The knot and the link

Before it was a sentiment, the knot was a bandage. The ancient Greeks knew the reef knot as the knot of Herakles, and Pliny reported a belief that wounds bound with it healed faster. Greek goldsmiths were working it into jewelry by about 300 BC.

The joined ring came later. A gimmel ring, from the Latin for twin, is two or three hoops that fit together into one band, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an engaged couple might wear a hoop each and rejoin them at the wedding. Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora with one in 1525. Louis Cartier's Trinity of 1924, three bands in three golds rolling through one another, is the gimmel set free.

Modern links borrowed from other trades. Mario Buccellati enchained rings of twisted gold thread like a lei in the 1930s; Jean Schlumberger, son of an Alsatian textile family, held the diamonds of his 1959 Sixteen Stone ring with tiny gold cross-stitches; Jean Dinh Van hooked two half-rings together like handcuffs in 1976; Gianni Bulgari locked bracket-shaped links into Parentesi in 1982. The recent pieces are about two people. FRED laid a figure eight on its side in 2016, for the eightieth year since Fred Samuel opened his shop, and Pomellato Together, in 2023, binds two gold ellipses with one link that can face forward or hide behind the finger.