Druim: the stem line
The line the ogham letters stand on: on the stones it is the edge where two faces meet, and in manuscripts a drawn line. Its Irish name, druim, means ridge, edge or back.
Meaning
Every ogham letter is placed by its side of the stem line. The Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies gives the line’s Irish name as druim, “ridge, edge, back”, and calls a single stroke flesc, “a twig”. On the early stones there is no drawn line at all: the script “was originally written along the edges of stone where two faces meet”, as the Unicode Standard puts it, and the stem lines of manuscripts and fonts stand for that edge. Inscriptions cut on a line scored into the face of a stone are later, “scholastic”, from after the seventh century.
Origin and history
The Auraicept na nÉces, the medieval scholars’ primer, names the groups by the line: the B group is “right of stem”, the H group “left of stem”, the M group “athwart”, the vowels “through stem”. It reads them like a tree, climbing from the bottom: “thy right hand first, that is, group b: and, thy left hand after, that is, group h”. Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project explain the picture: the line was likened to a tree’s trunk and the strokes to its branches or twigs.
Which way it reads
On the stones the inscription usually starts at the bottom left of a face, runs up the edge, across the top and down the other side, Ogham in 3D explains, though some read upward on both edges, as at Ballineanig in County Kerry (CIIC 146).
Feather marks
Later ogham sometimes marks the start of a line with a sign McManus calls an “arrow-head”. The name “feather-mark” is R. A. S. Macalister’s, from his corpus of 1945, the OG(H)AM project notes, and a standing pillar has no need of one; three manuscripts of about 800 do without it too. Unicode encodes it as U+169B OGHAM FEATHER MARK, with a reversed mark for the end, and gives as an example the word latheirt, written between the two in the margin of a ninth-century Latin grammar. It means “massive hangover”, perhaps the scribe’s apology for any errors in his text.
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 OghamBeitheThe 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.
- The same shape in Norse gods and their symbolsOdinOdin was the chief of the Norse gods: god of kings, war and the dead, and of poetry and magic, who gave an eye for wisdom. His signs are the spear Gungnir, the ravens Huginn and Muninn, the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, the wolves Geri and Freki and the gold ring Draupnir.
See also
Luis, Fern, Sail, Nin, Úath, Dair.
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
- Ogham in 3D: ogham, Ogham in 3D (2013 edition), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, ogham
- 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, p. 75; glossary, druim
- The Unicode Standard, chapter 8, §8.15 Ogham, The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0, Chapter 8: Europe-II, Unicode Consortium, 8.15.1, Ogham; Rendering; Forfeda
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, on flesca and the stemline
- Feather-marks, OG(H)AM project blog, 23 August 2024, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, introduction
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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