Your relationship is beautiful and unique, and you can find a stunning Celtic wedding ring that symbolizes that. If a plain gold band doesn’t speak to you, you have many other options featuring designs that reflect how you feel about each other. It can be gold, silver or even a combination of both. Your ring can say more than ‘I’m married’. It can declare the depth of your commitment or the foundations of your love with an ancient Irish motif. After you’ve popped The Question, one of the next questions is which wedding ring is right for you? Here’s an overview of some of your choices.Each motif comes in a huge variety of options from simple and elegant to extravagant.
Fisherman who was abducted into servitude with a goldsmith. He became a master goldsmith himself and designed a ring for the woman he loved in his home village of the Claddagh. It featured a heart to represent love cradled in two hands symbolizing friendship with a crown above it to stand for loyalty. When he returned home after being freed, he presented the ring to his beloved and they wed. He set up a studio in Galway and began making rings. Local people began using them as wedding bands and friendship rings, and soon the Claddagh ring spread around Ireland and then the world. It’s now a popular motif for Irish gifts as well as wedding rings.
The defining quality of Celtic knots is that they are one unbroken line. The line loops and twines around itself but has no beginning or end. It represents eternity and infinity. If you both love knotwork, you have plenty of choices. The Lovers’ Knot is a beautiful, rectangular design that fits perfectly onto a ring. The Trinity Knot is three loops in a triangle shape. The number three has always been important in Irish culture. It can stand for your shared past, present and future; the generations of a family; the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, or the three stages of life, youth, adulthood and old age.
Irish Wedding Rings & What They Mean
If words are your love language, you can choose Irish wedding rings that spell it out. The Irish phrase ‘mo anam cara’ means ‘my soulmate’. It’s growing in popularity and is perfect on a Celtic wedding ring. Before modern written language, our ancestors in Ireland were carving Ogham script on standing stones. Ogham is popular on many Irish gifts, but it can be a stunning touch for a wedding ring. Marriage is based on faith – faith in each other and, for some, faith in God – so an Ogham engraving of the word ‘faith’ is just the right touch.
All of these motifs can found on a dazzling array of different Irish wedding bands. Whether you want silver or gold, a minimalist design or something intricate and sparkling, you can find the perfect Celtic wedding ring featuring these motifsA Claddagh ring (Irish: fáinne Chladaigh) is a traditional Irish ring in which a heart represts love, the crown stands for loyalty, and two clasped hands symbolize fridship.
The design and customs associated with it originated in Claddagh, County Galway. Its modern form was first produced in the 17th ctury.
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The name derives from the Italian phrase mani in fede (hands [joined] in faith or hands [joined] in loyalty). This group dates to Ancit Rome, where the gesture of clasping hands meant pledging vows. Cut or cast in bezels, they were used as gagemt and wedding rings in medieval and Raissance Europe to signify plighted troth.
In rect years it has be embellished with interlace designs and combined with other Celtic and Irish symbols, corresponding with its popularity as an emblem of Irish idtity.
Although there are various myths and legds around the origin of the Claddagh ring, it is almost certain that it originated in or close to the small fishing village of Claddagh in Galway.
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As an example of a maker, Bartholomew Fallon was a 17th-ctury Irish goldsmith, based in Galway, who made Claddagh rings until circa 1700. His name first appears in the will of one Dominick Martin, also a jeweller, dated 26 January 1676, in which Martin willed Fallon some of his tools. Fallon continued working as a goldsmith until 1700. His are among the oldest surviving examples of the Claddagh ring, in many cases bearing his signature.
There are many legds about the origins of the ring, particularly concerning Richard Joyce, a silversmith from Galway circa 1700, who is said to have invted the Claddagh design as we know it.
Legd has it that Joyce was captured and slaved by Algerian Corsairs around 1675 while on a passage to the West Indies; he was sold into slavery to a Moorish goldsmith who taught him the craft.
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King William III st an ambassador to Algeria to demand the release of any and all British subjects who were slaved in that country, which at the time would have included Richard Joyce. After fourte years, Joyce was released and returned to Galway and brought along with him the ring he had fashioned while in captivity: what we've come to know as the Claddagh. He gave the ring to his sweetheart, married, and became a goldsmith with considerable success.
The clasped hands [style ring]... are... still the fashion, and in constant use in [the]... community [of] Claddugh [sic] at [County] Galway.... [They] rarely [intermarry] with others than their own people.
An account writt in 1906 by William Dillon, a Galway jeweller, claimed that the Claddagh ring was worn in the Aran Isles, Connemara and beyond.
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Knowledge of the ring and its customs spread within Ireland and Britain during the Victorian period, and this is wh its name became established.
In his 1911 book Rings for the Finger, American mineralogist George Frederick Kunz addresses the importance of gold wedding rings in Ireland and includes a captioned photograph of a Claddagh ring.
The Claddagh's distinctive design features two hands clasping a heart and usually surmounted by a crown. These elemts symbolize the qualities of love (the heart), fridship (the hands), and loyalty (the crown). A Fian Claddagh ring, without a crown, is a slightly differt take on the design but has not achieved the level of popularity of the crowned version. Claddagh rings are relatively popular among the Irish
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While Claddagh rings are sometimes used as fridship rings, they are most commonly used as gagemt and wedding rings. Mothers sometimes give these rings to their daughters wh they come of age. There are several mottos and wishes associated with the ring, such as: Let love and fridship reign.
In Ireland, the United States, Canada, and other parts of the Irish diaspora, the Claddagh is sometimes handed down mother-to-eldest daughter or grandmother-to-granddaughter.
There are other localized variations and oral traditions, in both Ireland and the Irish diaspora, involving the hand and the finger on which the Claddagh is worn. Folklore about the ring is relatively rect, not ancit, with the lore about them almost wholly based in oral tradition; there is very little native Irish writing about the ring, hce, the difficulty today in finding any scholarly or non-commercial source that explains the traditional ways of wearing the ring.
