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The Ogham Alphabet The Ogham alphabet was used in Britain and Ireland some centuries before the introduction of the Latin ABC alphabet. In the 7th century AD, the latter was brought in by Benedictine monks, whose express task it was to create a new language to replace the old. In the medieval Irish “Book of Ballymote”, its invention is credited to ‘Ogma Sun-face, son of Breas’, an early Goidel god. Goidels established themselves in Britain from the continent in about the 3rd or 2nd century BC and the common language of Bronze Age Britain and Ireland is thought to be an early form of Goidelic. However the accepted Irish tradition is that the alphabet originated in Greece and was brought to Ireland via Spain (not Gaul). Each letter of the alphabet was named after the tree or shrub of which it was the initial but common trees of Greece would have been the fig, olive, cypress, plane-tree, vine, pine and palm a fact that tends to refute this idea unless as Robert Graves, who explored the language at depth, suggests, its provenance was of the Southern Black Sea Coast region. Since all the trees are native to Britain excluding the vine, perhaps it is likely to have come from France/Germany after all particularly as all the trees figure prominently in European folk-lore. As presented in Roderick O’Flaherty’s Ogygia and by O’Sullivan in Ledwich’s Antiquities of Ireland, the original Druidic alphabet (Beth-Luis-Nion) consisted of thirteen consonants and five vowels. Coupled with strong evidence in mythology, this led Graves to conjecture that the thirteen consonants could be identified with the thirteen months of the year (a lunar month being 28 days) forming a seasonal calendar of tree-magic. In fact the hawthorn to this day still carries the name ‘the May.’ The order of this ‘B-L-N’ alphabet was then of great importance. More accepted versions of the alphabet of the ‘B-L-F’ type consist of 15 consonants and 5 vowels. Here is one version:
In many other versions, P is replaced by Ng for Ngetal, represented by the reed. Each letter was represent by nicks cut with a chisel along the edge of a squared stone. In the deaf-and-dumb language to which the alphabet corresponded these nicks could be indicated alone by fingers or by fingers against the shin, nose, thigh and foot. Besides these 20 letters, five combinations of vowels were used to represent five foreign sounds. These were Ea, Oi, Ia, Ui and X and they represented Kh, Th, P, Ph and X respectively. In inscriptions however, elaborate characters unlike for those of the other letters were used to represent these: Kh was represented by a St Andrew’s cross, Ph a spiral etc. The writing of Ogham scripts was in the main reserved for public inscriptions to the dead and only when Druidism began to decline. Previous to that it had been kept a dark druidic secret. There are still numerous examples of ancient stone inscriptions on standing stones in Ireland, Isle of Man, North and South Wales, and Scotland dating from between the 4th and 7th centuries AD. Graves, Robert 1999, The White Goddess, 4th Edition. |
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