Nerthus is the best-described deity of early Continental Germanic religion, known from chapter 40 of Tacitus's Germania (c. 98 CE). A group of seven tribes worshipped her in common in a grove on an island of the Ocean, generally located in the Jutland–Schleswig region. Her cult image stood in a covered wagon that no one but her priest could touch; when the priest sensed her presence, cattle drew the wagon among the peoples, and wherever it went there was festival and a sacred truce in which iron was put away and no war waged. Afterward the wagon, its cloth and the goddess were washed in a secret lake, and the slaves who performed the washing were drowned. Her name (*Nerþuz) is the formal etymological ancestor of the Old Norse god Njǫrðr, a gender shift that has generated extensive scholarly discussion about the relationship between the Continental goddess and the later Scandinavian deity.