History

Promise rings: Origin and history Our life is full of promises. Many of them are quite routine: you promise to pick up someone at the airport, help a friend or sibling with a school project or volunteer to buy some groceries on the way from work. In fact, some of our promises are implied and unspoken. We build our lives around them. There is also a special kind of promises. They are meant to last a long time or even for as long as we may live.

THE story of the ring given by Queen Elizabeth to the Earl of Essex is of such romantic interest that it is sad to destroy the charm by casting doubts on its authenticity ; but, at the present day especially, a crucial test is applied to numbers of similar instances, and 'historic doubts' crop up incessantly, with which heretofore no profane hand was expected to meddle. The story of the Essex ring-token has been investigated with great care by a writer in the ' Edinburgh Review ' (No.

There is apparently quite a large selection of rings that have Roman numerals engraved on them. I am presently at a loss regarding the meaning and significance of this engraved message. As one seller of Roman numeral rings quite simple-mindedly acknowledged: "Don't worry about trying to figure out what roman numerals are on this ring, just trust us when we tell you they look cool." Still, what does this mean? This can represent the idea of time (the numerals are I-XII), combined with the idea of eternity (a very persistant symbolic interpretation of a ring).

True Love Waits is the most common and popular inscription on purity rings. Curiously, this phrase does not have a direct correlation with any Bible verse (which is not a problem per se). This makes it more difficult to deal with common request to translate the words "True Love waits" into Latin(something one might wish to do for a personalized purity ring). First of all, the Latin nouns that denote "love" have many undesirable connotations, some of them quite distant from the idea of purity.

‘William Jones writes in his book "Finger-ring Lore": *The veneration for a wedding-ring is shown in the instance of the great lexicographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson. He writes under date March 28, 1753: 'I kept this day as the anniversary of my Letty's death, with prayers and tears in the morning. In the evening I prayed for her conditionally, if it was lawful.' Her wedding-ring was preserved by him, as long as he lived, with an affectionate care, in a little round wooden box, and in the inside of which was a slip of paper inscribed : ' Eheu !

This was in the news a few years ago. A British couple in Coventry found an antique engraved ring (using a metal detector, I believe). The engraving is in French and says: " Mon Cuer Avez" - Have My Heart. As anyone who ever studied French should notice, this posie ring features a "relaxed" Medieval spelling of the word cœur. I hope that if someone decided to use this exact inscription of a modern ring they would use the proper spelling, unless the general style of the posie was meant to recreate an antique look.