Three Rings from the 7th-Century Legend

Some designs arrive quickly. Others feel as though they have been waiting in the landscape for a very long time.

The first chapter of the Wayland Cycle belongs firmly to the latter kind.

This set of three titanium rings grew from a desire to make something more than “runic jewellery” in the modern decorative sense. The aim was to create artifacts rooted, as honestly as possible, in the meeting place of landscape, folklore, and early English rune tradition. Not replicas of the past, and not costume pieces, but modern objects that stand near the deep old currents that still run beneath certain places.

For this first chapter, the ground chosen was the ancient landscape around Wayland’s Smithy and the Uffington White Horse.

That landscape is unusually rich in meanings layered across time. Wayland’s Smithy itself is a Neolithic chambered tomb, already ancient long before the Anglo-Saxons gave it the name of their legendary smith. Nearby, cut into the hillside, the White Horse has endured for nearly three thousand years, maintained by generations who refused to let it vanish beneath turf and time.

Between those two places lies a whole territory of memory: archaeology, myth, poetry, place-name, survival.

Sometimes history is like deep water lying only millimetres from your feet. We blithely stroll along the edge of the precipice, while the light and noise of current affairs reflect from the surface, hiding the true depth of the waters beneath.

But pause and peer, hand shading your eyes, and feel the tide of time pull you in.

That sense of standing close to something vast, half-hidden, and far older than oneself lies behind this set.

Ring I — Wayland’s Smithy

The first ring in the cycle is the ring of the hidden forge.

Its central symbol is a simplified mound containing the Anglo-Saxon rune ᚳ (Kenaz). The mound represents Wayland’s Smithy, the ancient chambered mound that later folklore made into the unseen workshop of the smith. The rune within it represents the fire at the heart of craft: torch, flame, knowledge, and the creative spark hidden within the earth.

Around this symbol runs the inscription:

ᚹᚪᛁᛚᚪᚾᛞ ᚳ/ᛋᛗᛁᚦᛁ

or, in sense:

Wayland — Smithy

The ring is finished in blue, a colour that felt right for the cool, secretive nature of the place: the forge beneath the mound, the hidden chamber, the sense of something not extinguished but concealed.

This is the first movement of the legend: the place itself.

Ring II — Wayland’s Coin

The second ring moves from place to exchange.

In the folklore, a traveller leaves a coin and a horse beside the stones. Later he returns to find the horse shod and the payment gone. The smith is never seen. But a bargain has been enacted all the same.

That detail matters. The legend is not only about a supernatural smith; it is also about the mysterious contract between human need and skilled work. Payment is given, work is done, value is exchanged.

The central symbol of this ring is a bindrune combining ᚷ (Gyfu) and ᚠ (Feoh).

Gyfu carries the sense of gift, exchange, reciprocity.
Feoh carries the sense of wealth, movable value, payment.

Joined together, they become a symbol not merely of money, but of the bargain itself — the act of giving value in return for craft. In that sense, this ring may be the most conceptually dense of the three. It speaks not only to a folktale moment, but to something central in older social worlds: the binding force of exchange, promise, and obligation.

The ring is finished in gold, the natural choice for the artifact of payment. Yet the design avoids obviousness. This is not simply a “coin ring,” but the ring of the unseen contract.

This is the second movement of the legend: the bargain.

Ring III — Wayland’s Horse

The third ring carries the oldest image in the set and, in some ways, the freest.

At its centre runs a simplified form of the Uffington White Horse, placed between the runic words for Wayland and Smithy, so that the horse runs along the band like a landscape figure rather than standing upright as an emblem.

That mattered. The White Horse is not a badge. It is a figure cut into the land itself, alive through movement and line. To force it into a static upright arrangement would have betrayed its nature. It needed to run.

The horse engraving was cut deeper than the surrounding runes, so that it sits sunken into the surface of the ring like the chalk figure itself cut into the hillside. It is, quite literally, placed within the metal as a feature of landscape rather than a mere graphic mark.

This ring remains silver, because it felt right that the horse should stay closest to the plain metal — the least adorned, the most direct, the oldest-feeling of the three.

If the first ring is the hidden forge, and the second the bargain, this third ring is the result: the horse returned, the work completed, the old story made visible.

This is the third movement of the legend: the outcome.

A Triptych in Metal

Taken together, these three rings form the Anglo-Saxon chapter of the Wayland Cycle:

• Wayland’s Smithy — the hidden forge beneath the mound
• Wayland’s Coin — the exchange of value for craft
• Wayland’s Horse — the horse returned shod

Place.
Bargain.
Outcome.

There is a certain power in three, and it felt right to stop there. Not to keep adding artifacts until the story lost its shape, but to let the triad stand complete. Three rings are enough to carry the cycle without diffusing it. They form a set, a sequence, a mythic triptych.

Each ring has its own visual language:
the architectural stillness of the mound,
the formal symbolism of the bindrune,
the flowing movement of the horse.

Yet all three belong to the same world, the same landscape, the same current of meaning.

Making Near the Past

What interests me most in work like this is not the idea of recreating the past exactly. That is impossible. The past is not available to us whole.

What remains available are fragments: a mound, a horse cut into chalk, a line of verse, a runic alphabet, a folktale half-held between memory and place.

To make honestly from such materials is not to claim mastery over them. It is to stand near them. To pay attention. To admit that they are deeper than any one object can fully contain.

That, perhaps, is where meaning enters the work.

There are people who can look at places like these and see only old stones, turf, weathered earth. To me, that is a source of sadness, because it misses the extraordinary thickness of the world. Ancient places are not empty. They are dense with human attention, with memory, with labour, with time.

To some, it is only stone.
To others, it offers a glimpse through an open doorway.

These three rings are offered in that spirit.

Not as answers.
Not as reconstructions.
But as small, durable attempts to honour a place where history, myth, and craft still seem to lean close together.

Now available on my Etsy store https://thesonsofwayland.etsy.com/listing/4481329197

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