Tanfana or Tamfana was a goddess of the Istvaeones in ancient Germanic paganism, the destruction of whose temple in the territory of the Marsi is mentioned in Tacitus' Annals.
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In Annals Book 1, chapter 51, Tacitus records a massacre of people of the Cherusci, Chatti and Marsi and total destruction of the celeberrimum illis gentibus templum quod Tamfanæ vocabunt ("the temple . . . of Tamfana, as they called it, the special resort of all those tribes").[1] The previous chapter states that the location was in the territory of the Marsi.
There is no undisputed testimony of this goddess besides the passage in Tacitus. An inscription Tamfanae sacrum was found in Terni, but is considered a falsification by Pyrrhus Ligorius.[2] She is also mentioned, as Zamfana, in the supposed Old High German lullaby, which was accepted by Jacob Grimm[3] but is now also considered a forgery.
Since fana is Latin for "temples," it has been suggested that it was a temple to a god Tan, shortened from the German word for a pine-tree, Tanne, or that the first element meant "collective."[4][5] The division of the word was rejected by Grimm among others;[6] he called the name "certainly German," the -ana ending being also found in Hludana, Bertana, Rapana, and Madana.[2][7]
The passage is one of few to contradict Tacitus' own statement in Germania that the Germanic tribes did not have temples.[8][9] Wilhelm Engelbert Giefers proposed that Tanfana derived from tanfo, cognate with Latin truncus, and referred to a grove on the site of the Eresburg, related to the Irminsul.[10]
Many suggestions have been made about the goddess' name and nature. Grimm was unable to interpret it, but suggested variously that it was connected to Stempe, a name of Berchte,[7][11] that she was named for an association with a sieve,[12] and, based on the now discredited lullaby, that her name meant "bountiful, merciful."[13] Based on folklore and toponymy, Friedrich Woeste proposed that the name was cognate with German zimmern and meant "builder" or "nourisher";[14] based on the season at which the festival and the Roman attack took place, Karl Müllenhoff proposed she was a goddess of harvest plenty, properly *Tabana, cognate with Greek words for "expenditure" and (hypothetically) "unthrifty"; others added Icelandic and Norwegian words for "fullness, swelling," "to stuff," and "large meal."[15] A. G. de Bruyn, a scholar of Oldenzaal folklore, returned to splitting the name into Tan and fana on toponymic grounds and because of a stamp dated 1336 found near Ommen that shows a woman holding a fir tree flanked by a sun symbol and a catlike creature and a bird; he proposed that she was a moon or a mother goddess, perhaps related to the Carthaginian goddess Tanit.[16] He and more recently Rudi Klijnstra relate Tanfana, or Tan, to legends surrounding de Groote Steen te Oldenzaal (the Big Stone at Oldenzaal) in the area of Overijssel; the stone was originally located on a hill called Tankenberg, the highest point in the area, but was later moved into the city.[16][17]