The ogam-name(h)úath – afearful bed of thorns

Text of a presentation to theKeltisch Colloquium 2014

Saturday 17 May 2014 Bucheliuszaal, Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht

I want to talk about the Irish ogam-name (h)úath, which was assigned to the character in the ogam scriptrepresenting H. This will give me an opportunity to say something in general about the ogam script and thenames that were given to the characters, before I explain why the ogam character H in particular isproblematic, i.e. a thorny issue.

Some of you will be familiar with the cryptic script known as ogam through the work of Damian McManus,who has written a number of articles on the subject, as well as a book – An Introduction to Ogam. And if youhave ever looked the word ‘ogam’ up on the internet, you are sure to have come across countless websites,both serious and highly fanciful. According to Wikipedia, ogam ‘is sometimes called the "Celtic TreeAlphabet", based on a high medieval Bríatharogam tradition ascribing names of trees to the individualletters.’ And that is part of the problem! You’ll find a good example of the nonsense that has been written onthe subject on the website: http://dutchie.org/celtic-tree-lore/.

The oldest surviving examples of the ogam script are inscriptions on standingstones. The characters take the form of strokes carved along the edge of thestone, beginning from the bottom left-hand side, continuing upwards, over thetop and down the right-hand side. It is also possible that inscriptions werecarved on wooden staves but, if so, no examples have survived. The earliestinscriptions are found in southern Ireland from the fourth century AD on, thenlater to the north and east, into western Britain and eventually the Scottishhighlands. From the seventh century on, epigraphic inscriptions in Irelandbecame fewer and fewer, but the script survived in manuscripts, where it waswritten horizontally, along a stemline simulating the edge of a stone.

West of KillarneyDunloe Lower ogam stonePhoto: Jim Dempsey and

Deb Snelsonhttp://www.megalithicireland.com/ Dunloe%20Ogham

%20Stones.htm

When arranged in sequence according to the number and position of the strokes either side of a stemline, thestrokes represent an alphabet comparable to the Latin, Greek or Hebrew alphabet, but with phonemes in acompletely different order. The sequence was known as the Beithe-luis or Beithe-luis-nin, from the names ofthe first two or first three characters. In the original set-up there were fifteen consonants amd five vowels,with conson-ants and vowels grouped separately, plus one supplementary character that appears to have beena velar consonant but was later used as a vowel, either a long /e:/ or a diphthong /ea/. The consonants werearranged in three groups of five, which together with the five vowels formed four families, called in Irishaicmi. In this and several other respects the ogam scheme resembled the Germanic fuþark, in which the runesare arranged in a completely different order to any Mediterranean alphabet and, like the ogam characters, aregrouped into three sets or families. Also, and most importantly in the present context, runes and ogamcharacters shared the characteristic of having meaningful names, like the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, butunlike the letters of the Greek and Latin alphabets, where the letter-names were meaningless.

http://www.ancientscripts.com/ogham.html

In the dissertation I defended in Leiden in June last year I accounted for these similarities and differences,but here is not the place, nor is their sufficient time to go into details; suffice it to say that I posit that both theogam scheme and the fuþark have similar origins, in a Gallo-Greek alphabet – not Latin, as most scholarssuggest today, and Transalpine, not Cisalpine, as Macalister suggested. Also, the names have a similar origin.As I have elected here to talk about the name of a particular ogam character, (h)úath, I want to focus on theprocess of coining names, rather than on the origin of the script as such, although I’d be delighted to answerany questions on origins of the system later. In the case of both ogam characters and runes, the consensus up to now has been that their names wereindigenous creations, probably invented early on, at the same time as the scripts themselves. According tothis view, the names of the runes – like beorc [birch] for b and ger [year, produce of a year, harvest] – wereinvented among the Germanic tribes somewhere on the Continent and brought by the Angles and Saxonsalong with the use of runes when they migrated to Britain. Similarly, the names of the ogam characters – likebeith [birch] for B and gort [field, produce of a field, harvest] for G – were inventions coeval with theinvention of the script, maybe on the Continent, but in any case designed to suit the Celtic dialect for whichthe ogam script was created.

