Who is Manannan?

quick Google:

Shoney, or Shony, is mentioned in Alexander Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica.

Shoney is Seónaidh in Gaelic, a corruption of the name John. St John the Baptist is associated with the Scottish St Banann, a saint of the sea who may originally have been Mananann, so Shony may relate to Mananann in a convoluted way.

Just before Easter, men in various parts of Scotland would make offerings to Shony (who was called 'O god of the sea' in one of Carmichael's songs), to ensure a good crop of seaweed for the future. There was a very formal ritual involved, usually, and one example describes how one man would wade into the sea to give the porridge or beer whilst addressing Shony with an 'incantation'. The men would all then go to church to stand in silence around a candle, before going off to the fields to basically get drunk...

source

and the ever dodgy wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seonaidh

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so according to them, "Shoney" is St John (The Baptist), who spent time standing in rivers and ponds. Strange association (Saint>sea god) but who knows?

Might I suggest that Dylan is the obvious candidate for a Brythonic sea god? His name means '[that which goes] to the shore, the wave's son', probably from British *Diglannos or summat similar.

Thanks Teg

The few stories I have heard associated with the name include things like the above mention of offerings to Shony and stories where he is a sea god in the waters around the highlands and islands and down to include the Firth of Clyde.

Thinking in terms of healing and water maybe there is more to this than at first appears. The above gives a link of St John to the sea and there is the well known st John's wort linking him to healing. Is it possible that St John has taken on associations in this land of a god linked to healing and water.....Nodens? St John is also closely associated with midsummer - one of his feast days. And I believe early baptism was a full dunking in a large body of water. So perhaps not so strange that St John the Baptist might be linked to a god with associations of healing and the sea.

In the sense that the Lydney impedimenta have marine associations? (He could also be the god of the severn bore, by the way:

tasciomaglos to marcodubnos, c. 400AD:

'Ah, zee 'ere, Tasc me old mate, there goes the bore on the river severn.'
'Ah yes, that be Nodons driving 'is horses back from the open sea up to his there temple. The foam o' the wave be the flecks of spittle a-falling from the 'orses' mouths as they 'urries back to their stable yonder.'

Going down the saint route, we'd also need to look at St. Michael and his associations with places that stick up out of the water.

Yes it does: 'Divine Lord of the Uproar (twrf, from latin 'turba', 'crowd') of the Flood/Sea'
Ifor Williams suggested a link to the severn bore: Teyrnon in pwyll is located in a more or less appropriate place.

Don't forget Dylan

We can't really say. As is maddeningly the case very frequently with celtic things, it's all wonderfully suggestive and yet insubstantial.

The trouble is there are lots of different things here:

1) personal spiritual feeling (as preferred, quite reasonably, by Craig et al.)
2) 'folk' tales and local lore, which are often by their nature undatable and untraceable
3) medieval welsh literature, most of it written down well into the second millenium and having a very obscure relationship to
4) Romano-British religion as revealed by inscriptions, archaeology and material culture

with more distant resources such as

5) irish medieval literature, and
6) continental Celtic religion, as revealed by inscriptions, archaeology and material culture, and
7) classical accounts of Celtic-speaking peoples.

My suggestion is that we are likely to drift off into the realm of the pointless when we compare unalike things. So Irish medieval literature can be compared, perfectly reasonably, to welsh medieval literature. Similarly, Gallo-Roman and Romano-British archaeological finds are reasonable to compare. comparing medieval lit to folk tales is reasonable, as both Wales and Ireland have had an exceptionally vigourous folk-tradition with longstanding roots in a distinct culture, although this needs to be done cautiously.

Conversely, comparing unlike things is likely to be pointless: my UPG about Wittenham Clumps and the the Coligny calendar is unlikely to be of much value, nor is comparing a dubious modern English retelling of a Scottish Gaelic folk-tale to a Romano-British inscription or Pomponius Mela talking about the druids.

These resources all have their place, but their value shifts in a relativistic way each to the other. I've noticed we often have free-association sessions on CF, which are great and very fruitful, but my worry is that what we actually do sometimes is generate slightly random ideas that then take on a kind of life of their own, and thus become a kind of subconscious 'evidence' in their own right and spark off new free-assocation chains.