Small world

Browsing at random, I came across this wonderful story about the Glasgow coat of arms, which includes:

the tree that never grew,
the bird that never flew,
the fish that never swam,
the bell that never rang.

The fish that never swam

“The coat of arms always shows the fish with a ring held in its mouth. This is because a King of Strathclyde had given his wife a ring as a present. But the Queen gave it to a knight who promptly lost it. Some versions of the story say that the King took the ring while the knight was asleep and threw it in the river. The King then demanded to see the ring - threatening death to the Queen if she could not produce it. The knight confessed to St Mungo who sent a monk to catch a fish in the river Clyde. When this was brought back St Mungo cut open the fish and found the ring. When the Bishop of Glasgow was designing his own seal around 1271, he used the illustration of a salmon with a ring in its mouth and this has come down to us in today's coat of arms.”

It's a small world. I wrote about a variation of this story on March 11th.