The Claddagh ring: hands, heart and crown from the Galway coast

Two hands holding a heart topped by a crown: the Claddagh ring is today one of the best-known symbols of Ireland and one of the most widespread love rings in the world. Its history brings together a fishing village, a legend of captivity and return, the work of a few Galway goldsmiths and a much older European tradition of wedding rings. Separating fact from legend makes it possible to appreciate its meaning better.

The fishing village

The Claddagh was an ancient fishing village located just outside the walls of Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, at the mouth of the river Corrib. For centuries the community preserved its own customs, a strong identity and even a kind of traditional self-government, with an elected head known as the king of the Claddagh. The name comes from the Irish An Cladach, the stony shore. Its thatched cottages were demolished in the 1930s.

In this community the ring with the hands and heart became a family heirloom, handed down from mother to daughter and used as a wedding ring. It was its link with the village that gave it the name by which it is known today, even though the design, as we shall see, belongs to a wider family of jewellery. In Claddagh families the ring was often the only gold object they owned, and it was carefully kept even in times of the greatest poverty.

The legend of Richard Joyce

Tradition holds that the ring was invented by Richard Joyce, a member of one of Galway's historic families. During a sea voyage, according to the story, he was captured by corsairs and sold as a slave in Algiers, where he learned the goldsmith's trade. Freed towards the end of the seventeenth century, he is said to have returned home bringing the design with him, perhaps intended for the woman who had waited for him.

Beyond the romantic elements, there are old rings of this type bearing the mark attributed to Richard Joyce, datable between the late seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth. Examples are also known by the goldsmith Thomas Meade, active in Galway in the same years. Joyce's name is therefore linked to real production, even though the details of his adventure remain uncertain.

A fede among fede rings

The Claddagh design belongs to the great European family of fede rings, rings with two clasped hands, widespread from Roman antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages as tokens of betrothal and marriage. The Irish novelty lies in the addition of the heart and the crown. According to the interpretation current today, the hands represent friendship, the heart love and the crown loyalty. In the nineteenth century Irish emigration carried the ring to America and throughout the English-speaking world.

From the village on the bank of the Corrib to shop windows all over the world, the Claddagh ring has made a long journey without losing its identity. Within it coexist the memory of a vanished community, a legend of exile and return and the ancient gesture of joined hands, which for centuries in Europe signified the given word and mutual fidelity.