The ruins at Stonehenge (Mystery Hill), New Hampshire

Summary of Discoveries of Dr. Barry & René Fell

NOTE: "Old Norse" and "Old Gaelic" as used by Fell may be equivalent to a Northern dialect of the Saharan language as discussed by Nyland, and most of the inscriptions in this section may also be transcribed with the Ogam/Igbo Dictionary: see Catherine Acholonu.

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Religion During the Bronze Age

  Based on a translation of inscriptions in America, Fell (1982) attempts to provide an overview of American Bronze Age peoples' religion:

  As no Norse inscriptions older than the Iron Age [had been deciphered before publication of... [Fell's 1982 book], King Woden-lithi's commentary on his gods is not only the first information we have had on the matter, but it is unique. The era in which he lived, calculated from the position of the vernal equinox on his zodiac as about 1700 BC, is regarded as early Bronze Age in Britain, but in Scandinavia, where metals were imported, the Neolithic continued longer, and Woden-lithi would be regarded as living in the transitional time between the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age, a period, often called Chalcolithic, when copper was employed.

Archaeologists and mythologists have concluded from a study of the carvings left by northern European peoples that sun worship was the religion practiced at this transitional phase and that it continued well into the Bronze Age. Their inferences are totally confirmed by Woden-lithi's inscription.

"It is obvious that sun worship was the vogue, as the sun figure is placed at the center of Woden-lithi's sacred site, is drawn on a larger scale than the other figures, save only that of the moon goddess, and the lettering beside each of these deities is much larger than the other parts of the text (Please see Figs. 81, 82 & 83).

The great festivals of the Norsemen year in Woden-lithi's day were, as noted previously, those of Yule and of Eostre. At these times, as the inscription tells us, there was feasting and drinking, and men dressed up as comic figures called Yule-men. Their costume suggested the diagonals that mark the solstice and equinox lines on an azimuth plate recording the greatest and least excursions of the sun northward in the course of a year. Some of the actors wore horns, other had outsize rabbit or hare ears. Some were dressed as other animals, and some performed acrobatics. Thus, the mad March hare and the Easter Bunny of some Christian secular celebrations may be survivals from Woden-lithi's time, over 3,000 years ago.

If there was a lunar festival, whatever Woden-lithi may have said about that has not yet been recognized or deciphered.

"Other gods are mentioned, but they seem to have been relatively minor nature spirits. These latter are divided into two groups, the more important Aesir (also sky gods, but having roles to play on earth and in the thinking of the people), the less important Wanir or earth gods, and the enemies of the gods, the giants and monsters of the underworld (including the bed of the ocean). These lesser divinities match their more important later derivatives, the gods of the late Bronze Age and subsequent periods.

A list of the various divinities whose names have so far been deciphered (by Barry Fell) on Woden-lithi's inscribed rock platform is shown in Fig. 84.

The custom of having clowns, and in particular those buffoons that the inscriptions at the Peterborough site call Yule-men (see Fig. 85) may have originated in Spain, for several sites are known in that country where images occur of humans dressed in this manner. The lowermost figure on the right [of Fig. 85] depicts a women dressed as a Yule clown, a feature not found at Woden-lithi's site; the Spanish Yule-lady shown here is from the Cueva de los Letteras. The upper left figure is lettered in Tifinag, and announces himself as a Y-L  M-N, one of the Yule-men; it can be found about 5 feet northwest of the main sun-god figure. The other two Yule-men shown on the right side of the illustration are respectively from 14 feet and 16 feet northwest of the main sun-god figure. The two figures on the lower left lie about 50 feet southwest of the sun god. One is evidently a tumbler, the other a jackrabbit, or, in terms of his European origins, a hare. In Scandinavia to this day the equivalent of Santa Claus is called the Yule-man (though nowadays he wears Icelandic costume, as does our own American Santa). The Scandinavian Yule-man also has a troop of Jule-nisser (Yule Dwarves) who accompany him. The hare seems to have vanished from the midwinter festival of modern times, and remains with us in the guise of the Easter Rabbit who now brings the Easter eggs, another survival of old Norsemen pagan customs.

There are other links with ancient Spain, though not at Woden-lithi's site, which is predominantly Scandinavian. Fig. 86 ....[and other examples: Fell, 1982] show sculptures of animals that have been found in parts of New England where the stone chambers occurs. The bison (Fig. 86) is from Lawrence, in the valley of the Merrimack River in Massachusetts. It recalls the numerous Iberian sculptures, often crude as in this case, of bulls."  [A boar and a recumbent beast, apparently a bull (Fell 1982)] were both discovered in central Vermont by John Williams and me while we were investigating the chambers at South Woodstock. They too recall the ancient Spanish sculptures.

The carvings in stone in northern Portugal also include numerous examples of animals, so much so that Professor Santos Junior, President of the Anthropological Society of Portugal (Sociedade de Antropologia e Etnologia de Portugal), has inferred that a special zoolatry (religious worship of animals) too place there. One of the examples he found was attached to a stone tablet carrying an inscription, which he sent to me. Like others from the region, where Basque place names occur, the inscription proved to be written in the ancient Basque tongue, using the ancient Basque syllabary (Fig. 87). The inscription disclosed that it was a dedication to the Laminak, subterranean monsters that are still the object of superstitious dread among the Basque country people of today.

