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  • Victorian Urban Legend: Ox Ring March 11, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legend: Ox Ring

    Busy day. Lots of work and final papers to grade, but would love to know whether this can be paralleled: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com On the 8th of November, 1871, a public officer at  Colchester reported that having seen a report in the Shipping Gazette that a bullock had been picked up by the […]

    Did You Hear the One About the Ring… July 16, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern
    Did You Hear the One About the Ring...

    Curious about ring legends? This blogger recently went through the international folklore indexes in search of rings so you don’t have to: you can waste a lot of time there… Yes, he found the boring old chestnuts: ring found in fish; ring cut from corpse etc. etc. But there are also some marvelously bizarre and […]

    Real Magic Ring? March 21, 2016

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Real Magic Ring?

    This ring perhaps no longer survives, but when it was sketched in the mid nineteenth-century it was rendered thus. The ring divides. The block on the left was apparently a set of jewels that when pressed made the ring open in this fashion: a common trick? Within the ring were written a series of words. […]

    Wedding Ring Superstitions August 4, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Wedding Ring Superstitions

    Everything to do with weddings attracts superstitions and rings are no exception: as the most visible material sign of the bond between man and wife it is only natural that they were included in rituals. The following folklore (all we have in our files) comes from Britain and Ireland, all but one are from nineteenth-century […]

    The Vein of Love and the Ring Finger May 15, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Contemporary, Medieval
    The Vein of Love and the Ring Finger

    A beautifully realised graphic history of the engagment ring by Vashi led to thoughts about why, in the Western World, the wedding ring is worn on the ring finger, the third finger of the left hand counting from the index. The answer most authorities give, from nineteenth-century reference works, to modern wedding miscellanies, to early […]