The powers of these knots were recognized especially in strengthening or defeating love, as aiding women in labor, and in other ways which prove them to be cousins-german to the magic knots with which the medicine-men of the Lapps and other nations along the shores of the Baltic were supposed to be able to raise or allay the tempest. "One of the torments with which witchcraft worried men was the Knot by which a man was withheld so that he could not work his will with a woman. It was called in the Latin of the times Nodus and Obligamentum, and appears in the glossaries, translated by the Saxons into lyb, drug." "To make a 'ligatura' is pronounced 'detestable' by Theodoras, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 668. The knot is still known in France, and Nouer l'aiguillette is a resort of ill-will." Then is given the adventure of Hrut, prince of Iceland, and his bride Gunnhilld, princess of Norway, by whom a "knot" was duly tied to preserve his fidelity during his absence.[627] "Traces of this philosophy are to be found elsewhere," (references are given from Pliny and Galens in regard to "nod").[628] "A knot among the ancient northern nations seems to have been the symbol of love, faith, and friendship, pointing out the indissoluble tie of affection and duty. Thus the ancient Runic inscriptions, as we gather from Hickes's Thesaurus, are in the form of a knot. Hence, among the northern English and Scots, who still retain, in a great measure, the language and manners of the ancient Danes, that curious kind of a knot, a mutual present between the lover and his mistress, which, being considered as the emblem of plighted fidelity, is therefore called a true-love knot: a name which is not derived, as one would naturally suppose it to be, from the words 'true' and 'love,' but formed from the Danish verb _Trulofa, fidem do_, I plight my troth, or faith.... Hence, evidently, the bride favors or the top-knots at marriages, which have been considered as emblems of the ties of duty and affection between the bride and her spouse, have been derived."[629]
Sir Thomas Browne, in his Vulgar Errors,[630] says "the true-lover's knot is much magnified, and still retained in presents of love among us; which, though in all points it doth not make out, had, perhaps, its original from Nodus Herculanus, or that which was called Hercules, his knot resembling the snaky complications in the caduceus or rod of Hermes and in which form the zone or woolen girdle of the bride was fastened, as Turnebus observes in his Adversaria." Brand shows[631] that the true-lover's knot had to be tied three times. Another species of knot divination is given in the Connoisseur, No. 56: "Whenever I go to lye in a strange bed, I always tye my garter nine times round the bed-post, and knit nine knots in it, and say to myself: 'this knot I knit, this knot I tye, to see my love as he goes by,' etc. There was also a suggestion of color symbolism in the true-lover's knot, blue being generally accepted as the most appropriate tint. I find among the illiterate Mexican population of the lower Rio Grande a firm belief in the power possessed by a lock of hair tied into knots to retain a maiden's affections.