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In Celtic mythology, Abnoba was a forest and river goddess, worshipped in the Black Forest and surrounding areas. An altar at the Roman baths at Badenweiler, Germany, equates her with Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt.
According to Tacitus's Germania, Abnoba also was the name of a mountain, from a grassy slope of which flows the source of the River Danube. Ptolemy's Geography (2.10) also mentions the mountain as the source of the Danube. The surrounding range, in Ptolemy, is the Abnobaia ora (the nominative case, given here, is not in Ptolemy), Latinized to Abnobaei montes.
Pliny the Elder also gives us some statements about Abnoba (Natural History, 4.79). He says that it arises opposite the town of Rauricum in Gaul and flows from there beyond the Alps, implying that the river begins in the Alps, which it does not. If Rauricum is to be identified with the Roman settlement, Augusta Raurica, modern Augst in Basel-Landschaft canton of Switzerland, Pliny must be confusing the Rhine and its tributaries with the Danube.
The Danube begins with two small rivers draining the Black Forest: the Breg and the Brigach, both Celtic names. The longest is the most favorable candidate: the Breg. The Abnobaei montes would therefore be the Baar foothills of the Swabian Alb near Furtwangen im Schwarzwald.
Etymology
The two main etymologies of the word segment it as either Ab-noba or Abn-oba. The first is the strongest. Contemporary compilation of etymological lexica at the universities of Leiden and Wales (proto-linguistics of Celtic words. These lexica suggest that this name is derived from Proto-Celtic *Ab[o" target="_blank" >*-nōb-ā .
Proto-Celtic *-nōb- is in turn derived from Proto-Indo-European *nebh-. One meaning is wetness . The first segment would be from *ab-, water, as in Old Irish ab, from *aba, flow. One interpretation would be river-wetness which possibly paraphrases the concept of fluvial moisture . In keeping with the conventions of proto-linguistics, the preceding asterisk * denotes an unattested, reconstructed form.
On the other hand, it seems somewhat redundant to call a river wet. Redundance is common in river names, but usually in names renamed in a different language. The geography of the Breg river suggests another interpretation. The root, *nebh-, can mean wet, but more often it means fog, cloud, mist. Some photographs of Furtwangen indicate that the valley of the Breg is sometimes so filled with a ground fog that you can only see the tops of the buildings. Abnoba therefore would mean misty stream with the implication of upland stream.
The other segmentation relies heavily on Celtic Avon type names, such as the Abona, a river of Gaul. This *ab- is the same as the one above, but the -n- seems to add connotations of a river-daemon. If this is the form of Abnoba, then the -oba remains unexplained. It is possible that the two different Abnobas do not have the same derivation, and further, that the people who used the names confused them together.
Bibliography
- Ellis, Peter Berresford, Dictionary of Celtic Mythology(Oxford Paperback Reference), Oxford University Press, (1994): ISBN 0195089618
- Wood, Juliette, The Celts: Life, Myth, and Art, Thorsons Publishers (2002): ISBN 0007640595
External links
Ancient Gaulish and British goddesses | Nature goddessesSea and river goddesses
"Abnoba"