Now, I’ve rather irresponsibly chosen examples of names that will superficially suggest connexions betweenthe names for runic and ogam B and G. The reality, of course, is not so simple. But these examples indicatethat there may be connexions between rune and ogam names that go beyond pure coincidence. The thesis Idefended last June is that the Irish and Germanic names were not created in indigenous isolation but that firstIrish ogam-names were created on the basis of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and that then the Anglo-Saxon rune-names were coined along similar lines, influenced by the Irish ogam-names. This, if you will, ismy thesis in a nutshell. A first reaction to such an idea is often that Hebrew is a difficult language and surelynot well enough known in north-western Europe in the fourth century AD for anyone to understand Hebrewletter-names, let alone invent Irish or English names based on Hebrew. Latin maybe. Greek less likely.Hebrew certainly not.

In answer to such objections, I would pont out that the first use of ogam in southern Ireland is found in analready Christian context. In a Christian environment an important element of worship was reflection on thepsa;ms, which were customarily collected in psalters. And an important element of a psalter was the use ofthe Hebrew alphabet as an integral part of the acrostic psalms in particular. An example of a psalter in useearly on in England is the Vespasian Psalter, which was probably brought to Canterbury by ArchbishopTheodore and hjs assistant Hadrian in the eighth century. In one of the prefaces there is a good example of alisting of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet with transcriptions of their names and interpretations in Latin.

Greek alphabet with Latin interpretations of Hebrew letter-names.Vespasian Psalter BL, Cotton, Vespasian A 1, fol. 6v (Courtesy of the British Library)

Unfortunately, the earliest surviving example of a psalter in Ireland probably dates to no earlier than the sixthcentury, and what has survived is too fragmentary to contain any reference to the Hebrew alphabet. But itinconceivable that there were no psalters among early Christian congregations in Ireland. The earliestreference to Hebrew words in an Irish context is found in O’Mulconry’s glossary, which probably dates tothe seventh century. The Latin glosses on these Hebrew words as well as the Latin interpretaions of theHebrew letter-names can be traced back to the work of Jerome and Ambrose, and perhaps to an earlyrabbinical tradition. According to this tradition, the letter-names were interpreted as meaningful Hebrewwords, not always exactly the same as the name itself, but close enough to be capable of interpretation, andoften placed in syntactic relationships to form meaningful sentences.

An example from Jewish teaching is this passage from the Babylonian Talmud, specifically in the Gemaracommentary on the Mishna, Shabbath XII.3:1

Alef Beth [means] ‘learn wisdom’ [Alef Binah]; Gimmel Daleth, ‘show kindness to the Poor’ [GemolDallim]. Why is the foot of the Gimmel stretched toward the Daleth? Because it is fitting for thebenevolent to run after [seek out] the poor. And why is the roof of the Daleth stretched out toward theGimmel? Because he [the poor] must make himself available to him. And why is the face of the Dalethturned away from the Gimmel? Because he must give him [help] in secret.

As you see, the commentary takes account of the ordering of the letters in the alphabet and their shapes, andinterprets the names with near-homonymous Hebrew equivalents, so that the sequence forms a narrative witha didactic, moral message. The ultimate purpose, however, would seem to have been not so much to tell amoral tale, but as to provide a means of teaching the alphabet.

It’s entirely clear whether Jewish exonents of the Bible influenced the Christian patristic tradition or whetherthe influence was the other way round, but an example from a letter of Jerome in a letter written to a certainPaula, who had asked him to explain the form of Ps. CXVIII. In this letter Jerome follows Eusebius ofCaesarea, who linked the names of the Hebrew letters to form a message like that in the Talmud. The firstfive letters he interprets, in Greek, as follows:

a a1lf = ma&qhsij [act of learning, instruction], b bh&q=oi1kou [of the house], gen. of oi1koj ,g gi&mel=plh&rwsij [a filling up, becoming full], d de&lq = de&ltwn [of writing-tablets, books], gen. plur. of de&ltoj,h h=au3th [it], fem. sing. of au0to&j.

If you join these together you get a sentence of some sort:

1 See: http://www.come-and-hear.com/shabbath/shabbath_104.html.

ma/qhsij oi)/kou, plh/rwsij de/ltwn au(/th [the teaching of the house, it itself (is) an abundance of books].

