A Celtic knot is one line. It crosses over and under itself, sometimes for the whole length of a page, and it never begins and never finishes. That is the whole trick of it, and it is why the pattern has outlasted the people who first cut it into stone.
We have been casting knotwork in pewter for decades, and the question that comes across the counter most often is what a particular knot means. The honest answer has two halves, and this is both of them.
First, the interlace
The patterns we call Celtic knots are interlace: woven bands with no beginning and no end. They became associated with Celtic people through the early Celtic Church, where they were used to decorate Bible manuscripts, monuments and jewellery.
The best-known source is the Book of Kells, made around 800 AD. Open it at almost any page and the same logic is at work — a single line, endlessly folded, filling whatever space it is given.
The Trinity knot
Three points, three petals, one unbroken line. The triquetra is the most recognised design in all of interlace, and the one people most often ask for by name.
It is read today as the Christian Trinity, and elsewhere as any grouping of three — past, present and future; mother, father and child. Those readings are real to the people who hold them. Whether the carvers meant any of them is another matter, and we come back to that below.
The knot of motherhood
A heart within a heart, drawn without lifting the pen: one figure encircling the other. It is read as a mother's love for her child, which is why it leaves the shop more often as a gift than as a purchase for oneself.
We make it as a large pendant, a small one, and matching earrings.
The York knot, dug out of the ground
Our favourite piece in the range is not a symbol at all. It is a copy.
The York design is a replica of one of the oldest known pewter trinkets, unearthed from the remains of a 10th-century wooden building in York, England. Someone cast it in pewter a thousand years ago, someone else lost it, and it sat in the ground until it was dug up and drawn again.
There is a pleasing symmetry in casting it in pewter now, in a workshop on the other side of the Atlantic.
What nobody can honestly tell you
Search for Celtic knot meanings and you will find confident tables: this knot is protection, that one is loyalty, this one wards off harm. Be careful with them. The people who filled the margins of the manuscripts left no key, and most of the tidy one-to-one meanings you will read were attached to the patterns centuries later, some of them within living memory.
What is documented is plainer and, we think, better: these were made by hand, they take enormous patience to draw correctly, and the line has no end. If you want the piece you wear to mean something specific, the meaning is yours to give it. That is roughly how it has always worked.
Knotwork off the neck and onto the table
Not all of it is jewellery. The quaich — from the Gaelic cuach, meaning cup — is a shallow two-handled drinking cup, traditionally for whisky or brandy. It began in wood, and has been made in pewter since the 17th century, when clan chiefs used it to welcome guests.
Alongside it: spreaders and cheese knives with knotwork handles, place card holders, picture frames, napkin rings, and a wine bottle coaster carrying the word Sláinte — to your health.
Everything here is cast and finished by hand in our workshop in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and guaranteed for life — if a piece ever needs cleaning or repair, bring it back and we will take care of it.