Beithe
The first letter of ogham, one stroke to the right of the stem line, for the sound b. Its name, beithe, means birch, one of the few letter names that really is a tree.
Meaning
Beithe heads the first of ogham’s four letter groups, Aicme Beithe, which is named after it. It is a single stroke cut to the right of the stem line: the Auraicept na nÉces, the medieval Irish scholars’ primer, puts the B group “to right of the ridge”. Damian McManus, whose list of the original letter names the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies follows, gives the meaning as “birch-tree”, and Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project count beithe among the names that are “unambiguously identical” with a word for a tree. Unicode encodes the letter as U+1681 OGHAM LETTER BEITH, in the modern Irish spelling.
Origin and history
The Auraicept, which George Calder edited and translated in 1917, says beithe “has been named from the birch owing to its resemblance to the trunk of the birch”. It also explains why the letter comes first. The first ogham ever written in Ireland, it says, was seven b’s cut on birch and sent to Lugh son of Ethleann as a warning that his wife would be taken from him “unless thou watch her”, and “it is on that account b is still written at the beginning of the Ogham alphabet”. The Word Ogham of Morann, a list of riddling kennings for the letters copied in In Lebor Ogaim, calls beithe “faded trunk and fair hair”; the Word Ogham of Mac ind Óc calls it “most silvery of skin”.
A birch, and perhaps a borrowed name
Hayden and Stifter accept that beithe means birch, but add that the name may have been picked “because of the similarity with the Greek letter name beta”. They make the same kind of suggestion for úath and Ailm.
On the stones
B turns up in names. On Greenhill II, a broken stone in County Cork (CIIC 58), the OG(H)AM project read the first word “clearly” as CATTUBUTTAS, a name that “later appears as Cathbad in Old Irish”.
The Beth-Luis-Nion tree calendar
The thirteen-month tree calendar named after ogham’s first letters, Beth-Luis-Nion, is the poet Robert Graves’s, published in The White Goddess in 1948. Steven Michael Stroud, writing in the Robert Graves Review, quotes a letter of 1946 that shows Graves “well into the process of constructing or refining” it. About ten years after the book appeared, witches took the calendar up as a sacred one, and for the witchcraft community it is a touchstone still, Stroud writes. The tree names it draws on are much older but are not ogham’s first meanings either: Hayden and Stifter trace them to the Middle Irish commentary on the Auraicept, written between about 900 and 1200.
Write in ogham
stringmash.comOgham translatorWrite English in ogham, the early Irish alphabet of strokes cut along an edge, with the full ogham chart.Read next
- Next in OghamLuisThe second letter of ogham, two strokes to the right of the stem line, for the sound l. The medieval tracts make it the rowan tree; Damian McManus reads the name as “flame” or “plant”.
- Both letter names are read as the birchBerkananThe Elder Futhark rune for the “b” sound. Its name, *berkanan, meant the birch tree.
See also
Fern, Sail, Nin, Úath, Dair, Tinne.
Sources
- Ogham in 3D: alphabet, Ogham in 3D (2013 edition), letter names after Damian McManus, A Guide to Ogam (1991) and Ériu 39 (1988), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, alphabet; Letter names, Aicme Beithe
- Auraicept na n-éces: the scholars' primer, George Calder (ed. and trans.), 1917: the Ogham tract from the Book of Ballymote and the Yellow Book of Lecan, with In Lebor Ogaim, John Grant, Edinburgh (Internet Archive), Auraicept, pp. 75, 91; In Lebor Ogaim, pp. 277, 285
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §1, Beithe; introduction
- Og(h)am of the Month, OG(H)AM project team (Nora White, Patricia O’Connor, David Stifter and others), 2021–2025, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, April 2024: Greenhill II
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+1681
- Wicca Reading The White Goddess, Steven Michael Stroud, The Robert Graves Review, The Robert Graves Review (Robert Graves Society), The BLN Thirteen Month Lunar Tree Calendar; Witchcraft, Graves, and the BLN Tree Calendar
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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