With ‘house’ he is presumably referring to the House of the Lord. Jerome translates the first two Hebrewnames as doctrina domus, which he interprets as doctrina Ecclesiae, quae domus Dei est.

For Ambrose, the letter-names were a springboard for extensive homilies, which are too long to quote herebut are just as important as Jerome’s interpretations for them to have been a source for the understanding ofHebrew letter-names throughout the early Church and to have formed the basis of numerous inventories, likethat in the Vespasian Psalter, throughout the early Middle Ages – sometimes with disastrously distortedresults.

As you will gather from these examples, the correspondences between the names and the interpretations werenot always a matter of direct translation, but involved a search for homonyms, near-homonyms, synonyms,metaphors, interpretations of letter-shape, and a number of other techniques. If you want to know more aboutthe processes, you’ll have to read my book, because here and now I want to concentrate on the Irish word forthe ogam character H, (h)úath, and how this name came to be given to the character and how it wasinterpreted in later contexts when the original process of name-giving seems to have been forgotten.

As I said at the start of this talk, I have chosen the ogam character H and its name precisely because it raisesa number of thorny issues. The first and by no means least of these issues is whether there even was aphoneme /h/ and a character representing it in the earliest version og ogam. No evidence of H is found inepigraphic inscriptions and occurs for the first time in manuscript versions of the script that start to appear asits use epigraphically begins to die out in the seventh and eighth centuries. In manuscripts, ogam was writtenhorizontally, in line with the Latin script, along a horizontal stemline to simulate the edge of a stone. inmanuscripts, the first character of the second aicme or family of characters was clearly described asrepresenting a phoneme /h/ and having the name úath or húath. Úath, without an initial ‹h›, was an Irishword meaning ‘fear’. But it has been reasoned that, because the name was assigned to the character H, andbecause ogam-names were assumed to be acrophonic, i.e. to begin with the same letter as the character theyrepresented, an initial ‹h› was added to úath to make it comply with the acrophonic principle. By the samereasoning, if úath was the original name and the Irish dialect of the time did have a phoneme for /h/, thecharacter at the beginning of the second aicme will originally have represented a phoneme for which úathwas a more appropriate name.

Damian McManus has been one of those who has doubted whether the Irish dialect at the time of theinvention of the ogam script had an /h/ phoneme. Since he also believed the coining of the names was coevalwith the invention of the script, he assumed that a character with an original name úath, coined on theacrophonic principle, will have represented a phoneme closer to /j/, as a consonantal parallel to vocalic /i/ ona par with an original parallel between ogam /u/ and /w/, later transcribed as an ‹f›. He looks for anetymology in the Welsh udd [lord], but etymology fails him:

The nearest one can get to úath with an initial /y/ is a Primitive Irish *yódos (< *youdos cognate with Welsh udd‘lord’ < *youdyos, from the root *yeudh- ‘to fight’) but this would have yielded Old Irish *úad, not úath.2

He also rejects the idea of a Primitive Irish *yótos from Greek iota, since this would have made úath the onlyloanword among the twenty ogam-names. Nevertheless he persists with the idea that the phoneme originallyrepresented by the character was not /h/ but was assigned to H at a later date when ogam was being realignedwith the Latin alphabet. Accordingly, the initial ‹h› in the manuscript form of the name was a cosmeticaddition as part of the realignment.

However, Pedersen was of the opinion that ‘a radical [h] sound did exist in Primitive Irish and Old Irish inwords formerly beginning with /p/ and /i/ (and proclitics in /s/)’.3 Sims-Williams also disagrees withMcManus and offers seven possible reasons why ‘Primitive Irish must have had the phoneme /h/ and/orallophone [h], perhaps in more than one variety.’4 These are:

1. Final /s/ > (‘some sort of’) /h/, although early ogam inscriptions used sail in this position.

2 McManus 1991: 36.3 Pedersen 1909: 410–11, in McManus’s translation 1988: 154.4 See Sims-Williams 1993: 163–9 for these and subsequent comments.

2. Medial *s had disappeared by the time of the early inscriptions but the metathesis apparent in Welshhaern < *isarn- may be evidence that the disappearance occurred via /h/.

