Ogham
The Trees Came Later
- First attested
- 4th centuryRoughly 400 "orthodox" stone inscriptions in Primitive Irish, catalogued and numbered in Macalister's Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum (1945–49); c. 247 of the Irish examples come from Kerry, Cork and Waterford, with the largest concentration outside Ireland in Pembrokeshire. Dated by linguistic criteria to the fourth to sixth centuries CE. The manuscript tradition — In Lebor Ogaim and Auraicept na nÉces — survives earliest in the Book of Ballymote (RIA MS 23 P 12), written 1390–91, the ogham tract at pages 308–314.
The 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.
Ireland's earliest script, and on almost every stone just a name; the tree alphabet came later.
About four hundred inscriptions survive from Ireland — above all Munster — and western Britain, cut in the fourth to sixth centuries: one to five strokes notched across a standing stone's edge, read upward. Almost all are a personal name in the genitive — X MAQI Y, X son of Y — commemorating a man, and on a common reading staking a claim to land. They are the earliest written Irish, and the tree alphabet is not on them. It belongs to the scholastic treatises In Lebor Ogaim and Auraicept na nÉces, surviving earliest in the Book of Ballymote, about 1391; McManus dates that doctrine to the Old Irish period and counts at most eight of the twenty names as trees. Tochmarc Étaíne has a druid divining with ogam on yew wands, but today's tree oracle rests on Robert Graves's calendar of 1948.
Light
The earliest written Irish — a script that McManus argues was devised by someone who knew how Latin grammarians sorted letters, then built for a standing stone's edge rather than a page. A fifth-century name cut in Kerry is still legible, and still a name.
Shadow
Many stones survive only because later generations roofed souterrains with them — seven came out of one roof at Coolmagort in 1838, monuments turned to building material. What replaced the record is worse than forgetting: a thirteen-month tree calendar invented in 1948, sold as druidic inheritance.
