The Metal Detectives Group

lol 😂 common sense is like a super power these days, seems not many people have it lol 😂

Common sense farm sign here 👏 👏

A good friend is out with MWS today and this has come up… looks interesting but what is it ?

What would you do and how would you feel if you were digging your next signal and saw this starting to emerge from to soil?

Medieval harness pendant 🥰

A 1,600-year-old gold ring. A furious Roman curse. And a quiet conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien that may have helped birth the One Ring.

In the late 4th century AD, a Roman named Silvianus visited the temple of the healing god Nodens at Lydney Park in Gloucestershire (a place later known as Dwarf’s Hill). While there, his gold ring vanished. Convinced it had been stolen by a man named Senicianus, Silvianus did what many Romans did when earthly justice failed: he commissioned a lead curse tablet.

The tablet, found at the temple site in the early 19th century, reads something like this:
“To the god Nodens. Silvianus has lost a ring and has donated half its value to Nodens. Among those who are called Senicianus, do not allow health until he brings it to the temple of Nodens.”
The ring itself stayed lost for more than a thousand years.

Then, in 1785, a farmer ploughing a field near the Roman town of Silchester in Hampshire turned up a striking gold ring. It is large (about the size of a thumb, weighing 12 grams), ten-sided, and engraved with a bust of the goddess Venus. Along the band runs a Latin inscription: “Seniciane vivas in deo” — “Senicianus, may you live well in God.”

The ring eventually found its way into the collection of the Chute family at The Vyne, a grand house in Hampshire now owned by the National Trust. For decades it sat quietly in the library.
In 1928–29 the celebrated archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler excavated the temple at Lydney. He noticed the rare name Senicianus appearing on both the curse tablet and the distant gold ring. To understand the obscure Celtic god Nodens, Wheeler turned to a colleague: J.R.R. Tolkien, then Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.
Tolkien studied the name (linking it to the Irish mythological figure Nuada of the Silver Hand) and visited the Lydney site. Whether Wheeler specifically mentioned the cursed ring during their discussions is not proven. But the pieces are tantalising: a stolen or lost precious ring, a named thief, a powerful curse of ill-health, an ancient hill called Dwarf’s Hill with old mine workings nearby, and a professor of language and legend who would soon begin writing The Hobbit.

Tolkien always insisted his stories were not direct allegories or borrowings. Yet many scholars and the Tolkien Society itself have noted the striking parallels — a ring that brings misfortune to those who possess it against its owner’s will, a curse that follows it, and the rediscovery of something long hidden.

The ring is now on display at The Vyne. Beside it you can often see a first edition of The Hobbit and a transcription of Silvianus’s ancient plea for justice.

A real Roman ring, a real curse, a real conversation with Tolkien… and one of the greatest stories ever told.
What do you think — pure coincidence, or did a 4th-century theft help shape Middle-earth?