The common people, even more afflicted by the pains of life, also sought these ringed remedies. The toadstone ring was deemed effective. Several actual stones have since been called by this name—no one knows precisely what it was—but the effective ones were generated by the toad, possibly as nature’s compensation for the creature’s ugliness. The toadstone was credited, as the Oxford Dictionary puts it, “with alexipharmic or therapeutic virtues.” The best known allusion to the toadstone is in Shakespeare’s As You Like it, when the banished Duke in the forest reflects upon his state:
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
It must by no means be thought that the toadstone is merely a literary fiction. Queen Elizabeth, on her Progress in 1558, was given a “toade stone set in golde.” Sir Walter Scott, in 1812, called it “sovereign for protecting new-born children and their mothers from the power of the fairies.” Against fairies, perhaps the toadstone worked.
More questionable was the power of a ring against specific diseases, although to the edge of this century country folk in rustic parts, as in back-lying Suffolk, wore special rings that were blessed against cramps.
A more mechanical method of using rings in witchery or divination has been to pitch or spin them, or to suspend them and let them swing, in such a way as to have them indicate Yes or No; or, by falling upon haphazardly arranged letters, spell out a message.
Visibility Rings
Legends of rings that make one invisible are universal. An unusually potent one, we are told in a tale of medieval Europe, was given by the Queen Mother to Otnit, King of Lombardy, when he set out to seek the hand of the Soldan’s daughter. In addition to making him invisible at will, the ring always foiled his detractors by indicating to the owner the right road toward his destination.