3. There is a possibility that an Irish /h/ < IE *p may have survived up to the time of ogam’s invention.Cf. Schrijver: Húath may denote a consonantal reflex of IE *p: *hótV- < *pou-tV- (cf. Lat. pauere[fear]).5

4. Úath may have been intended to represent the /x/ < /k/ that is transcribed as Latin H in some earlyCeltic texts.

5. A Pictish ogam NEH(H)T- could be evidence that H may have been intended to represent the [x]allophone of /k/ in /kt/ and /ks/ combinations, only to be seen as redundant due to the use of ogam Cfor the [x] allophone of /k/.

6. /h/ was so marginal in Irish that it never appeared in inscriptions.

7. Ogam H was included in the system as equivalent to Latin H without any intention for it to be used.

I’m not going to go through all these suggestions here, but No. 3, which was put forward by Peter Schrijveris particularly significant in the present context. However, Sims-Williams ultimately rejects the ideaas ‘quite uncertain’. Instead, he favours a suggestion originally put forward by Meroney: ‘An h-likesymbol is the typical Insular nota abbreviationis for Latin autem … ; some dunce or wag turned thisinto Irish uathem “most fearsome,” and then dropped the ending.’ Sims-Williams justifies the use of aLatin loan-word for an ogam-name by pointing to the fact that it not only would have been impossibleto find a native Irish word with initial h-, but H was not regarded as a real letter, being only a notaaspirationis.

The Meroney/Sims-Williams idea has its attraction, but I find Peter Schrijver’s idea more attractive and thinkI can counter the charge of it being ‘quite uncertain’. My support for the idea, however, is not philological.The fundamental question I would ask is why the ogam character H would have been given a name meaning‘fear’ even if that name did begin with ‹h›. After all, aren’t ogam-names supposed to form a tree-alphabet?Beith [birch], dair [oak], fern [alder], sail [willow], coll [hazel], and so on. Even H, with its name úath, issupposed to be linked to scé, the whitethorn or hawthorn. Is the white thorn to be seen as an icon of fear –like the Anglo-Saxon rune-name þorn and its Scandinavian equivalent þurs, a giant that instilled fear inwomen?

Before answering this question of fear, I must deal with the general question of sources for ogam-names andmore particularly the tree-alphabet. No names of ogam characters are found in epigraphic inscriptions. Listsof names are, however, found in manuscripts compiled in the middle Irish period but apparently derived fromtracts written in Old Irish. The most important text in this respect has in fact acquired the title The Book ofOgams – In lebor ogaim. In the body of this text there are three lists relating to ogam and one giving thenames of trees as categorized in another tract known as the Laws of Neighbours – Bretha Comaithchesa. Butthe author of The Book of Ogams seems to be confused, because he starts by explaining that ogam wasinvented by Ogma, son of Elatha, that the first ogam character is B, the birch, and that the whole scheme hasfour aicmi of five characters each. Then he turns to the lists of trees given in the Laws of Neighbours. In thelaw book there are four categories of eight trees each, but the author of The Book of Ogams mentions onlythree categories and gives only 15 names of trees from the first two categories. More confusingly, he followsthis list up with the assertion that all ogam characters are named after trees and, as if to prove this, he lists thenames one by one, each with an explanation referring to a tree isin caill [in the forest] – the only exceptionbeing midiu [?mead] for muin.

Much more substantial than this initial listing of ogam-names are two sets of explanations that are given atthe end of the main text of Yhe Book of Ogams. These explanations use a form of trope known asbriatharogam, literally ‘word ogam’, which has been compared to a Germanic kenning, although strictlyspeaking there arte differences between the two. A word ogam consists of a two-word periphrasis orcircumlocution. often two nouns, one in the genitive, but also a noun and an adjective in the superlative. Thepurpose of a word ogam was to provide a description sufficient for the name being described to deduced,although in many cases it could be a matter of guesswork rather than deduction. The difficulties they

5 See Schrijver’s suggested etymology of húath quoted in McManus (1991: 37) as a personal communication andsubsequently published as Schrijver 1997: 222–4.

presented are demonstrated by the fact it was later found to be necessary to provide extensive glosses eoexplain the explanations.

There are basically three quite distinct sets of word ogams and subsequent glosses. The two sets found at theend of the text of The Book of Ogams are attributed to Morann mac Moin and Mac in Óc. On linguisticgrounds McManus date both sets to before 800, while Charles Graves pointed out that The Book of Ogamscannot be earlier than the beginning of the eighth century, since it refers to Adamnan, who died in 704. Somelater manuscripts repeat the same two sets of word ogams in column form, with shorter glosses, and add athird set attributed to Cú Chulain. In the appendix I give examples of the word ogams and glosses for(h)úath, which I will return to below. The fourth set in this example is the only set found in the commentaryof the Auraicept na nÉces, Students’ Primer, in Book IV, which is attributed to Fénius, Íar mac Nema andGaidel mac Ethéoir, and dated by Thurneysen to the second half of the tenth century at the earliest.

When the descriptions and glosses are examined in detail, it has to be concluded that there are no more thanfive ogam-names that are indisputably the names of trees as defined by the word ogams: beithe, sail, fern,duir, coll. These five names are included in the list set out as alphabet 27, without glosses, amongst all theother ogam schemes on the pages at the end of the Book of Ogams. In this list H doesn’t actually have aname.

However, in another list, alphabet 26, just above alphabet 27 on the same page, all the names are the namesof trees, with again the exception of midiu for muin. Even the name of H is sgé [whitethorn].

What in fact we find is that, across the spectrum of glosses on the word ogams, there appears to be anincreasing number of references to trees and shrubs. It’s not clear whether this progression is chronological,but, if we take the glosses on the consonants, the longer glosses contain a limited number of references totrees or shrubs; the very short glosses of Cu Chulainn seem to have had little room for references to trees andshrubs, but in the other two sets of short glosses and in the Auraicept glosses there are significantly morereferences, while the introductory list in The Book of Ogams contains not only a large number of tree glosses,but an increasing number of them are acrophonic. Finally, in alphabet 26, all the acrophonic tree glosses havebeen promoted to the full status of ogam-names.In other words, ogam did not start out as a tree alphabet, as proposed by Rodereric O’Flaherty in theseventeenth century and championed by Vendryes and Robert Graves in the twentieth century, Under theinfluence of a few names that were indisputably tree-names, as well as the idea that the characters werefedha, trees, because their branching shapes looked like trees, the trees of the forest encroached on the wholesystem – and we are still suffering today from the consequences on all those weido websites on the internet!

But where does this leave the ogam-name úath? We have established that it is the name of the h-phoneme,which did exist in the Irish dialect at the time ogam’s invention. Although it is glossed with the name of atree, scé, whitethorn, úath is not the name of a tree but means ‘fear, and is conceivably cognate with Latinpauere. What we have not determined is why a name meaning ‘fear’ was assigned to ogam H and why theword ogams and glosses relating to H refer to a thorn tree and packs of dogs. A fearsome thorn-bush?Fearsome packs of dogs?

My answer, in line with the custom of the Auraicept na nÉces, is ni ansa, ‘not difficult’. Put simply. the nameof the letter equivalent to ogam H in the Hebrew alphabet is chet. Ambrose interpreted this name as pauor[fear]. In so doing he was associating chet with Hebrew with one or more Hebrew words meaning ‘fear’:

ttj chatath [be afraid, be dismayed], tj chath [dismayed, broken, fear], htj chittah [terror], or tytj chittith [terror].

A coincidence? I don’t think so, because it is just one of series of instances of correspondence between thename of a Hebrew letter and the name of an equivalent ogam character.

Some of the word ogams and glosses associated with úath clearly have to do with a sense of fear (sse theappendix). The B and C word ogams, for example, are unproblematic. The word ogams, Bánad gnúise[Blanching of faces] and Ansam aidche [Most difficult at night] can both be seen as symptomatic of beingterrified. It is even possible that what is being referred to here is a spectre, a nocturnal spirit, a úath or fúath –a word homonymous with úath [fear].