It is relevant to state here that when Basque and other Spanish scholars sent these undeciphered inscriptions to me, nothing was known in Spain or Portugal as to the language of the writing. The solution (Fig 89 & Fig 90) proved to be one that depended wholly on the fact that the Cree, the Ojibway, and some other Amerindian tribes have preserved this same syllabary today, and still use it in their letters, their newspapers, and other contexts. It is mistakenly attributed to the missionary James Evans, a Welshman who is supposed to have "invented" the script in 1841. What Evans really did, as Fell had noted in Saga America, was to preserve and adopt the writing system that he found already in use among  his flock. For this he deserves great credit, but it is wrong to say he invented the syllabary. The system of writing goes back far beyond the earliest Roman inscriptions in Spain and Portugal. It continued in use among Basques until some time in the early Middle Ages. The last known example of its use is on a tablet now held in the San Telmo Museum (Fig 89 & Fig 90). Using the Cree syllabary as a guide (Fig. 88),   Fell transliterated the signs into the phonetic equivalents in Latin script, and then recognized the language as Basque. Its translation appeared to be that shown in the illustrations, and Fell submitted his decipherment of the tablets to Dr. Imanol Agiŕe, the Basque etymologist and epigrapher. he confirmed the decipherment and provided a modern Basque rendering of the same text. (This, of course, is in marked contrast to the views of those archaeologists who state that the Basque inscriptions found in America are marks made by roots or by plowshares. For the views of linguistic scholars on the one hand, and archaeologists on the other, reference may be made to volume 9 of the Epigraphic Society's Occasional Publications, entitled Epigraphy Confrontation in America [1981]). A possible means of Iberian influence on the Norsemen settlements in Canada may have been the Algonquians. For, as an inscription cut on Woden-lithi's site shows, the actions of the Norsemen colonists were of interest to the Algonquians, and an inscription in a language similar to Ojibwa, using the Basque (and therefore the Cree-Ojibwa) syllabary (see Fig. 91 Table 3), makes reference to Woden-lithi's departure by ship. As already noted, Woden-lithi's relations with the Algonquians appear to have been cordial, and he refers as a "foreign-friend" (Fig. 20) to one whom he has carved.

The beliefs and practices referred to in this [section], worship of the sun and moon and worship of animals, appear all to derive from the Stone Ages and were doubtless a direct carryover from the late Neolithic.

But the Indo-European farmers who occupied Scandinavia toward the close of the Stone Age, and who are believed by Scandinavian archaeologists to be the direct ancestors of Bronze Age peoples in Scandinavia, were practical country people who perceived the sun as a supreme deity on whom the fertility of their crops depended, since only by planting seed at times determined by the position of the sun in the constellations could they be assured of success in reaping a harvest." [It is of interest that Fell (1982) does not indicate farming practices among the Norsemen colonists in America. The evolution of observatories in their culture in Scandinavia might have been related to farming, but such observatories also fulfilled other functions, such as when good sailing seasons are available, etc.].

For their more personal needs they apparently evolved a whole pantheon of lesser deities. As the Bronze Age progressed, these lesser gods gradually assumed the role of major gods, and eventually the sun and the moon and the rest of nature were assigned by the priests to the lesser roles of servants of the new gods. For the Norsemen peoples the leading members of the new pantheon were all sky gods. The new religion had already developed clearly defined roles for these gods, and in that capacity they accompanied Woden-lithi to America, as his presiding patrons.

The Gods Go West -- Woden and Lug

Based on a translation of inscriptions in America, Fell (1982) proposes a hypothetical scenario of further migrations by Bronze Age peoples on the American continent:

Although both the ancient peoples of Ireland and the Norsemen Teutons venerated the sun god above all others during the Bronze Age, the former calling him by the name Bel or Grian, the latter Sol or Sunu, each of these peoples recognized a host of lesser gods. These deities seem to have originated as spirits of nature, each in charge of particular natural manifestations, and later some of them were elevated to become major gods.

Thus Lug to the ancient Irish was a god of light, who repelled the forces of darkness with his mighty spear. The Norsemen people apparently assigned much the same characteristics to Woden or Odin, who also owned a mighty spear and dealt destruction to the enemies of gods and men. Both ancient Irish and Norsemen recognized a sky god who was named for thunder: Taranis in ancient Irish, Thunor or Thor in Norse. Both had divinities in charge of war, of music, of writing skills and magic, and, especially, fertility, both male and female.

In America something happened that did not and could not happen in Europe. Relatively isolated and defenseless settlements of Irish and Norsemen Teutons came into accidental and basically friendly contact. Inevitably there were intermarriages, and each side imparted its ideas to the other. Thus arose a peculiarly American blending of European concepts, which later permeated Amerindian thinking, as intermarriages became more extensive.

 When the people from Ireland and Scandinavia crossed the Atlantic to settle in America they brought their gods with them. In the northeastern settlements, where native rock abounded, they built religious centers in the megalithic style. Some of the chambers still carry ogam inscriptions indicating the name of the god or goddess of the dedication (.....see Fig. 168). In most cases the original inscriptions are now unreadable or totally effaced by time and weather. As centuries went by, and the Ancient Irish people or their Creole descendants dispersed across the continent, their concepts changed with the changing environment. In the Northeast the mother goddess was conceived as a female figure resembling the Punic Tanith, also as a nude image. On the prairies the mother goddess is represented as an Amerindian woman who's fringed clothes spell out in ogam her name and titles. Where there were no rocks, no stone chambers could be built, and they and the other megalithic structures all but vanish as we pass beyond the Great Lakes.

