I Should Be Drawing

eatoncrow:

ishouldbedrawing:

Man, dropping betrothal rings into wine cups as a secret signal seems to be a common trope in British myths, at least going by the ones in the book I just finished.

• The Age of Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm
• British Myths and Legends, M. I. Ebbutt

Only two this month! I’m lazy. At the moment, I’m not sure what to read next - going by the pile, Jane Austen’s Emma is next, but I might mix it up with Science of Discworld, since I found Emma a bit dry when I first picked it up.

Secret signal for what? This sounds interesting.

It comes up in three of the myths, such as Black Colin of Loch Awe - you have the hero and a princess fall in love, and then the hero departs to be all heroic in foreign lands, so the princess will give him a token which she will know him by when he returns, such as a ring. 

Upon his return, another trope will be that in his absence, the princess is to be wedded to someone else - usually another lord for political reasons - so to get close to her he has to disguise himself as a vagrant or minstrel, and slip her the token secretly. In all the three cases, it’s slipped into her wine, so I do wonder whether that was a common tradition at the time.