Page 410 - J. C. Turner - History and Science of Knots

404 History and Science of Knots

promise to marry, and would be called engagement nowadays. How old this
ritual is, can best be seen from the fact that the name was not only used over
the entire region we call Scandinavia, but also in Britain where it survived
as a remnant from the Danish invasion times until way past the 16th century
[30]. In the sixteenth century trulofa was still a customary expression for `to
become engaged', which has become true-love via some popular etymology.
The English Dictionary assigns the earliest occurrence of the word true-love
to the 9th century Cynewulf:

Woes seo treow lufu, hat at heortum.

It shows that true-love, the concept and the word, is ancient; but not neces-
sarily related to knots some 1000 years ago.
In the Northern parts of Europe attempts by the Roman Catholic church
to introduce their engagement customs met with protest. This is described by
Troels-Lund [30], thus:

In Scandinavia attempts by the medieval Roman Catholic church to
introduce the exchange of engagement rings, an originally Mediter-
ranean tradition, met with two kinds of resistance. First of all, we
Scandinavians were not willing to let engagement rings take the
place of the engagement dowries, even in our churches. Secondly,
we had become accustomed to symbolising the relationship between
man and woman by different means. Among all gothogermanic
peoples, faithfullness in love had been symbolised since times im-
memorial by either a knot which was tied by both parties (from
which came the English true-love knot), or by the breaking of a
gold coin into two halves after which each party kept one half.

The first of these traditions is acknowledged by John Brand in Observations
on the popular antiquities of Great Britain [6]:

A knot among the ancient northern nations seems to have been
the symbol of love, faith and friendship, pointing out the indissolu-
ble tie of affection and duty. Thus the ancient Runic inscriptions,
as we gather from Hicke's Thesaurus, are in the form of a knot.
Hence among the northern English and Scots, who still retain, in
a great measure, the language and manners of the ancient Danes,
that curious kind of a knot, a mutual present between lover and his
mistress, which, being considered as the emblem of plighted fidelity,
is therefore called a true-love knot: a name which is not derived,
as one would naturally suppose it to be, from the words `true' and