Nehalennia is a pre-Christian goddess, invoked to protect sailors on perilous voyages. Several linguists have tried to explain her name. According to the most recent theory, the tracks are in Welsh. Nehalennia can be traced back to 'she who is by the sea' via Celtic.
Two thousand years ago, people in Zeeland worshiped a goddess named Nehalennia. At that time, Zeeland did not yet consist of several islands, but was one large peat swamp that was protected from the sea by high dunes. This goddess is perhaps the most famous deity of our pre-Christian past. Where names like Wodan and Donar don't mean much to most people, almost everyone has heard of Nehalennia.
Roman Age
Nehalennia is known to us for dozens of altar stones and votive statues (statues made to idolize an often mythical person) that have been fished from the Oosterschelde in recent centuries. The altar stones date from Roman times and the votive inscriptions on these stones are written in Latin. Her name, on the other hand, is clearly not Latin and must therefore have been indigenous.
We can infer from the inscriptions that merchants and salt merchants invoked Nehelennia to protect sailors and cargo during perilous voyages. Other than that, all we know about this mysterious woman is her enigmatic name that has long defied any linguistic explanation.
Yet linguistic research of the last twenty years has lifted an important corner of the veil. And that while the etymologies that the benevolent layman finds via Wikipedia, are quite dated. A great opportunity to counter scientifically.
Germanic or Celtic
A fundamental question in this matter is whether the name Nehalennia is of Germanic origin and thus belongs to the ancestral stage of Dutch or is of Celtic origin. In the latter case, it may have originated from the Gallic dialect that the inhabitants of the southern Netherlands spoke in Antiquity.
To determine this, one has to find word elements in the name that can be connected with Germanic or with Celtic language material. These can be nouns or grammatical suffixes. For example, the goddess name Hludana found in Roman votive inscriptions from the Rhineland allows us to make the etymological link with the Old Germanic word *hluda– 'glory' (compare Dutch loud). For this name we also have an Old Norse goddess name from the Edda (collection of songs from medieval Iceland), namely Hlóðynn, which we can associate with it.
The name Nehalennia, on the other hand, leaves us in more uncertain waters and most of the proposals made for such connections are complicated and poorly founded. Such as the proposal of Gutenbrunner (1936) who saw a relationship with Old Germanic *nehwa which means 'near' and is in us 'na' and 'approach'. But we cannot explain the whole word with this.
Another etymological proposal, from after the war, came from the Flemish onomastic Maurits Gysseling, the author of the monumental place name dictionary from 1960. He proposed that in the case of Nehalennia we are dealing with a prehistoric name base that is neither Germanic nor is celtic. According to him, however, it went back to Indo-European, the linguistic ancestor of both. The basis of the name would then be the Indo-European root *neiH- which means 'to feed, to lead'. But as with Gutenbrunner's proposal, it is difficult to get to the form Nehalennia from this root.
Late Celtic reconstruction
A more recent and more plausible theory comes from Bernardo de Stempel from 2004. She states that Nehalennia is strongly connected to the sea and that it is therefore possible that her name reflects this fact. In addition, the name Nehalennia always occurs as an addition to a preceding dea, the Latin word for goddess. It is therefore plausible that Nehalennia as an additional explanation to dea acts and tells about the kind of goddess we are dealing with with this. This suspicion is reinforced by a number of inscriptions where the name appears in the plural, namely deae nehalenniae .
Bernardo de Stempel mainly finds traces in Welsh, with words like halein 'salt' and heli 'sea'. These words allow for a Late Celtic reconstruction *halen– meaning 'sea' which together with a prefix *ne- (meaning 'on' and 'at') would form the basis for the name Nehalennia. The word formation is then structured as follows; first the prefix *ne- (=op), then the middle part *-halen- (=sea) and finally the suffix *-ja which makes feminine derivations; taken together, the name would then mean 'she who is by the sea'.
Tacitus' Helinium
In the Dutch coastal area we may find several names that are derived from a Late Celtic form *halen-. According to Tacitus, De Maasmond was called Helinium in Roman times in which the Celtic *halen– can be clearly recognized. This Helinium can probably also be found in the later element helle in Hellevoetsluis and we also find him in several places in North Holland and Friesland where the word hel and hell refers to salt marshes in the tidal area.
While much, if not most, of the cult of Nehalennia remains unknown, at least one important fact about this goddess seems to have surfaced. This is a Celtic goddess who was worshiped on the Celtic-speaking coast of the Netherlands and Belgium in Roman times.