Robert Graves

Graves admitted his argument depended on tree letter-names in O'Flaherty's Ogygia (1685), which the ogham scholar Macalister called 'late artificialities'.

Robert Graves, The White Goddess, ch. 7 'Gwion's Riddle Solved' (text read in the amended 1961 edition, with Postscript 1960), on O'Flaherty's Ogygia and Macalister's letter

English poet and novelist (1895-1985), author of The White Goddess (1948).

Sources2 sources

Primary source

Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, 1948, Foreword; ch. 1; ch. 7 'Gwion's Riddle Solved'; ch. 14 (read in the 1961 amended edition)Graves's own theme of the Threefold Goddess, his thirteen-month tree calendar, his claim of logical deduction from ancient documents, and his admission that the argument rests on O'Flaherty's alphabet despite Macalister's warning.
They all seem to me to be late artificialities, or rather
Roderic O'Flaherty, Ogygia: seu rerum Hibernicarum chronologia, 1685Date of O'Flaherty's Ogygia, the seventeenth-century source of the letter-names on which Graves built his tree alphabet.