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Mars Thingsus is one of the most exciting testimonies of Germanic belief, found of all places far from Germania: on votive stones on Hadrian's Wall in Britain (Housesteads/Vercovicium). Germanic soldiers from the Batavian land had set them up.
"Mars Thingsus" is no Roman god, but a Germanic one under a Roman name. The Romans saw in the Germanic Tiwaz/Ziu their war god Mars (interpretatio Romana). The decisive part is the byname: Thingsus belongs to the Germanic Thing – the people's and court assembly. Tiwaz was thus not only a war god but above all a god of law and oaths: the guarantor of order, under whose eye treaties were struck and disputes settled. That is exactly what makes this find so precious – it shows a Germanic god in a role the Norse Edda barely remembers.
The evidence stands far from Germania: on Hadrian's Wall in northern England, at the fort of Vercovicium (today Housesteads). There Germanic auxiliaries dedicated two altars (RIB 1593 and 1594). The dedicators call themselves cives Tuihanti – "citizens of Twenthe", Germani from the region of today's Twente in the Netherlands, serving as a cuneus Frisiorum in Roman service. They brought their god along to the empire's frontier and raised him an altar in the 3rd century. So it is that we know the Germanic god of law from Roman stone, of all places, at the edge of Britain.
Mars Thingsus does not appear alone: beside him two goddesses are named, Beda and Fimmilena (on the second altar Baudihillie and Friagabis), grouped as the Alaisiagae. Their names ring of legal language: some scholars read them through the Frisian legal terms bodthing and fimelthing (fixed and movable court dates) – goddesses of the Thing, then, fitting for the god of the Thing. The popular equation with valkyries is appealing but uncertain; the names themselves point rather to the world of law and assembly.
The find fits a larger picture. The French scholar of religion Georges Dumézil assigned Tiwaz to the "first function" – the sphere of law, oath and sovereignty. To this belongs the famous Norse myth in which Týr lays his hand as a pledge into the wolf's jaws so that an oath be kept: the god who vouches for binding order with his own body. At Housesteads we see the same idea, only centuries earlier and rooted on the continent: the god in whose name law is spoken.
Not least, the stone tells of people. The Tuihanti were Germanic soldiers, a thousand kilometres from home, in the service of a foreign empire – and yet they held to their god. Such dedications from the Roman frontier are our most important contemporary testimonies to continental Germanic belief, long before the Icelandic tradition. Where the written sources fall silent, the stone speaks.
"To the god Mars Thingsus and the two Alaisiagae, Beda and Fimmilena … the citizens of Tuihantis."Votive inscription, Housesteads, RIB 1593, after a public-domain translation
Tiwaz · Wodan, Donar & Ziu · Interpretatio Romana · Germanic Religion · The Matronae.
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