Chief of the Ancient Irish gods was Lug, god of the sky and of light, and creator of the universe. His emblems are his spear and his slingshot. With the latter he once destroyed a one-eyed monster named Balar, who, with his sorcerer attendants the Fir-bolg, had gained the mastery of Ireland. Balar is depicted in an unlettered inscription on the Milk River, near Writing-on-Stone, Alberta. He is shown as having one leg and one arm, held aloft over his gigantic eye, which could kill hundreds merely by its glance. In this pictograph, Fig. 93, Lug has just loosed the thong of his slingshot and the monster is about to die. Another and evidently much later depiction of Lug is that in Fig. 92, where his name is given in Norse runes, one of many examples we now have of Norsemen influence on the western Irish in North America. Presumably the Norsemen came down from Hudson Bay to enter the prairie lands. In this Petroglyph Lug is shown holding his magic spear, by means of which he defeats the forces of darkness each year, to usher in the returning spring. The last-mentioned petroglyph occurs on cliffs at Castle Gardens in Wyoming, and at the same site another Ancient Irish god is identified by his name written in Norse runes. This is Mabona (or Mabo), the Irish Apollo, god of music and of sports and the presiding divinity in charge of male fertility. In this context his symbol is the phallus, shown in the petroglyph on the rock above him.

The Punic traders of Iberia brought to America the coinage of Carthage and other Semitic cities, and these coins often depict a horse (the emblem of Carthage), or just its head and neck, or a Pegasus with wings but without the rest of the animal's body. Since there were no horses in the Americas at that epoch, the Ancient Irish had vague and strange ideas as to what kind of animal it might be, apparently able to fly like a bird, yet resembling a deer in other respects. They sometimes carved representation of their gods or heroes riding on this magic animal of the skies," and often birds' feet replace the hoofs. "The body may resemble a boat, while the mane and tail provide the fringe ogam required to give a title to the composition. In this respect the American Irish copied exactly the conventions of the minters of Spain, forming the word C-B-L or G-B-L (for capull, horse), and in the case of a Pegasus, adding the suffix -n (ean, meaning "flying").  Some of these flying heroes mounted on Pegasus-back may be intended for Norsemen Valkyries, other have the name Mabona or Mabo-Mabona incorporated in the ogam of the tail.

The god of knowledge, especially astronomy, astrology, and occult sciences, and of writing skills, was Ogmios. He is always represented as having a face like the sun, and sometimes he carries rods that spell G-M, the consonants of the word ogam.

In later centuries, long after the time of Woden-lithi and his colonists, the descendants of the Norsemen settlers began to migrate westward, to reach the Great Plains and, ultimately the West Coast from British Columbia southward to an undetermined distance. They also encountered other Amerindian tribes, especially the many Dakota tribes, usually now referred to as Sioux. With the passage of time these communities all blended, and so a part of the Norsemen heritage was introduced into the Amerindian tradition.

While these events were occurring, a similar westward migration took place among the Irishiberian (noted as Celtiberian) colonists who had originally occupied much of New England and also part of the southeastern states. These ancient people from Ireland likewise reached the Plains, and they too blended with the Sioux tribes and the Shoshone. They also had a predominant influence in forming the Takhelne people of British Columbia. These people from Ireland spread southward along the Pacific coast, through Oregon and much of California, where their ogam inscriptions are often to be found in excellent states of preservation.

Inevitably the two religious traditions, Norse on the one hand, Ancient Irish on the other, both of them expressions of the original Indo-European pantheon, blended to produce a composite mythology. Thus we find Norsemen heroes depicted in what appear to be Ancient Irish roles and vice versa. These blended traditions persisted into modern times, and there were still artists painting ogam texts beneath Norsemen mythological subjects as late as the first decades of the nineteenth century.

All the foregoing inferences are attested to by the inscriptions. In localities such as the Milk River in Alberta, where inscriptions in ogam abound, the bedrock is so soft that the inscriptions cannot be many centuries old. Some declare their [recent origin] by incorporating depictions of Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or colonists with rifles-- scattered incongruously among petroglyphs that depict the old Norsemen gods and heroes.

It is clear that a tradition of sculpting replicas of still older petroglyphs must have persisted for thousands of years, and it is very probable that many of the artists whose work we now admire and whose ogam texts we can still recognize may not themselves have really understood what it was that they had been trained to sculpt. Perhaps, like the Egyptian carvers of Roman times, they merely knew that they were repeating old and hallowed texts from their remote ancestors, the meaning no longer known to them.

Whether this was so or not, the Amerindians have disclosed little of what lies behind their traditional art, or have cloaked it behind a disguise of later-invented myths. And as for the inscriptions, many of those that are still readable as ancient ogam cannot possibly have been cut in ancient times. They represent a fossil art, preserved intact from another age. We can be grateful to those artists who thus preserved the remote past for us in this way.

King Woden-lithi gives a concise summary of his pantheon of gods, which (like Snorri's Edda) he separates into the Aesir or sky gods and the Wanir or earth gods.

"Chief of Norsemen sky gods is Woden of the great spear Gungnir and, as stated above, he has much the same characteristics as Lug of the Gaelic Irish (noted as Celts) and Lew of the Brythonic Irish. He presides over magic and owns a magic ring that Loki, his son, had made for him.

