Note 27.1 — Chapter VIII · THE LIFE-TOKEN IN TALE AND CUSTOM.

In the ballad of Hind Horn the king’s daughter gives the hero a jewelled ring. As long as the stone keeps its colour, he may know that she is faithful; but if it change its hue, he may ken she loves another man. Professor Child, commenting on the ballad, adduces not merely several variants and romances on the same subject, but also a Roumanian ballad wherein a prince going to war gives his wife a ring which will rust if he be dead, and a Silesian story and another British ballad where the ring breaks in twain.27.1 In these ballads and stories we probably have the real meaning of plighting the troth in the marriage service with a ring. Bacon, somewhere discussing the superstition, gravely suggests that a trial should be made by two persons of the effect of compact and agreement; that a ring should be put on for each other’s sake, to try whether, if one should break his promise, the other would have any feeling of it in his absence. The hero of a North German tale receives from his bride the day after marriage a snow-white shirt, which will turn black if she die, and become stained and spotted if she be untrue.27.2 A Hungarian tradition speaks of a carbuncle which lighted up the neighbourhood of a lake in the Carpathians while the consort of the king of the water-fays was true to him; but when she fell in love with a mortal prince it lost its splendour, and the king with his golden palace and all his treasures sank into the black depths of the lake.27.3 The Faith-token is a piece of machinery too suggestive to be overlooked by poets and dramatists of more refined art than the mediæval romancers. Davenant mentions an emerald, not set like the Carpathian carbuncle on a palace tower, but worn by a lady, and growing pale when her husband is unfaithful. Massinger’s play of The Picture turns upon a portrait of his wife given to the parting knight, Mathias, by “a great scholar,” or magician, with these instructions: