Celtic wedding rings: what the knotwork means

What does a Celtic knot mean on a wedding ring?

Today it is read as a love with no beginning and no end. Most Celtic knots are endless knots: follow the line and it passes over and under itself and comes back to where it started without a break. Put that around a finger and the meaning more or less writes itself.

That reading is a modern one rather than a recorded one. The monks who drew knotwork into gospel books left no note of what it meant to them. Even for the trinity knot, the best studied of these designs, the original intention of the early medieval artists is unknown. None of that makes the modern meaning less real: a wedding ring means what the two people wearing it agree it means.

Celtic wedding rings: Knotwork, ogham and the claddagh in titanium, black and colour.

Where does Celtic knotwork come from?

Not quite where the name suggests. Interlaced patterns first appear in Roman floor mosaics of the third and fourth centuries. The art of the Celts before Christianity reached them ran to spirals, steps and key patterns rather than knots. True knotwork began in northern Italy and southern Gaul and reached Ireland by the seventh century.

There it flourished. The earliest knots drawn in the Celtic manner are in a seventh century gospel fragment now at Durham Cathedral Library. The same style fills the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. Irish and Northumbrian monks carried it back to the continent. So a Celtic ring belongs as much to Northumbria as to Ireland, Scotland or Wales: it is the knotwork of the British Isles.

What is the trinity knot?

Three interlaced arcs making a rounded triangle, properly called a triquetra. It is the simplest knot there is. It turns up in Insular metalwork, in the Book of Kells and on eleventh century Swedish runestones, so it was never only Irish.

Its reading as the Holy Trinity dates largely from the Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century; one of the earliest references is from 1845. Many couples now choose it as a symbol of faith and many simply for its shape. Some read the three points as the two of you and the marriage between you. Any of those is a good enough reason.

What is an ogham ring?

A ring written in ogham, the early medieval alphabet of the Irish language. Each letter is a group of one to five strokes across a central line, which is why it suits a band so well: the whole ring reads as a pattern until you know it says something. Around 400 ogham stones survive, the oldest from about the fourth century. Most are in Ireland, with the largest number outside it in Wales and others in Cornwall, Devon, the Isle of Man and Scotland.

You will often see each ogham letter given a tree. That idea comes from medieval manuscripts written centuries after the stones were cut. Scholars accept at most eight of the twenty letter names as trees. If you choose an ogham ring, choose it for the words it carries rather than a tree for every letter. Our ogham ring can carry a name or a word of your own.

Ogham, titanium: Ancient Irish script cut as lines across a satin band.

Is a claddagh ring a Celtic ring?

It is Irish rather than Celtic in the sense of the knotwork. The claddagh, two hands holding a crowned heart, comes from a fishing village beside Galway. Its modern form dates from the seventeenth century. Many claddagh rings, ours included, set the motif between runs of knotwork, so the two traditions often meet on one band.

Which way the heart points carries its own meaning. It is worth knowing before you put one on.

The claddagh ring: What the hands, heart and crown mean and how to wear it.

How do you choose a Celtic wedding ring?

Start with how much contrast you want. Knotwork cut into black zirconium reads as matte black on black until the light catches it, the quietest choice. Anodised, the cut is coloured and the rest of the band stays bright, so the knot is drawn in colour. The broadest, 10mm, runs its knot between two inlaid lines of solid 9ct gold, in yellow, rose or white. Each ring carries its own design, so look closely at the photographs: they are not one knot in four metals.

Then think about width. Knotwork needs room to read, which is why the gold line ring is made only at 10mm. On a narrower band the knot is finer, so try the width on screen before you choose. A couple can wear two different Celtic rings, one light and one dark, or the same ring in two widths.

Band width guide: See 4mm to 10mm at true size before you choose.

Do wedding rings have to match?: How couples pair rings without making them identical.

Can a Celtic ring be resized or engraved?

Engraved, yes: inside the band, free, on every ring whose page offers it, so the knot on the outside can carry a date or a name on the inside. Resized, not in the usual way. Titanium and zirconium are not stretched or cut and soldered like gold. Cutting through knotwork would break the pattern anyway, so the size is settled before the ring is made. The free ring size finder takes about two minutes.

Why some rings cannot be resized: Which metals can be resized and what happens instead.

Ring size finder: Measure your size at home in about two minutes.