His magic spear is carved many times at Peterborough, some of the larger versions being perhaps the work of Algonquians copying from smaller originals. In one example (Fig. 96 & Fig. 97), located about 18 feet west of the main sun figure, the letters GN-GN  N-R are written: Gnugnir, the Ontario version of Gungnir, by which name Odin's spear was known to the Vikings of a later age. These and other inscriptions show that the mythology of Odin in Viking times is fundamentally just a more elaborate development of the mythology of the Norsemen peoples generally in the much earlier era of King Woden-lithi.

Woden himself is depicted as a male figure just to the right of Gungnir (Fig. 96 & Fig. 97). His name is written W-D-N, Woden, in the English and Germanic form of his name.

About 14 feet south of the main sun figure another of Woden's possessions is depicted (Fig. 103). This is a peculiar forked tree, identified as W-GH  D-R-S-I-L, Ughdrasil, matching the world-tree of the Vikings, called Yggdrasil. The name is supposed to mean "Ugly Horse" and its link with the tree is obscure.

Woden was also regarded as the god who presided over the dead, with feasting and other pleasures of the flesh for warriors who died in battle. His assistants in bringing in the bodies of the slain for restoration to life, were the Valkyries. There has not yet been observed any reference to this mythology on the Peterborough site, but Fig. 94  & Fig. 95 suggest that the myth of the Valkyries was imparted to the American migrants from Ireland. The inscriptions depicting these strange riders of flying steeds were cut in nearly modern times by western plainsmen, probably Sioux, who had inherited the Norsemen tradition." Please also refer to Figs. 98, 99, 100 & 102.

Loki The Crafty

One of Woden's sons was the crafty Loki of Viking tradition. He may well have been venerated more highly in Woden-lithi's time, not as a crafty ill-natured character, but as a skillful craftsman, for in the early Bronze Age technical skills would be rare and highly valued. About 10 feet north of the main sun figure at Peterborough there is an illustration of a galloping animal, and beneath it an ithyphallic Fig. (Fig. 104, with the following text engraved:

M-GN  L-M-S  L-K  L-A  W-N  W-V-GH  W-D-N

(magna lumis Loki lae wan Vighhya Slehefnir Wodena) "By sorcery, cunning and venom Loki won the steed Sleipnir for Woden." The word Slehefnir is assumed to be the damaged section that lies beneath, to the right.

Loki was credited by the Vikings with having powers of persuasion that the skillful dwarves of the Mid-Earth could not resist. Whenever Odin needed something from the dwarf's factories, Loki was always sent to wheedle it out of them. Similarly, when Thunor, the thunder god, required a weapon to defend the Aesir, it was Loki who was sent for, and who found means of providing it. King Woden-lithi's text states that a dwarf manufactured the magic hammer named Mjolnir for Loki to give to Thunor. This inscription is given as  [Fig. 119].

Loki, despite his malevolence, was a skillful craftsman himself, and seems in this aspect to represent the blacksmith god of the Greeks (Hephaistos) and the Romans (Vulcan). The Ancient Irish (noted as Celtic) equivalent of the latter two deities was Goibhnui and he, like the Graeco-Roman craftsman god, was lame. If, therefore, we equate Loki with Goibhnui (Fig. 105), despite their apparent differences in temperament, we should perhaps include here the activities preside over by Goibhnui in his new roles in America. For, as the Ancient Irish  settlers moved westward, they encountered the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, and began to harvest its wool by means of annual roundups. Goibhnui now became the presiding genius over the craft of forming. Once the wool was shorn, it passed under the aegis of the mother goddess.

At suitable locations in the mountainous areas of the Far West the ancient migrants from Ireland hunted the bighorn and the antelope. In Nevada, however, and also in British Columbia, there was an annual round up by shepherds, on foot. The pictographs show them carrying shepherds' crooks (Fig. 106a). it is probable that the long drystone walls noted by Professors Robert F. Heizer and martin A. Baumhoff (1962) were to facilitate driving the wild sheep into a confined area, where they were shorn of wool. The various pictographs (Figs. 106a, 106b, 107, 108, 109 & 110), some of them rebus ogam, depict sheep, and also other animals. The spinning of yarn and various parts of the vertical loom and its associated tools (shed battens, loom-comb [replacing a reed], and frame) are shown in pictographs given in ...[Figs. 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165 & 166]. The methods appear to be the same as those used by the present-day Navaho. In Nevada Professor Fell was told of persistent legends that the region was formerly in the possession of now-vanished people called "sheep-eaters." The technical farmer's words appearing on some of the inscriptions are in some cases of Norse origin. This fact, taken with the mixed Irish--Norse features of some of the mythological inscriptions and the occasional use of Norse runes, can only mean that a contact occurred between the Ancient Irish migrants of the Milk River (and also of Wyoming) and Norsemen visitors or settlers.

Tsiw Mighty-in-Battle

In Anglo-Saxon and Norsemen mythology, Tiw is the son of Woden (Odin) and therefore a member of the superior sky gods, though subservient to Woden. Two striking differences are evident in the mythology of King Woden-lithi, which antedates the historical era from which Anglo-Saxon and Norsemen mythology derives.

First, the name of Tiw is rendered in the ancient Germany manner, with an initial ts-sound (z of Old High German), and so, like Thunor, Tsiw reminds us of the southern Teutons rather than the Norsemen.

Second, his image is by far the largest of the gods' after the sun god and the moon goddess. He is also shown as the tutelary deity of ships. The ship depicted beside his main image is not a warship, however, but a trading vessel, with a deep capacious hull for cargo and without the banks of oars of a naval ship. it may well be Woden-lithi's own ship.

By tradition Tiw was the god of battle, and he presumably had that department of human aggression under his charge in Woden-lithi's day also. His major image lies some 30 feet west of the main sun figure at the Peterborough site (Fig. 111). He is shown as a stoutly built man, standing on the initial letter TS of his own name, his right hand held aloft, his left arm with the hand severed, the stump dripping blood. To his upper left stand the letters of his title L-M-Y-TH, "maimed" (Old Norse lamidhr). Beside him to his right lies the giant wolf Wenri (Fenrir of Norsemen mythology). According to Snorri, who wrote in the twelfth century, Fenrir was one of the evil progeny of Loki. He became a menace to the gods, and Odin ordered him to be haltered. Only Tiw was willing to attempt the task, and to achieve it he had to pacify the wolf by placing his hand in its mouth, as an earnest [gesture] that the halter would not in reality restrict him. When the truth appeared otherwise, Fenrir bit off Tiw's arm. Obviously this myth was already established in the early Bronze Age, since it is so clearly depicted here.

According to philologists, Tiw is the same god as the Greek Zeus. The Old High German name Tsiwaz, like the name by which Woden-lithi knew him, resembles Zeus. His tasks included that of holding up the sky. This he is shown doing in an unlabeled premaiming situation in a petroglyph (Fig. 113) located 6 feet west of the main sun figure [at Peterborough, Ontario].

In his role as a war god Tsiw has as one of his symbols a battle-ax. In Fell's book Saga America he recorded two iron battle-axes that had been discovered in America, though they seem to be of Viking origin. One was found at Cold Harbour, Nova Scotia, and the other (Fig. 114) at Rocky Neck, on the Massachusetts coast. They were formerly owned by William Goodwin, who first protected Mystery Hill, and they are now in the Goodwin Collection in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.

At the time when Fell prepared the text for Saga America (1980) he had not realized that the Tifinag alphabet is of Norsemen origin, and consequently he was baffled by what appeared to be Norsemen axes engraved, as these two are, with Tifinag letters. Not expecting the alphabet to render Norse language, he could find no Libyan match for the words the letters seemed to spell, and was forced to record them in the book with the comment.... "The markings are letters of the Tifinag alphabet of Libya, although the axes appear to be Viking."

Now that we can expect Norse language written in the Tifinag alphabet, the decipherment is clear, and we can be sure that the ax is indeed inscribed in Norse. The inscription shows that axes of this type were awarded as marks of honor by Norsemen kings, and that even though they are products of the Iron Age, they retain the ancient Tifinag as a persistent tradition from ancient times, as do many royal gifts given in modern times. The inscription may be transcribed as L-A-N  S-M  E-K-M  M-M  S-M  E-L, to be understood as Lae sami ekjurn emum, sami eli, "Royal award for the honor of battle widows, and for the honor of old age." That two such awards have been discovered in North America and none apparently in the Scandinavian countries themselves seems surprising.

Woden-lithi associates Tsiw with ships, as his dedicatory inscription shows, and this must indicate that at the epoch when Woden-lithi lived, the god was regarded as a tutelary deity for sailors. Since the king was himself a sailor, it is natural for him to have given such prominence to his patron, greater than that which he accorded to Woden or any of the other gods, save only the sun god. No other references have been found to Tsiw on American rocks, not indeed to find which god was regarded as in charge of fishing. For want of information on the subject, included here are some of the inscriptions that relate to ships and to fisheries (Figs. 115, 116 & 117). Most of these are demonstrably Ancient Irish in origin, some are unidentified, and merely depict ships of the Bronze Age type.

The illustrations have detailed captions. However, it should be explained that Ancient Irish custom, still to be found in Ireland within living memory, required that the local chief of any community be granted a tax comprising one tenth part of all catches of fish. The tithe was used by the chief for the support, not only of his own family, but also of indigent females or widows and fatherless children. (The American gypsies, at least in the Northeast, still maintain a similar custom, or did so up to [1972]... when Fell was collecting linguistic material from the Boston gypsies.)

The inscriptions that illustrate these fishing practices come from the Tule Lake region, on the border of Oregon and California. Although no fishing is now carried out there, the local Indians and museum authorities confirm that very great runs of fish used to occur in former times, and that they were indeed caught in nets, as the inscriptions state. it is also of great interest that the unit of measurement of fish by tally is called the M-S, to be read as Old Irish maois, the meaning of which is given in Patrick S. Dinneen's Irish-English, English-Irish dictionary (2nd ed., Dublin, 1927, p. 709) as "a hamper of 500 fishes." The lettering on the texts gives the remaining details. These texts are traced from photographs made at Tule Lake by Wayne and Betty Struble, who detected the ogam and brought the site to Fell's attention.

Thunor The Thunderer

Third of the sons of Woden, and fourth of the Aesir gods, we may note Thunor (Thor of the Norsemen). The form of his name suggests a north German rather than Scandinavian affinity for Woden-lithi's tongue.

Thunor was the name by which he was known to the Anglo-Saxons, before the Vikings came to England. He is accorded much space on Woden-lithi's rock platform [Peterborough, Ontario, Canada], and seems to have been one of the major objects of veneration. About 24 feet south-southwest of the main sun figure. He is depicted (Fig. 119) with his sword and hammer, but no text. He wears a high-peaked conical helmet. Some 20 feet west of the main sun figure his famous hammer is depicted, together with his personal name, M-O-L-N-R (Mjolnir). In the Bronze Age all famous weapons had personal names, on the model of Siegfried's sword, Volsung. Images of the short-handled hammer, usually not labeled, are seen all over the site. About 11 feet southeast of the main sun figure Thunor himself is depicted (Fig. 120), helmetless, arms akimbo, his hammer beside him to the right, and its name, M-L-N-R, inscribed to the left. In a corrupt spelling M-N-R the hammer appears about 45 feet to the south-southeast of the main sun figure, beside a pair of serpents, and to the right Thunor stands, demonstrating his mighty glove, one of the sources of his power. As conqueror of the sea giant Ymir (Himir of the Norsemen), he may have been accorded special veneration by Woden-lithi's mariners.

He is shown with his high conical helmet and his hammer also in a petroglyph composition (Fig. 123) centered at about 15 feet northeast of the main sun figure. This shows Thunor at the outset of the final battle of the gods against the forces of the underworld. The giant serpent-dragon of Middle Earth lies to the right, coiling its body, with a text composed of the dot-letters of the alphabet along its length. The text that accompanies this composition appears to be a continuation of the text given in Fig. 119, where a dwarf is recorded to have made Molnir for Thunor. This section reads:

N-M  TH-W-N-R  M-L-N-R  H-K  R-M  L-K-K  L-W-K  L  H-W

which may be interpreted as Nema Thunor molni haka Orma likkja luk la hawa, "Thunor takes up Molni to strike at the Serpent, its body lying coiled in the sea." (In Fig. 123 only the god and his hammer, and the first three words of the text are shown.)  The dragon defeated Thunor in the end, leading to the ascent to Walhol, as recorded later in this section.

As we have already seen, the ogam alphabet that for so long has been supposed to be an exclusively Ancient Irish script was in fact well known in Norsemen countries as early as the Bronze Age. This fact accounts for the otherwise untranslatable ogam inscriptions that occur in the Western Plains and as far west at the valley of the Milk River in Alberta, Canada.

Here occur many petroglyphs cut in soft bedrock; they are obviously not more than a few centuries old at most. One such is shown in Fig. 124, where a supernatural figure is depicted holding aloft what appears to be a rake. Indeed, the archaeologists who have recorded these and similar inscriptions say just that. Now it so happens that the Ogam Tract written by the mediaeval Irish monks describes a special kind of ogam called by them ogam reic: literally "rake ogam." It is not known in Ireland as occurring in petroglyphs, nor indeed anywhere save in the manuscripts written by the monks. Thus the American petroglyphs are the first examples to be recognized as archaeological artifacts.

When Fell was first confronted with these examples he naturally expected the language contained in the ogam script to be people of ancient Ireland and related to Irish Gaelic. But the decipherment proved baffling, as no Ancient Irish words known to him matched the concatenation of consonants present in the rakes and in the associated finger ogam (also mentioned in the Irish texts).

After the presence of Norse inscriptions was made clear by the Peterborough [Ontario, Canada] texts, the solution of the mysterious rake ogam of the Milk River petroglyphs became evident. The letters are indeed ogam, but the language is Norse, allied to Old Norse <= Saharan?>. As can be seen from Fig. 124, the "rake" represents the hammer Mjolnir and the god depicted is Thunor, here rendered as ogam T-N-R.

As god of war the deity may be presumed to rule-over the art of using weapons, whether for battle or for hunting. Fig. 125 is an example of many similar petroglyphs, in this case written in Ancient Irish language, where hunting scenes are portrayed. it is from Site 77 near Canal Flats in British Columbia, discovered by John Corner. This is modern work, for the medium in which it is executed is paint, exposed to the atmosphere; another piece of evidence pointing to the long memory of the Amerindians. The artist was a member of the Takhelne tribe, with a spoken tongue of partly Ancient Irish derivation." Please also see Figs. 121 & 122.

Mabona and Freyr-- The Phallic Gods

King Woden-lithi seems to have devoted less space on his platform to the Wanir, gods of the earth, than to the other deities. Under the inscribed word W-R-Y-aR (Freyar) he has depicted a phallic god ... [eleven] feet west of the main sun figure. Beside Freyr is an up-ended ship, one of his symbols by Norse tradition, though the connection with male fertility is not immediately obvious. The hull of a ship is perhaps here regarded as a phallic symbol.

The interesting interconnection between Ancient Irish and Norsemen gods, already noted in Fig. 92, under Lug, is again evident in a petroglyph at Coral Gardens, near Moneta, Wyoming, photographed by Ted Sowers of the Wyoming Archaeological Survey. The Ancient Irish god Mabona is shown below his symbol, a giant phallus and beneath is written his name, in younger runes. Again we have evidence of a later contact between the ancient American migrants from Ireland and Norsemen of the period of Leif Eriksson.

