Veleda

( ) Veleda ( ) was a seeress of the Bructeri, a Germanic people who achieved some prominence during the Batavian rebellion of AD 69–70, headed by the Romanized Batavian chieftain Gaius Julius Civilis, when she correctly predicted the initial successes of the rebels against Roman legions.

( ) Veleda ( ) was a seeress of the Bructeri, a Germanic people who achieved some prominence during the Batavian rebellion of AD 69–70, headed by the Romanized Batavian chieftain Gaius Julius Civilis, when she correctly predicted the initial successes of the rebels against Roman legions.

Life

The ancient Germanic peoples discerned a divinity of prophecy in women and regarded prophetesses as true and living goddesses. In the latter half of the 1st century AD Veleda was regarded as a deity by most of the tribes in central Germany and enjoyed wide influence. She lived in a tower near the Lippe River, a tributary of the Rhine. The inhabitants of the Roman settlement of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (now Cologne) accepted her arbitration in a conflict with the Tencteri, an unfederated tribe of Germany (i.e., one outside the boundary of the Roman Empire). In her role as arbitrator, the envoys were not admitted to her presence; an interpreter conveyed their messages to her and reported her pronouncements.

Legacy

In her 1795 novel Velleda, ein Zauberroman (Velleda, a Magic Novel), Benedikte Naubert conflated the lives of two contemporaries, Boudica and Veleda, whom she romanticized as Boadicea and Velleda. In Naubert's work, Velleda is portrayed as a sorceress who offers Boadicea's daughters access to immortality in the magical world of Germanic goddesses, while Boadicea draws her daughters back to the real world. A large extract from Naubert's novel appeared in Shawn C. Jarvis and Jeannine Blackwell's The Queen's Mirror, as did Amalie von Helwig's 1814 story "Die Symbole" (The Symbols), in which she was called Welleda. The forms "Velleda" and "Welleda" appear to be attempts to render the name in modern German (much as Richard Wagner rendered Odin or Wōden as Wotan in his Ring cycle). Other 19th-century works incorporating Veleda/Velleda/Welleda included Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué's 1818 novel, Welleda und Gemma; Eduard Sobolewski's 1835 opera Velleda; E.H. Maindron's 1843–44 marble sculpture Velleda; Franz Sigret's drawing Veleda, Prophetess of the Bructeri, and Paul Dukas' cantata Velléda. More recently, Veleda's story was fictionalized by Poul Anderson in Star of the Sea (1991), and by Lindsey Davis in The Iron Hand of Mars (1992) and Saturnalia (2007). Veleda is also referenced as a prophetess turned saint/goddess in The Veil of Years (2001) by L. Warren Douglas. She is also a character in The Dragon Lord (1979), by David Drake. On November 5, 1872, Paul Henry of Paris discovered an asteroid which was named 126 Velleda in honor of Veleda. The book series Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams features a mysterious and powerful seeress named Valada Geloë, likely inspired by Veleda.

See also

Germanic paganism Weleda

References

Bibliography

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1370497685 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.