Northern European Folk · Celtic
Symbol · Celtic Traditions
Dara Knot
Roots of the Oak Tree
Strength that is all underground: what holds through a storm is the part no one ever sees.
What it meansThe whole figure is root, and that is the argument: an oak stands through a storm because of a structure nobody has ever looked at. Strength here is defined as the part that is not on display, and the emblem shows only what is normally underground.
Symbol · 4th century
Ogham
The Trees Came Later
Ireland's earliest script, and on almost every stone just a name; the tree alphabet came later.
What it meansIt is written along an edge — the corner of a standing stone is the line, and the strokes cross it. So the script requires a three-dimensional object and reads upward. Nearly every surviving stone says only a name, which is the use: to mark that someone was here.
The FindingThe ogham tree alphabet is on none of the c. 400 stones — it is a doctrine of the medieval manuscript schools, surviving earliest in the Book of Ballymote of about 1391 — and the thirteen-month tree calendar behind the ogham oracles sold today is Robert Graves's, from 1948.
Movement · the 50s BCE
The Druids
No Word of Their Own
The learned class of Iron Age Gaul and Britain: described only by outsiders, reinvented after 1700.
What it meansCaesar reports that they held their learning too sacred to write, memorising for up to twenty years — which is why nothing of theirs survives. The prohibition is the only doctrine we can be reasonably confident of, and it is the reason we know nothing else.
The FindingNo druid left a surviving word of his own: the white robe, oak and golden sickle are one paragraph of Pliny, and the triads, Awen and bardic circles sold as druidic wisdom were written by Iolo Morganwg himself between about 1790 and 1826.