Much more obvious attention is given to the worship of the power of the phallus as a fertilizer not only of women but of Mother Earth herself, in the shape of the great stone phallic monuments that the Ancient Irish and Norsemen peoples erected in Europe and that their American cousins placed at corresponding suitable sites in the New World. That these are, in some cases at least, Bronze Age monuments is evidenced by the presence of ogam and consain script, making reference to ancient pagan divinities and rituals. Figs. 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, & 137  illustrate typical examples in both Europe and America...." The inferred fertility rituals are discussed in America BC. [Please also see Figs. 126 & 127].

That Mabo was preferred by the youth of America to his Norsemen equivalent Freyar is made clear by the much larger number of inscriptions dedicated to the former, and usually written in Ancient Irish ogam of the type called fringe ogam (...Fig. 1). A telling piece of evidence is seen at Woden-lithi's site (Fig. 128), where the male fertility god is named in ogam as Mabo. And the reason for the preference of young for the Ancient Irish god of youth is his three spheres of activity-- sex, sports, and music-- all of primary interest to the youth of every country.

In this first aspect, that of god of male sexuality, the numerous stone phalluses and menhirs, erect or fallen, in both Europe and North America, bear silent witness. Figs. Fig. 129, Fig. 130 & Fig. 131, show three European examples in France and Spain, and North American examples appear in Figs. Fig. 132, Fig. 133, Fig. 134 & Fig. 135. Most of the American phalluses have fallen into a recumbent posture. Those on Phallus Hill, South Woodstock, Vermont, have since been transferred to the museum of Castleton State College in Vermont.

In New England, groups of phallic stones were erected on the summits of hills (Fig. 137). Whether these were used as calendar determination sites is not yet established.

In British Columbia and in the Nevada and Californian deserts, there occur inscriptions in ogam, in a Ancient Irish language, relating to matings and the marriage bond (Figs. 138 & 139).

In addition to the worship of Mabo as a fertility god, interest in the various games and athletic sports under the protection of Mabo, and brought by ancient colonists from Europe is manifest in various petroglyphs (Figs. 140, 141, 142 & 143). What may be the Ancient Irish ball game of camanachd seems to be depicted in some cases. Running and hurling the caber are other athletic subjects, and we know from historic contacts in the nineteenth century that the Takhelne tribe of British Columbia practiced a sport much resembling the Scottish caber-tossing. An inscription at Cane Springs, in Clark County, Nevada, recorded by Professors Robert Heizer and Martin Baumhof, carries fringe ogam (Fig. 143) that implies that the game depicted can scarcely be separated from baseball, the latter an invention attributed to New York State in modern times." [Please also see Figs.141 & 142].

The third aspect that Mabo assumes, as the Apollo of the Ancient Irish, is that of the god of music. This is succinctly referred to in a Takhelne pictograph (Fig. 144) discovered by John Corner near Robson, in British Columbia as his Site 65, where the god has the head of a lyre, while his outstretched arms make the letter m, and his erected phallus an ogam b, thus spelling his name.

The lyre-faced god appears in various inscriptions in Nevada (Figs. 145, 146 & 147), with remarkable fringe ogam inscriptions incorporated into the petroglyphs as rebus forms. The captions to the figures give details. Designs evidently influenced by these compositions enter into the art of the Navajo and Apache tribes, who entered the western territories as late in wanderers from eastern Siberia (their language still retains many recognizable Turkmenian roots). It seems likely that these late invaders dispossessed the Pueblo peoples and acquired many of their art forms, so that the Navajo and Apache today are regarded as the foremost exponents of Amerindian culture in North America. In the process they seem to have acquired the Mabo rebus and converted it into a new but similar style, expressing a wholly different tribal mythology from that of the Ancient Irish from whom these figures originated.

Dancing to music, the dancers holding stag's antlers, is an ancient Irish cultural feature, also reflected in the North American petroglyphs (Fig. 148).

Amerindian musicians possessed many different though simple types of musical instruments. But the petroglyphs depict a wider range than was found in recent times and, in addition to the lyre, we see various representations of the Ancient Irish harp, both the large and the smaller kinds. The associated ogam lettering, in a Gaelic language, is illustrated in Figs. 149 & 150, and the captions explain this. Competitive performances on these instruments may have been judged by priests (druids), ensconced in seats like the curious stone ones that occur in New England (see Fig. 151).

The conclusion we reach, then, is that Norsemen and Irish colonists in ancient time, even as early as Woden-lithi's epoch, came to North America and influence done another and the Amerindian neighbors they encountered, producing a rich culture with varied strands. The inability of the Norsemen people to establish bronze industrial sites in America led to the disappearance of the great trumpets, the lurs, but the various instruments manufactured from turtle shell and wood, such as the lyre and the harp, were capable of manufacture here, and so survived almost to modern times.

The Mother Goddess

The mother goddess is depicted by the Ancient Irish & Norsemen in America and their Amerindian descendants as a divine being with a celestial grace, whether she be shown as a young woman, or as an elderly grandmother figure. The Norsemen, on the other hand, depict the terrifying aspects of worship of the goddess, in which a priestess and elaborate ritual becomes her voice and announces mysterious instructions. The concept of a divine mother seems to be the most ancient religious belief, for the Paleolithic peoples left behind them images and paintings of pregnant females, apparently expressing the wonder and the importance of fertility to the maintenance of the band or tribe. Later, when the essential preliminary role of the male in fertilizing the female was understood, the religion seems to have changed toward a father-god orientation, and the divine couple bred numerous divine progeny, each of whom became responsible for one or another of the fundamental human activities and interests.

