Page 421 - J. C. Turner - History and Science of Knots

The True Love Knot 415

Fig. 10. Tchokwe and Celtic Motives
The Polar Inuits have known the Diamond Knot, and thus implicitly
the Carrick Bend. This may imply that the Viking settlers, who colonised
Greenland around year A.D. 1000, knew it too. In 1910 Hjalmar Ohrvall studied
some Viking knots excavated at Mossle Jossagard in Sweden. He said one of
them was a 3-part Turk's Head [36]. All these facts together seem to indicate
that such complex knots as Turk's Heads were around at a very early date,
and similar patterns were known to many distinct peoples. It is therefore quite
well possible that one (or more) of these complex patterns may have been used
for a Betrothal Knot in Europe, perhaps even before any Roman entered the
scene. Who can tell?

Conclusions
It appears that there have been numerous distinct knots which were called
and used as a True Love Knot. It is pointless to inquire which one of them was
the real True Love Knot. As we have seen, the Reef Knot probably qualifies as
the original one for Southern Europe. At a later date other (more complicated)
knotted structures were used to symbolise the True Love concept. During
the medieval revival of the knot as mystic love symbol, the True Love Knot
found fertile grounds in the hands of poets. Finally the commercialisation
of the True Love Knot phenomenon in the Valentine tradition seems to have