Ingui
The name
Ingui is the Anglo Saxon variant of the continental Germanic
Yngvi.
Ingui is one of the few Heathen gods mentioned by name in Anglo Saxon poetic records. A strophe of the Anglo Saxon Rune Poem (circa 1100) records that:
- Ing was first among the East Danes seen by men
and this may refer to the origins of the
worship of Ingui in the tribal areas that
Tacitus mentions in
Germania as being populated by the Inguieonnic tribes. A later Danish chronicler lists Ingui was one of three brothers that the Danish tribes descended from. The strophe also states that "then he (Ingui) went back over the waves, his wagon behind him" which could connect Ingui to earlier conceptions of the wagon processions of Nerthus, and the later
Scandinavian conceptions of
Frey's wagon journeys. Ingui is mentioned also in some later Anglo-Saxon literature under varying forms of his name, such as "For what doth Ingeld have to do with Christ", and the variants used in
Beowulf to designate the kings as 'leader of the friends of Ing'. The compound Ingui-Frea (OE) and Yngvi-Freyr (ON) likely refer to the connection between the God and the cult of sacral kings on the continent and in England in the pagan period, as 'Frea' and Frey' are titles meaning 'Lord'.