An old Irish legend says that if you kiss the Blarney Stone, you are granted the gift of blarney - what 19th century Irish politician John O'Connor Power calls "something more than mere flattery. It is flattery sweetened by humour and flavoured by wit."
The Blarney Stone's beginnings are murky; there are multiple legends of its origin - a goddess presented it to the builder of Blarney Castle, where it is set into the castle’s parapets; or that Scottish hero Robert the Bruce presented it to the castle's lord as compensation for Irish assistance in the Battle of Bannockburn.
Whatever its origin, the Blarney Stone remains an attraction for those seeking the gift of gab, and a Texas Tech legend says a piece of the stone lies in a small monument near Texas Tech University's engineering complex.
The stone's arrival at Tech is also unclear, according to Lynn Whitfield. She said three different stories of the stone's appearance in Lubbock are possibilities.
"That's sort of a big milestone and change in Texas Tech's identity."
"One story has a Tech engineering student bringing it from Ireland," she said. "Another more plausible story has it that it was discovered by a geologist on campus during an excavation; the stone’s appearance was so unusual-looking that it reminded them of the Blarney Stone. The third story involves some unknown traveler that went through West Texas and somehow dropped the stone here years later."
The different stories agree on one thing, though: the date that the piece was found. All of the stories say the fragment was discovered in early March of 1939. University officials hurriedly erected a monument to the piece 10 days after its discovery, in a St. Patrick's Day ceremony on March 17th, 1939, west of the engineering key on campus.
Whether those who discovered the piece in 1939 thought it was real is also unclear, Whitfield said. But according to her, the speed at which the stone was commemorated points to the fact that in 1939, Tech was a very young university with few established traditions, and the discovery of something as significant as a Blarney fragment – real or not – offered a chance to establish one of the university’s first traditions.
“That’s sort of a big milestone and change in Texas Tech’s identity,” Whitfield, an archivist with the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library said.
So despite uncertainty about the stone's legitimacy, officials established it as a tradition, and it's been touted as one ever since.
Since the first verification test conducted just after its discovery, no other authentication has been performed on the stone. Whitfield said the uncertainty created from lack of testing – especially in modern times, when a test would be much more accurate than any conducted at the time of its finding – helps keep the legend alive.
“Do we want to run the tests and possibly destroy the myth or the legend that has existed so long at Texas Tech and has become a tradition?”
"The thing with myths is that there's an appeal to it; that you don't know everything about it. There's a little piece that will always be unknown to you and that's kind of what makes it exciting."
As millions around the world bend over backwards – literally – to kiss Ireland’s Blarney Stone, Tech engineers –those studying a profession firmly rooted in the very opposite of the speculation and guesswork that made the Blarney Stone famous – still rely on a bit of the Luck of the Irish.
“Seniors that would be graduating would kiss the Blarney Stone,” Whitfield said, “and thereby inherit the gift of eloquence and basically fly through all of their exams and go on to be successful.”
