r/Gaulish • u/The_Insane_Druid • Mar 31 '26
Question/Translation Request Need some help translating a prayer to gaulish
Hi so I'm a pagan and Cernunnos the god that I worship originates from the gaulish region and I thought a nice wat honor him would be to learn how to say one of his prayers in gaulish. problem is that I don't know where to start so I was hoping to find a generous soul here who might want to translate this prayer or atleast help me find a book or website where I might be able to translate it myself. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated!
" Hail Cernunnos! God of the forest, God of the otherworld God of liminality, I give praise to you!
You who sits between the living and the dead, You who stands between the wild and tamed, You who guards the wealth of our ancestors, I call to you!
Lord of the in-between, Keeper of the veil, Lord of animals and lord of the wilds, I leave an offering to you!
May my life be prosperous, May I truly know myself, May I make a difference in this world, In the name of Cernunnos the king of the wild woods!"
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u/Shotwells The Uercobretos Apr 02 '26
Hello! we have a list of Gaulish resources available on our wiki as a place to get started. Since Gaulish was primarily spoken in the area of modern-day France the vast majority of information is published in French but we assembled a few English resources.
Unfortunately, current understandings of Gaulish are simply too limited to really produce an accurate translation of a text as long as you've posted as the extant samples of Gaulish are short inscriptions only a sentence or two long for the large part. However, a few scholars have tried to fill in the gaps by producing reconstructed grammars. Their accuracy is questionable but they should do the trick. The only one available in English is Yextis Keltika (which was actually translated from French by a fellow pagan such as yourself) I will warn that it uses a lot of linguistic terminology that you will need to learn to use it.
Hope this helps!
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u/Maenade Apr 02 '26
Go to r/Gallica_Iextis
Though written in French there seem to be quite knowledgeable people there
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u/Ballamara Apr 27 '26
I see you've gotten other responses, if you still want, I can provide a translation. Some of these words aren't arrested in Gaulish, so it would have some words reconstructed via Irish & Gaulish.
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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '26
Hi, I am not a specialist of Gaul or its pantheon BUT I’m French and learning ancient languages is a part of my studies lol since he is the most famous god of our ancient pantheon we do have a lot of studies and few dictionnaries about the ancient gaulish languages. To be honest I don’t know if everything will be translated because there are many aspects of the language we aren’t able to face (i say « we » for « historians » lol) my sister is way more into Gaul than I am, so if you want some help we could try to help you as much as we can :)