The Irish Ogham alphabet (also called the Bethluis or Bethluisnin) consists of 20 characters in four different groups. The characters are made up of horizontal and diagonal notches (or twigs) on either side of a vertical line. They were carved in stone, and thusly read upwards from the bottom left corner and sometimes across and down the other side.
The word ogham just refers to the form of the script. Beith-luis-nin is the name for the collective of these specific letters. Beith and luis are the names of the first two letters, then the word nin literally means “a forked branch” and was used to describe any letter. So “beithluisnin” essentially means “beithluis letters”.
The characters are called trees (feada), where the consonants are side-trees (taobomna) with “branches” only on one side, and dipthongs extra-trees (forfeada). The long stems that the twigs (fleasg) are written along is called the ridge (druim). The alphabet is divided into four groups named after their first letter (aicme beithe, aicme huatha, aicme muine, acme ailme), with the fifth group being forfeada.
Calling them trees seems to be related to the manner in which the text is inscribed: along a single line, like the trunk of a tree, with many forms of extending branches along the trunk, or ridge.
The letter characters corresponded to meaningful phrases, not unlike the futhark alphabet, with several actually being the names of trees. Many scholars (and random chicks on Pinterest) have tried to fit this alphabet into a convenient one-to-one placement where every letter character corresponds to the name of a tree – but that’s not quite right.
It has become a commonplace of Irish scholarship to regard all the Irish letter-names as names of trees and no other aspect of Irish letters has contributed more to the derailment of a serious study of the history of Ogam than this.McManus, 1988
Ogham Alphabet Kennings
Damian McManus, a repeatedly cited source in all of my research, argues that these characters’ letter names (the means by which their values were memorized, not unlike the meanings derived from runic poems in the futhorc alphabets) represent the “mainstay of the tradition and should be given precedence over the manuscript key” (1988). This is where we get into Bríatharogaim: two word Old Irish meanings for the names of the letters in the ogham alphabet. There are three lists of variants, and I cannot begin to pronounce what they are called:
- Bríatharogam Morainn mac Moín: included in the Ogam Tract and interpreted in the Auraicept
- Bríatharogam Maic ind Óc: included in the Ogam Tract
- Bríatharogam Con Culainn: known from 16th & 17th century manuscripts; has something to do with Cú Chulainn, Irish war hero and demigod
More Facts & Observations
Up to 70 Irish ogham stones have been scanned and are available to explore on this Ogham in 3D website. Something like 360 ogham stones have been recorded in Ireland, and including those in Britain, the number exceeds 400.
Similarities With Viking Futhark:
- they are named after the sounds of the first few letters (Bethluis, Bethluisnin) not unlike our own Latin alphabet (from alpha and beta)
- the names were chosen because of their phonetic similarities to the sound of the letter
- they were fairly simple characters, mostly lines, designed to carve into stone
- many of the first occurances of these stones served simply as grave markers
- both were occasionally written and read backwards (right to left)
- bindrunes share the same characteristic of the ridge line in ogham: a vertical
- many of the characters definitely correspond to real Old Irish words, and many we can’t be sure of – the direct correspondence to the names of trees is mostly a convenient interpretation (Graves, Limerick, 1846)
The lettering system seems to have been contrived by those who possessed some knowledge of at least one other foreign alphabet. Ogham seems most closely related to the Latin alphabet and runic futhorc.
There are three main sources of information of which scholars derive their understanding of the Old Irish ogham: the Auraicept (originating from the Book of Ballymote, 1390), In Lebor Ogaim (literally “The Book of Oghams”, also known as the Ogham Tract), and De dúilib feda na forfed.
The Auraicept (also Uraicept in some places) is an Old Irish text on language and grammar.
The Ogam Tract is an Old Irish treatise on the ogham alphabet.