Fig. 152 shows one of the Milk River inscriptions at Writing-on-Stone, near Coutts, in Southern Alberta, where fringe ogam identifies the female figure as "Byanu, Mother of the Gods, Queen of the World," the language being Ancient Irish. Fig. 153, by way of contrast, from the same region, shows a Norsemen version of the goddess, seen in the guise of her priestess, as graceless and repulsive as the Irish version is attractive.

The megalithic symbols of the mother goddess in America are the same as she has in Europe-- the Men-a-tol or female stone, literally "stone-with-a-hole." Fig. 154 shows a men-a-tol at Land's End in Cornwall, England, and Fig. 155 a New England equivalent found and photographed by Hulley M. Swan at Jefferson, New Hampshire. The precise significance of these "holey-stones" in Europe has been debated. In modern times engaged or newly married couples exchange kisses through the aperture, and babies are passed through the hole to bring good luck. These may be ancient practices.

The sun, and his celestial manifestation as a sun god, was always appealed to for warmth, and rain to promote growth of crops. But so also was Byanu, the Ancient Irish mother goddess, as an inscription at Tule Lake, California, shows (Fig. 156). Wayne and Betty Struble photographed it. Other gods were also invoked. An inscribed stone placed in an ancient plantation in New York and found by John H. Bradner, invokes both Byanu and her divine son, Mabo. The Dakotas and Mandans invoked Thunor, in his later transformation into a rain god. Plowing was virtually impossible in North America, for lack of suitable draft animals. Thus we are perhaps to interpret Woden-lithi's inscriptions [at Peterborough, Ontario, Canada] of what appear to be plowmen (Fig. 157) as no more than a didactic reference to Scandinavian practices. A Danish version of an early Bronze Age plowman is shown in that same figure.

When the Ancient Irish & Norsemen traveled west and discovered the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, they established a sheep-farming industry based on stock running wild, but rounded up (on foot) once a year for shearing.... The product of this farming industry was, of course, raw wool. This, in turn, became the basis of a spinning and weaving industry, and the inscriptions in Nevada indicate that the mother goddess-- or a mother goddess-- was considered the tutelary deity of such activities. In the guise of a female that looks like the Irish Sulis, we find inscriptions in Nevada dedicated to some female divinity (Fig. 158 & Fig. 159.

The rocks of the Nevada plateau are rich in their petrographic commentary on the activities of these early farmers and wool-workers. At one site we find depictions of needles and thread, each labeled in fringe ogam with the names of the tools in old Gaelic. We find pictures of embroidery stitches. One ingenious petroglyph at Lost City, Clark County, Nevada, is in effect an advertisement for the wool industry, showing the production of cloth from the sheep's back by means of a looped wool thread, with pendant threads that spell ogam letters (Fig. 160). The various stages in converting the raw wool into yarn, then into a ball of yarn, including the carding, are all depicted (Fig. 161, Fig. 163, Fig. 164, Fig. 165 & Fig. 166). Setting up the warp on a frame is shown on Fig. 161, and a vertical loom of the type afterward used by the Navajo appears in petroglyphs at Valley of Fire, Nevada (Fig. 163). The various tools of the weaver, the battens, rods for weaving to cause the shed to alternate between throws of the shuttle, pegs, and loom combs (which replace the modern reed) all appear (Figs. 162, 164 & 165). And the final product, in this case a dress length, embroidered at the warp-ends (Fig. 166), is shown.

Other and equally important information comes from the burial goods deposited with the bodies of the dead at ancient burial places, such as those of the early Woodland Period investigated by members of the Archaeological Society of Tennessee at Snapps Bridge, Near Kingsport. Here we find actual pieces of equipment, such as loom weights, inscribed with appropriate words in ogam or Iberic, in the Iberian (noted as Celtimberian) or Basque languages, indicating the functions of the objects, which were evidently buried with their owners.... These latter finds came to notice through the observations of Dr. William P. Grigsby, who first noticed what he correctly inferred to be writing on some of the artifacts in his large collection.

Similar artifacts are found in Britain, as for example at the Windmill Hill site, occupied by the late Neolithic builders of Stonehenge. These have been recorded and well illustrated, and it is plain to see that inscriptions similar to those in North America occur, even the identical words. And similar inscriptions to those found on amulets in graves are also found inscribed on the stone chambers of New England. Thus, an invocation to the goddess Byanu, the mother-goddess....., occurs on a Windmill Hill amulet, and a similar text was reported in 1976 in America B.C. from a stone chamber dedicated to Byanu at South Woodstock, Vermont (also see Mystery).

On the ceiling of the same chamber at South Woodstock occurs a depiction of Byanu in her guise as Tanith, the mother goddess of the southern Iberians and of their Carthaginian neighbors (Fig. 168).

Near the same site John Williams and Barry Fell found in 1975 the torso of a fallen image of a female divinity, evidently Byanu, whose name appears in various local contexts (Fig. 167).

These examples illustrate the continuing and widespread influence of the concept of a mother goddess in North America just as in Europe.

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Allen. Derek 1978. An Introduction to Celtic Coins. British Museum Publ., London. 80 p.

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Vastokas, Joan M. 1984. Native and European Art in Ontario 5000 BC to 867 AD. Toronto, Canada, and Gallery of Ontario. 48 p.

Zoega's, Geir T. 1910. Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Oxford University Press

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