Something weird happened to a lot of Valthungian nouns and adjectives starting around 600ᴀᴅ. (Well, at this time they weren’t so much Valthungian as maybe late Griutungi or pre-Old Valthungian.) Nouns and adjectives ending in voiced stops (that is, B, D, and G) went through some linguistic gymnastics, beginning with a series of voicing changes. Final ‑b(s) and ‑d(s) became ‑b(z) and ‑d(z), and eventually devoiced again to ‑f(s) and ‑þ(s), respectively. (E.g. halbs ‘half’ → halbz → halfs → haufs; bards ‘beard’ → bardz → barþs → braþs.) Final ‑gs, however, voiced to ‑gz, but didn’t devoice to **‑hs. This resulted in an awkward voiced ending that would eventually become /ʥ/ (e.g. dags ‘day’ → dagz → dagž → daǧ).
This unaesthetic combination caused an avoidance of that particular combination in many words, especially in adjectives ending with the Germanic *‑Vgaz ending (cognate to English ‑y, German ‑ig, and Latin ‑icus), and it became common to replace this ending with its Latin counterpart, ‑icus (→ ‑ikus, e.g. maht-īgs ‘powerful’ → meaht-ikus → mǣtikus), or to convert it to a “long j-stem,” resulting in ‑agis or ‑ugis (e.g. manags ‘many’ → managis ‘crowded’ or grēdags ‘hungry’ → grēðugis).
By the way, something similar may have happened around late Middle English in verbs ending in -ȝen, whereby a number of very cromulent Old English verbs (stīgan, migan, hnigan, sigan, wigan) vanished from the language, leaving only stray archaic fragments like stile and sie.
In any case, some nouns and adjectives did their own weird things, like borrowing Latin ‑alis (e.g. unags ‘fearless’ → unagalis) or, in the case of today’s word, Latin ‑ceus.
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