The word ogam, Condál cúan [Assembly of packs of hounds], is more complex. The association of H andhounds or wolves could perhaps be ascribed to the sound of panting canines, as might be confirmed by theuse of Latin asper to describe a ‘rough sound’ and in particular the rough growling sound of the letter R,which was known as the littera canina [canine letter].6 The reference to hounds might therefore reflect theLatin expression littera canina. Admittedly, H is not R, but in Latin words borrowed from Greek, where therho was aspirated, an h was appended to the r, as a sign of the spiritus asper.7 An alternative explanationcould also relate to an Irish grammatical term, namely condail [the internal division of a word by theinsertion of meaningless syllables]. DIL cites an example from Aur. 1501: a condaill .i. a caindeligud.8

Condail is the verbal noun of condaili, to which DIL attaches two meanings: (a) ‘shares’ and (b) ‘meetstogether’. The first meaning implies a relation with dáilid [portions out] and 4 dál [dispensing of drink andfood; distributing], while the second meaning relates to 2 dál [a meeting] and comdál [meeting, tryst]. Theform of the word comdál used in the word ogam is condál [assembly], which DIL describes as ‘appar[entlya] modification or earlier form of comdál infl[uenced] by cú’, i.e. the word for ‘dog’ – the prefixes con-,com-, co- (cf. L. co-) being confused with forms of cú [dog] (n.pl. coin, g.s. & g.pl. con). Accordingly, Isuggest that the assembly of packs of hounds refers to the meeting of two adjacent vowels separated by theinsertion of a (meaningless) H.9

Similarly, with their reference to the thorn, the glosses are also hinting at a grammatical use of H, inparticular in lenition and aspiration. Not only is úathad a term for lenition and the mark of aspiration,10 butreferences throughout the Auraicept confirm the use of H to indicate aspiration. An example that echoesstatements of Priscian and Isidore is the following:

h non est litera sed nota aspirationis, i.e. h is not a letter but a sign of aspiration. Tinfedh, i.e. tiniudhfeadh [vanishing, melting away of signs], i.e. disintegration of a sign on transfer to any of them.11

6 Lewis and Short, s.v. asper.7 Lewis and Short, s.v. R. I.8 DIL, s.v. 1 condail.9 See DIL, s.v. H. In later spelling, according to DIL, an h- was prefixed to initial stressed vowels in numerous

instances where the preceding word terminated with a vowel.10 DIL, s.v. 2 úathad.11 Aur. 767–9. Calder 1917: 56–7; my own English translation; cf. Priscian: H enim aspirationis magis est nota … H

literam non esse ostendimus, sed notam spirationis (Keil 1857–80: 2.7.27–9.23); also Isidore: H autem littera prosola aspiratione adiecta postea est, non littera, quae proinde aspirationis nota dicitur, quia vocem elevat. Aspiratioenim est sonus uberius elatus, cuius contraria est prosodia, sonus aequaliter flexus (Etym. I, 4, 11).

The word used for aspiration here, tinfedh, is the verbal noun of do-infet [to blow, breathe]. The Irish text,however, links it to tinad [act of melting, vanishing], and fedh [letter], so that tinfedh is analysed as tiniudhfeadh [melting of letters].

In another context, I have suggested that the connexion between úath and scé [thorn] might be related to theGreek signs for aspiration and lenition being perceived as accents.12 The signs, or diacritics, were createdfrom the letter H by cutting it in two halves: ├ for the spiritus asper and ┤ for the spiritus lenis. Accordingto Calder, a marginal note on pp. 325, 326 of the Book of Ballymote manuscript reads: ‘Aspiratio H, dassien[daseian] ├, scilen [yilhn] ┤.’13 Meroney (1949: 28) even suggested that there may have been anassociation between the Greek sign ├ and the ogam sign for H: ┤. But this is unlikely since the Greek ├resembles an ogam B, while ogam H is resembles the spiritus lenis: ┤. In Greek the technical term for adiacritic like the spiritus asper was kerai&a, which literally means ‘horn’ or ‘horn-like projection’, but inHebrew the term was Åwq, qots, which means ‘thorn’, and in Old English pricele [prick, thorn].

A well-known reference to the use of diacritics is found in the Bible at Matthew V.18:

Vulgate: Amen quippe dico vobis, donec transeat cælum et terra, jota unum aut unus apex non præteribita lege, donec omnia fiant. [D-R translation: For amen I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot,or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled.]

The iota in the Vulgate translation refers to the Greek equivalent of the name of the Hebrew letter yod, whichwas the smallest in the Hebrew alphabet and was used as a metaphor for ‘a small matter’. A more literaltranslation in English would be ‘a yod or a thorn of a yod’. The ‘thorn of a yod’ – in Hebrew dwy l� wxwq, qotsoshel yod – refers to the small thorn-like or horn-like protuberance atop the letter yod and metaphoricallymeans ‘the smallest of the small’.

