The lady’s wish thereafter full well perform’d the knight.”
And when the fight waxed sore at the court of Etzel, the daring and dying Folker called on Sir Rudeger, to bear witness to his bracelet-bound fidelity:
“For me, most noble margrave! you must a message bear;
These bracelets red were given me late by your lady fair,
To wear at this high festal before the royal Hun.
View them thyself, and tell her that I’ve her bidding done.”[131]
It would, indeed, seem, that from this root-idea of the binding force of an endless covenant, symbolized in the form, and in the primitive name, of the bracelet, the armlet, the ring,—there has come down to us the use of the wedding-ring, or the wedding-bracelet, and of the signet-ring as the seal of the most sacred covenants. The signet-ring appears in earliest history. When Pharaoh would exalt Joseph over all the land of Egypt, “Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it upon Joseph’s hand.”[132] Similarly with Ahasuerus and Haman: “The king took his ring from his hand, and gave it unto Haman;” and the irrevocable decrees when written were “sealed with the king’s ring.” When again Haman was deposed and Mordecai was exalted, “the king took off his ring, which he had taken from Haman, and gave it unto Mordecai.”[133] The re-instatement of the prodigal son, in the parable, was by putting “a ring on his hand.”[134] And these illustrations out of ancient Egypt, Persia, and Syria, indicate a world-wide custom, so far. One’s signet-ring stood for his very self, and represented, thus, his blood, as his life.
The use of rings, or bracelets, or armlets, in the covenant of betrothal, or of marriage, is from of old, and it is of wide-spread acceptance.[135] References to it are cited from Pliny, Tertullian, Juvenal, Isidore; and traces of it are found, earlier or later, among the peoples of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Islands of the Sea. In Iceland, the covenanting-ring was large enough for the palm of the hand to be passed through; so, in betrothal “the bridegroom passed four fingers and his palm through one of these rings, and in this manner he received the hand of the bride.” In Ireland, long ago, “a usual gift from a woman to her betrothed husband was a pair of bracelets made of her own hair”; as if a portion of her very self—as in the case of one’s blood—entered into the covenant rite. Again in Ireland, as also among the old Romans, the wedding-ring was in the form of two hands clasped (called a “fede”) in token of union and fidelity.
Sometimes, in England, the wedding-ring was worn upon the thumb, as extant portraits illustrate; and as suggested in Butler’s Hudibras:
“Others were for abolishing