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Dead Winter's Night (Formally Bright Eyes)
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I'm doing more work on the Nehalennia research today and I have several questions that come across my mind: There is a recurrence of themes that appear across several cultures. The golden apples of Greek myth = the apples of Idunn, for instance. Are these retellings of the same story, or are they independent of each other?
There are two sites where temples to Nehalennia have been found and the author of the article that I'm reading has included examples of other altars that have been found there, most prominently Neptune/Poseidon and Hercules but the author's not reproduced the inscriptions (I'm presuming that there are some) that accompany these altars. The Nehalennia ones come with them, so I presume that they should.
The reason why I want to know if there are inscriptions is that I want to confirm that the altars are actually dedicated to those gods/demi gods and that they aren't a god that has a similar function in that culture and the author is saying that they are those gods/demi gods. Romans have clearly had an influence at the sites because the writing on the altars is latin, but they when they encounter gods of the native
lands that they invade, they often attribute a native god in that culture that has similar traits to their own with their own god, so Thoth becomes Mercury/Hermes, Tyr becomes Aries, etc...
Even later writers have this problem of transposing gods/goddesses from Greece and the Roman Empire to other lands - Snorri Sturluson claims that the Nordic deities are Greek migrants.