Mars Thingsus

One of the oldest surviving traces of his worship is not Norse at all. A stone altar from Housesteads on Hadrian's Wall carries a Latin dedication to Mars Thingsus, set up by Frisian soldiers serving in Roman Britain in the third century. Roman practice regularly identified foreign deities with Roman ones, and Mars is the name reached for here; Thingsus is generally read as relating to the thing, the Germanic legal assembly. If that reading holds, this god was tied to law and the assembly as much as to battle — a role the Norse poems, written a thousand years later and far to the north, no longer show.