the word in its Gaulish form to have had a right to it, Ēsus may be taken as a more correct spelling. This is proved by one of the inscriptions on an altar dug up at Nôtre-Dame in Paris, where we have nouns of the second declension written with o, such as tarvos, 'bull,' and Cernunnos, the name of another Gaulish god, while the one which here concerns us duly appears as Esus of the U declension. The fact strongly corroborates the view of Pictet and others who connect Esus with the Sanskrit asu-s, 'the breath of life, life both as a force and as a condition;' Zend aṅhu-s, 'a lord or master, also world and place generally,' aṅhva, 'one's own self or individual existence, the soul;' Old Norse áss, genitive ásar, plural æsir, 'gods generally, but more especially the older group of Norse divinities,' to which may be added the Anglo-Saxon genitive plural ésa, 'of gods.'
This identification is of great interest, and I venture to mention one or two particulars of a nature to confirm it: the Norse word points to an original nominative ansu-s, the former existence of which is countenanced by Jordanis' allusion to the title of Ansis,[1] which the Goths gave to the deified heroes of their race. On the other hand, Sanskrit and Zend give evidence only to a weakened form, asu-s, and it is with this rather than with ansu-s that Esus seems to go, in so far as concerns its phonology. For the Celtic languages, not unfrequently setting out with the combination es, corresponding to as in Sanskrit, modified it by eliding the sibilant and making the vowel into i, which in Welsh mostly represents a vowel etymologically long: the stages would seem to be ĕs, ez, īz, ī, i, as in the Irish siur or
- ↑ Jordanis de Origine Actibusque Getarum (ed. Holder), cap. 13, p. 18.
