I was looking at an image of someone hanging upside down and kissing the Blarney Stone. The whole thing seems preposterous.
Legend is that you kiss this stone and get blessed with the skill of flattery and lying without people being cross at you for doing so. To kiss the stone, you hang upside down across a gap in a parapet. It seems like bored castle guardsmen got someone to kiss the stone they all widdled on while standing watch (it is over a parapet gap after all), and then made an ongoing thing of it. Could someone let me know the true story here? Or at least who started this?
On a side note, is there a known oldest joke on tourists/foreigners?
I'm sorry, but we don't allow 'First'/'Last' questions on /r/AskHistorians, and so we have removed this submission. It's not that the question is bad; it is simply that, given the rules of this subreddit, these types of questions are ill-suited to its format. We've found that they tend to get responses along the lines of "the first/last example I know of," or else many short, speculative responses in the case that the answer went unrecorded. This results in many removed comments, and very few answered threads.
If this is a question you still are interested in a response to though, you have options!
Consider the core of the question to rephrase and resubmit. Instead of asking, for instance, "Who was the first person killed by a firearm?", try "What do we know about the early development and use of firearms?". Asking about origins, developments, or declines is more likely to get in-depth, knowledgeable answers.
Every other Wednesday we run a "Short Answers to Simple Questions", and if you can hang on to your question until then, it can likely fit unchanged.
Finally, you could also try submitting your question to /r/History or /r/AskHistory, which doesn't have submission criteria quite as strict.
Thank you for understanding!
Hi everyone, this is your friendly neighborhood mod team. Please focus on the history of the Blarney stone in responses rather than other old practical jokes. Thanks!