It s official ! The pretzel looking bowline(s) are now named The Pretzel Bowline(s).
Bulloney: most if not all of these late-blooming so-called "bowlines"
are lacking the quintessential element of a
bowline -- viz., the central
nipping loop, one end being the SPart, the other an eye leg.
The world doesn't need such lame naming that every eyeknot that
someone dreams up garners "bowline" in its moniker as some sort
of claim to legitimacy.
The Bowline (Ashley's #1010) is a marvel of material efficiency
-- the simple union of a loop & bight. To seek from such limited
structure an
essence is like splitting hairs, but to my mind the
task can be done, and what is essential is the nipping loop. (The
bight-wise finish is something that can be employed broadly, but
is not so important a structural feature as the nipping loop.)
As for the essence of a
pretzel, that has to my mind a struggle between
the
Overhand &
Fig.8 forms, where the latter is cast appropriately.
(The sequence of knots beginning {Overhand, Fig.8, Fig.9, Fig.10 ...}
can be put into this ends-twist-in-the-center form.)
For the first-presented knot here, note that I've named as
"Mirrored Bowlines"the like knot where (1) the central, nipping
Cow hitch has ends pulling away
from, rather than crossing, each other, and (2) the tail makes a similar (hence
"Mirrored")
collaring of the
Cow Hitch end feeding the eye.
This knot is envisioned as good for rockclimbing tie-in, able to withstand
repeated falls w/o tightening, yet quite resistant to loosening (from an
already amply open/loose setting).
The knot you show here takes those
Cow Hitch ends in the opposite
directions, with a
particular crossing -- having the SPart pass
under(i.e., closer to knot body, as shown here) is much preferable.
--dl*
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