Of all the Irish gods, Nuada is the one with a street address. A Romano-British temple complex on a hill above the Severn, excavated in the 1920s, was dedicated to a god called Nodens — and the linguistic road from Nodens to Nuada is short and well made. That gives him something almost nobody else in this tradition has: a physical cult site, votive offerings, and a curse tablet with a real person's grievance on it.
The king who cannot be king
In the first battle of Mag Tuired, fought against the Fir Bolg for possession of Ireland, Nuada loses his arm — struck off by the Fir Bolg champion Sreng. The Tuatha Dé Danann win the battle and then face a constitutional crisis, because Irish law does not permit a maimed man to hold the kingship. The principle is real and appears in the legal tracts: a blemished king brings blemish on the land.
So Nuada steps down and Bres takes the throne, which goes catastrophically. Meanwhile Dian Cécht fits Nuada with a working arm of silver, and the epithet Airgetlám, silver-hand, sticks to him permanently. That is the earliest prosthesis story in Irish literature and one of the earliest anywhere in Europe, and the text is precise about the fitting: the arm has the movement of any other arm.
It is not enough. A silver arm is still not an unblemished body, and the restoration only becomes complete when Dian Cécht's son Miach grows flesh over the silver — or, in the fuller version, regrows a limb of flesh entirely, reciting a formula about sinew joining sinew. Dian Cécht kills him for it. Nuada gets his kingship back at the cost of the surgeon who made it possible.
Then Lugh walks into Tara, and Nuada gives up the throne a second time, voluntarily, to the better man. He dies at the second battle of Mag Tuired, killed by Balor's eye along with Macha. Twice deposed, twice by his own judgement, and killed in the war he handed over — he is the tradition's study in a ruler who keeps recognising his own insufficiency.
His sword is one of the four treasures brought from the northern cities, from Findias, and the formula is that once it was drawn from its sheath no one escaped it and no one could resist it.
Lydney Park, and what the votives actually show
The temple of Nodens sits inside an Iron Age hillfort at Lydney in Gloucestershire and was built in the late fourth century CE — remarkably late, well into the Christian empire. The complex is unusual and worth describing in its own terms rather than in Irish ones:
- A cella temple with side chapels, a long narrow building usually interpreted as an abaton or dormitory for incubation — sleeping at the sanctuary in hope of a healing dream, as at Greek and Roman healing shrines.
- A bath suite and a guest range, which means people were staying.
- A mosaic with sea creatures and fish, and a bronze plaque showing a figure driving a chariot flanked by tritons.
- Nine bronze figurines of dogs, including a fine long-nosed hound, plus dog imagery repeated elsewhere on the site. Dogs are strongly associated with healing sanctuaries; a dog licking a wound was itself understood as curative.
- A defixio — a curse tablet — from one Silvianus, who has lost a ring and asks the god to permit no health to a man named Senicianus until the ring is returned to the temple.
From those objects the standard reconstruction is a god of healing, of hunting, and of water or the sea. That is inference from finds. There is no myth of Nodens. No text tells a story about him, no inscription describes his character, and everything anyone says about his personality is extrapolated from a mosaic, some dogs and one furious lost-property notice.
The Tolkien ring, and how much of that story is true
A gold ring found at Silchester, inscribed with the name Senicianus, has long been connected with the Lydney curse — the same unusual name, forty miles away. J. R. R. Tolkien, then Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, was asked to supply a short philological appendix on the name Nodens for the Wheelers' 1932 excavation report, and he did, connecting it to a root meaning to catch or entrap.
The claim that this is where The Lord of the Rings came from was pushed hard in the 2010s and is widely repeated. What is documented: Tolkien wrote the name-note; the ring and the curse tablet exist; the dates overlap with his early work on Middle-earth. What is not documented: any statement by Tolkien connecting the Silchester ring to his own. It is a delightful story with a real archaeological core and a speculative middle, and it should be told that way.
Nudd, Lludd, and the Welsh side
The Welsh cognate is Nudd, best known through Gwyn ap Nudd, king of the Welsh otherworld and later of the fairies. He also appears as Lludd Llaw Ereint — Lludd of the Silver Hand, the exact counterpart of Airgetlám. The shift from Nudd to Lludd is generally explained as alliterative assimilation: Nudd Llaw Ereint became Lludd Llaw Ereint because Welsh liked the matching initials. That Lludd is then the king of the tale of Lludd and Llefelys, who rids Britain of three plagues, and eventually the legendary founder in whose name Ludgate in London was later explained.
So the silver hand travels — Ireland, Wales, and quite possibly a temple in Gloucestershire — while the story attached to it does not. That is the normal condition of Celtic comparative evidence, and it is why the Celtic family tree draws Irish and Welsh figures in separate zones rather than merging them.
Why does a silver arm disqualify him but a flesh arm does not?
Because the requirement is about wholeness rather than function. Early Irish kingship works on a correspondence between the ruler's body and the territory: a king's truth brings good weather and full harvests, and a defect in him shows up in the land. A silver replacement is visibly a replacement, so the defect is still on display. Miach's regrowth removes the evidence, which is what the law actually cares about.
Is Nodens definitely the same god as Nuada?
The name equation is solid — the phonology works cleanly from a Common Celtic form through to both the British and the Irish reflexes, and the Welsh Nudd sits between them. What is not solid is that they were the same deity in any meaningful sense. Four hundred years and the Irish Sea separate a Gloucestershire sanctuary from a manuscript written in a Christian monastery, and nothing at Lydney mentions a lost arm or a kingship.
What happened to Lydney after the Romans left?
The site was in use into the early fifth century and then abandoned, and the hill was not built over, which is why the plan survives so well. It was excavated by Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler in 1928–29 and republished with new work decades later; the finds remain in a private museum on the estate. It is one of the very few places where a visitor can stand inside a building where a Celtic-named god was worshipped, which is not something the Irish material can offer anywhere.