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Gobannus


Gobannus (or Gobannos, the Gaulish form) was a Gallo-Roman god, whose name, denoting "the smith", is normally taken to identify him as patron of smiths.

A number of statues dedicated to him are preserved, found together with a bronze cauldron dedicated to Deus Cobannos, in the late 1980s and illegally exported to the USA, now in the Getty Museum in the Getty Center, in California. He is mentioned in an inscription found in the 1970s in Fontenay-près-Vézelay, reading AVG(VSTO) SAC(RVM) [DE]O COBANNO, i.e. dedicated to Augustus and Deus Cobannus.

The name is from a Proto-Celtic stem, *goban- 'smith' and can be compared with the Old Irish gobae ~ gobannsmith,’ Middle Welsh gof ~ gofeinsmith,’ Gallic gobedbi ‘with the smiths,’ Latin fabersmith’ and with the Lithuanian gabija ‘sacred home fire’ and Lithuanian gabus ‘gifted, clever’. The theonym may be an antecedent of Old Irish Goibniu and Middle Welsh Gofannon. In Modern Irish "smith" is gabha, and in Modern Welsh it is gof. Abergavenny, in what is now south east Wales was the site of a Roman fort and settlement called Gobannium.


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