Ogham

About ogham

Ogham is the alphabet in which Irish was first written: letters of one to five straight strokes, cut along the edge of a standing stone and read from the bottom up. The OG(H)AM project at the Universities of Glasgow and Maynooth describes it as lacking any pictures: “like a barcode, it consists solely of a succession of straight lines”. Its heyday was the middle of the first millennium AD, and the inscriptions, Encyclopaedia Britannica notes, show an earlier state of Irish than any other source. Of more than 375 known, about 300 are in Ireland; the rest are in Wales, Scotland, England and the Isle of Man. The name is spelled ogam in Old Irish, said OH-ghum, and ogham in Modern Irish, said OHM, the project notes.

Each page here takes one letter: its sound, its strokes, its name and what the name meant, and where it is cut on the stones. There are twenty, from Beithe and Luis to Edad and Idad, with Ébad, the other extra letters and the stem line itself.

Four groups of five

The twenty letters fall into four aicmí, “families”, each named after its first letter, as the Unicode Standard explains. The B group is cut to the right of the edge, the H group to the left, the M group across it on the slant, and the vowels are notches on the edge itself; the Heritage Council’s guide to ogham stones notes that knowledge of the script was never lost, because the manuscripts kept a key to it. Most inscriptions are a name in the genitive, often with the father’s name, joined by MAQI, “son”.

The tree alphabet

Each letter has a name that is an Irish word, and the medieval Auraicept na nÉces and In Lebor Ogaim read every one as a tree: Beithe the birch, Luis the rowan, Dair the oak. Damian McManus, Professor of Early Irish at Trinity College Dublin, concluded that only six of the twenty were trees to begin with; the others, like Muin, “neck”, and Gort, “field”, were reinterpreted once their meanings were lost. The Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies gives his readings, and each page sets them beside the medieval ones. The thirteen-month “Celtic tree calendar” is later still: it is the poet Robert Graves’s, from The White Goddess (1948).

Where it came from

The origin is disputed. Britannica records that some scholars connect ogham with the runes, and others see it as a transformation of the Latin alphabet; letters for h and z, sounds Irish did not use, argue against a purely Irish origin. Ogham in 3D thinks it likely the script was made in Ireland for the sounds of Primitive Irish.