have ended up having particular significance. In the late 18th Century a farmer found an engraved gold ring from the 4th-5th Century at the remains of the Roman town of Silchester. The ring has a chunky bezel with an engraving of Venus and engraved letters surround the band, which is in the shape of a ten-sided hoop. By amazing coincidence, a few decades later a Roman lead tablet bearing an inscription concerning this ring was found at a Roman temple site at Lydney in Gloucestershire. The tablet was engraved with a curse imprecating woe upon the person who had stolen this very ring! [Written curses left at temples must have been quite common. I remember seeing many examples uncovered at the temple connected to the Roman baths at Bath. Interestingly, people they wanted to curse were often mentioned by name, along with the wrong they had committed! (No "forgive and forget" in THOSE days!) At Bath they were usually written upon ostraca, broken pieces of pottery.]

Then in 1928 Sir Mortimer Wheeler, a prominent archaeologist, was told of the ring and the "curse tablet" while he was excavating at Lydney. Wheeler had an advisor on his Lydney dig who was an expert in early English - an Oxford don, named Tolkein! Was it inspiration, do you think?