The bad-luck superstition that has clung to opal in the modern Western imagination is not a deep-rooted folk belief but a literary invention of the early nineteenth century, traceable with unusual precision to Sir Walter Scott's 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein. In the novel, an opal-set hair ornament worn by the supernatural Lady Hermione brings tragedy and her own apparent death; the symbolic association of opal with misfortune was new in the lapidary literature, but the novel's enormous popularity carried the association into wider European culture within a decade of publication. The historical record before Scott shows opal was prized by the Romans, esteemed in the Renaissance, and traded steadily through the medieval and early modern periods. The collapse of the opal market that followed Scott's novel — exacerbated by a coincident cholera epidemic in continental Europe — is one of the more striking cases of literary fiction influencing a commercial trade.

The historical record before 1829

Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, devotes a passage of admiration to opal in Naturalis Historia, ranking it among the most prized gemstones and noting the play of colour with what reads as genuine fascination rather than dread. The Roman senator Nonius is reported (variously by Pliny and other sources) to have preferred exile from Rome to surrendering his celebrated opal to Mark Antony, an episode that suggests the stone carried prestige rather than ill repute. Throughout the medieval period, opal appears in lapidary literature as a stone of varied virtues — protective, healing, sometimes invisible-making in the more fanciful accounts — but never as a stone of misfortune.

Renaissance and seventeenth-century lapidary writers, including Anselmus de Boodt and Robert Boyle, treated opal as a desirable and sometimes wonderful stone. The Hapsburg imperial collection in Vienna held important opals throughout the period, and the French royal jewels included substantial opal pieces. There is no significant pre-1829 textual tradition of opal as unlucky in any of the major European languages.

The novel and its impact

Scott's Anne of Geierstein was published in 1829 and was an immediate commercial success across Britain and continental Europe, with translations into French, German, Italian, and other languages within a few years. The novel is set in late-fifteenth-century Switzerland and Burgundy and treats the supernatural episode of Lady Hermione and her opal as a piece of gothic romance rather than as a moral lesson about gemstones. Scott appears to have invented the unlucky-opal motif for narrative purposes; there is no scholarly evidence that he was drawing on an existing folk tradition.

The cultural impact, however, was substantial. By the early 1830s, opal sales in continental Europe had reportedly fallen by more than half, and the historical opal trade based around the Cervenica mines in present-day Slovakia (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) experienced a sustained decline. Several factors compounded the literary effect: a cholera epidemic that reached Europe in 1830-1832 was attributed in popular belief to a range of supposed causes, including misfortune attached to specific objects, and opal — newly tarnished in the gothic imagination — became a casualty of that broader anxiety. The Cervenica deposits had also been declining in production, and the combination of literary association, epidemic anxiety, and supply contraction kept opal substantially out of fashion for several decades.

The Australian recovery

The discovery of major opal deposits in Australia in the 1870s and 1880s, and the subsequent expansion of the Lightning Ridge field after 1903, brought new material to a Western market that had partly forgotten the stone. The Australian opal trade — supported by promotional efforts including, by tradition, gifts from Queen Victoria of Australian opals to her daughters — substantially restored opal's commercial standing. The story of the Victoria gifts is documented in some Australian sources, although the exact extent of her advocacy is harder to verify than the popular account suggests. See the separate entry on opal lucky Queen Victoria for the counter-narrative.

By the early twentieth century, opal had recovered its place as a valued gemstone, supported by promotional designation as the October birthstone and by the Australian industry's substantial output of fine material. The bad-luck superstition has not been entirely dispelled — it survives in occasional retail anxiety, particularly among older customers — but the trade does not take it seriously, and most modern customers encounter it as a curiosity rather than a deterrent.

Why the literary cause stuck

Several features of the opal-and-Walter-Scott episode help explain why the literary attribution had unusual staying power. Opal is one of the few gemstones whose visual character — the moving, shifting play of colour — invites supernatural interpretation, and a romantic gothic novel set among Alpine castles found in the stone's optical phenomenon a ready vehicle for narrative magic. Scott's novel was widely translated, widely read, and widely imitated, and the cultural reach of mid-nineteenth-century English-language romantic fiction was unusually wide. The cholera epidemic provided a real-world anxiety that the gothic association amplified rather than created.

Comparable cases — gemstones temporarily damaged by literary or theatrical association — are difficult to find at the same scale, although the Hope diamond's curse mythology, largely a twentieth-century construction, follows a similar pattern of literary attribution producing market consequences.

Modern position

For working jewellers, the Walter Scott superstition is best treated as the historical curiosity it is. Customers who raise it can be answered with the genuine pre-1829 historical record, the Australian recovery of the trade, and the present-day enthusiasm for opal across both Australian and Ethiopian production. The October birthstone designation provides a positive cultural framing that vastly exceeds the residual superstitious shadow. For collectors and historians, the episode remains a notable example of literary fiction reshaping a gemstone's cultural meaning, and the gap between Pliny's Roman admiration of opal and the post-1829 European anxiety is itself an instructive piece of cultural history.

See also opal lucky Queen Victoria, opal, and October birthstone for related entries.

Further reading

• GIA — opal reference
• GIA Gems & Gemology — opal historical and folkloric articles
• International Gem Society — opal folklore reference