Designer Jewelry Gems

A knot motif is historically used in Celtic wedding rings design to symbolize the intertwining of two lives in matrimony. If you and your partner are considering using a design of Celtic origin to symbolize your union, you might want to know where the design comes from. The word Celts is used to identify a group of peoples united by their use of a set of related languages of Indo-European origin.

The Celtic nations are essentially the British Isles with the exception of Ireland. In England the Celtic tradition was subsumed by Anglo-Saxon culture. The long held belief that all Cetic culture trace back to a common tribe has been disproved by genetic investigators and it is now believed Celtic culture was spread by conquering other unrelated tribes or through simple cultural influence of neighboring peoples.

Celtic art in modern usage refers to the designs and motifs that came to prominence during the Celtic art revival of the eighteenth century. This revival was born out of the desire by the Welsh and Scottish to assert their cultural identities in the face of the dominance of English culture in political and religious areas.

The Celts were not influenced by Greco-Roman representational art traditions and evolved a distinct stylized abstract form of decoration that has more in common with Arabic decorative traditions, save for the rare use of symmetry. The frequent use of endlessly repeating, narrow, linear patterns was adopted by the Western European Catholic Church and is seen in Christian manuscripts, churches and cathedrals throughout the world.

The now familar patterns seen in Celtic wedding rings are fashioned from stylized representations of rope knots, thus making them perfect visual metaphors for “tying the knot.”

There are some beautiful three dimensional Celtic wedding rings available. These designs do not have the traditional flat band with solid, even edges. The band is formed by the loops of the featured knot pattern, with open spaces captured within the design. A variation on this is two solid ring edges serving as a frame for a graceful flow of rope-like metal capturing open space within the design.

The use of knot patterns in Celtic wedding band design makes them one of the few designs to regularly incorporate open space within the band. Gemstones are applied at the artisan’s discretion and many designs forego faceted gems in favor of the semi-precious polished stones used in historic Celtic jewelry. Types of knot patterns include; the Celtic Knot, Circle, Spiral and Heart as well as the braided two stranded Infinity Knot and the clover leaf like Trinity Knot.