Blarney
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Blarney. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a village in Ireland, 4 miles N. W. of the city of Cork, with Blarney Castle in its vicinity. A stone called the Blarney Stone, near the top of the castle, is said to confer on those who kiss it the peculiar kind of persuasive eloquence alleged to be characteristic of the natives of Ireland. BLASCO IBÁÑEZ, VICENTE, Spanish novelist; born 1866. He came active in radical agitation, and sufearly befered several terms of imprisonment for too fiery expression of his political con-- victions. He has represented Valencia in the Cortes as a Republican deputy. It is as a novelist, however, that he is best known. His novels, "La Catedral," "La Barraca," "El Intruso," have a great vogue in Spain. After the war began he gained a wider audience in the world at large by his "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," based on the sion of France and Belgium, and "Mare Nostrum," a powerful romance dealing with the Mediterranean. In 1920 he VICENTE BLASCO IBANEZ visited the United States and spent some time in Mexico at the time of the Obregon revolution.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a village four miles northwest of Cork, Ireland. The name is applied also to a stream, and to a small castle in the vicinity. The inhabitants of this parish are said to be particularly versatile in the art of flattery and persuasive speech, which is accordingly called blarney from the name of the locality. A stone in the northeast angle of the castle, several feet from the top, bears a Latin inscription giving the date of erection. It is called the Blarney Stone. Whoever kisses the Blarney Stone is said to acquire the fluency of tongue peculiar to the district. The term has passed into literature. See Cork ; Ireland
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts describe a village of four miles northwest of Cork with a castle whose stone confers eloquence, and that is still an accurate description — Blarney Castle, the tower house built by the MacCarthys in the 15th century, remains in private hands and open to visitors, and the kissing ritual has only grown, drawing hundreds of thousands of people a year. What has changed is the safety and the scale: where visitors were once simply held by the ankles over the drop, the parapet now has iron guard rails and a supporting attendant, and the surrounding estate has become a full commercial attraction with gardens and the neighbouring Blarney Woollen Mills. Aiton's confident 1910 note that the stone bears "a Latin inscription giving the date of erection" is the one detail that has not aged well: which block is the true Blarney Stone, and what if anything is carved on it, is now treated as folklore rather than record. The village itself, once distinctly rural, has been absorbed into the commuter belt of a much larger Cork.
Written for this edition, 2026.