Page 420 - J. C. Turner - History and Science of Knots

414 History and Science of Knots

most likely was the Reef Knot, could have been made more decorative by
interweaving the parts , so as to give a Carrick Bend. Further interweaving
would lead to more complicated structures such as Turk 's Heads.
Ohrvall set out trying to find evidence supporting his conjecture that the
Turk's Head had been used as a Betrothal Knot in Sweden . After a literary
search he found that the Swedish name had been used to denote a symbol of
love and friendship . In a work of 1825 by Torneros one can read [36]:

On the loose sands of word friendship rests,
which stretches out of days and late times
although silent it speaks of faithfulness
our 'valknut-bond' goes over mountain and valley.

It is obvious that here is mention of the knot being used in a symbolic
sense. Ohrvall also found that Sparre, in his 1847 novel Standaret, used the
word valknut in the sense of Love Knot [36].
Two things are worth noting. First of all it is remarkable that the Swedes
chose to use a customary knot name, i.e. Valknut, to actually identify a
concept like the True Love Knot. I have been unable to trace anything similar
in Denmark or elsewhere.
The second thing on which I wish to say a few words, are the relationships
between the Carrick Bend, Wale Knot and Turk's Head. The first of the note-
worthy links is that in Scandinavia the Carrick Bend has an ancient Icelandic
connection. The Viking descendant fishermen of the Vestmanna archipelago,
which is situated off the southwest coast of Iceland, traditionally have made
extensive use of the Carrick Bend to connect the segments of their gillnets [17].
In the Scandinavian knotting literature the Carrick Bend goes by the name
Gronland Stik. This is due to its frequent use in the Greenlandic gillnetting
fishery since 1500 onwards.
The second link is that the Carrick Bend relates to the Turk's Head and
vice versa. The Carrick Bend forms a basis for knots like the Doubled Diamond
Knot and the Footrope Knot [1 , #695, #697]. These knots strongly resemble
the four-stranded Wale Knot, which in turn conceals a Turk 's Head pattern.
The Wale Knot name has been applied indiscriminately to many of the Wall
and Crown derivatives [1, #845].
Furthermore, there are distinct peoples, widely separated geographically
and in time, such as the Bushoong and Tchokwe people in Central Africa, who
draw fascinatingly complex planar graphs in the desert sand which more than
superficially resemble braid diagrams (Fig. 10a). Closer to Europe the Celts
have produced similar curves (Fig. 10b); admittedly not in desert sand.