In the Lindesfarne Gospels an Old English translation of the term, namely pricele [prickle, sharp point, verysmall thing], is found in the glosses on the lines from Matthew,14 which may indicate a closer link with theHebrew qots [thorn] than with the Greek kerai&a.

To sum up, I began this journey by emphasizing the thorny nature of ogam H, which is not helped by thepopulsr perception that ogam-names formed a ‘Celtic Tree Alphabet’. I then gave an overview of the ogamscheme, hinting at my theory that the scheme itself was based on a Gallo-Greek alphabet and that the namesof the characters were based on Latin interpretations of Hebrew letter-names developed by people likeJerome and Ambrose. The next stop on the way was whether the inventory of sounds accounted for in theoriginal scheme included an /h/ phoneme. I gratefully accepted the assurances of others that it did andproposed that these assurances were supported by my own explanation of the source of the name of thecharacter, namely Ambrose’s Latin interpretation of the Hebrew letter-name.

However, there was first the little matter of a forest of trees to be cleared away before we could get down tothe root of úath with its sense of ‘fear’, with its association with those assemblies of packs of hounds, andwith the whitethorn, which turned out to be a metaphor for H as an orthographic tool alongside arnin andforsail. But, of course, as well as fearful thorns, the hawthorn also has fabulous white blossom, and equallyfabulous red fruit. A tree truly worthy of myth and fantasy!

12 Griffiths 2006: 89–90, note 8.13 Calder 1917: 94.14 forurd ł pricls an ł enne … enne pricle ł stæfes heafod … ne forgæs. London, British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv (s.

viii1/4–x3/4) 35r. In the Anglo-Saxon Gospels, the word used was prica [prick]: Án i oððe án prica ne gewit fram ðæreǽ (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 140 (990 x 1030), ed. Bosworth and Waring, 1874: 18).

Appendix: Word ogams and glosses describing the name of ogam H: (H)úath

Morann mac Moin

Word ogam Condál cúan Assembly of packs of hounds

Long gloss.Book of Ogams,all MSS

.i. uath sin, ar is uath la nech conal chon alladh. Conal cuan do rad re huath in ogaim (some texts add: .i. sce, ar is uatmar i ara deilgibh) ar coibnius* in anma, ar uath iad as ænrian.

.i.e that is Úath for an assembly of wolves isfearsome to a person. ‘Assembly of packs ofhounds’ is applied [as a kenning] to the Húath of Ogam, (some texts add: i.e. whitethorn, for it is fearsome on account of its thorns) because of the kinship of the name, for they are úath alike.

Short gloss.Later MSSonly

.i. is ann fo-ceird coin alti uaill .i. sceii.e.it is there that wolves howl, i.e. whitethorn.

Auraicept gloss

Huath dono, is o chrand ro hainmniged .i. sce ut dicitur comdal cuan huath (some textsadd: .i. sce) no ar is atmar hi ara deilgibh (some texts add: no is minic la cach comdailic sgiaigh).

Húath, then, was called after a tree, i.e. the whitethorn ut dicitur ‘Assembly of packs of hounds’, is húath (some texts add: i.e. whitethorn) for it is fearsome on account of its thorns (some texts add: or people frequently meet at a whitethorn).

* Some texts read: choidelighiudh for coibnius [choibdelighiudh = ‘opportunity’ or (?) coibdelachas = ‘kinship’].

Mac in Óc

Word ogam Bánad gnúise Blanching of faces

Long gloss.Book of Ogams,all MSS

.i. uath, ar is ban gnuis in duine in tan do-berar uath no uamun uimi. Uad-side for fid in ogaim. ar æntaid anma aturu fen .i. uath cechtar de.

i.e. úath, for a person’s face is white when he is surrounded by terror or fear. [The kenning was transferred] thence to the Ogamletter on account of the identity of name between them, i.e. both are úath.

Short gloss.Later MSSonly

.i. scei. i.e. whitethorn.

Cu Chullain

Word ogam Ansam aidche Most difficult at night

Short gloss.Later MSSonly

.i. huath. i.e. fear.

Selected bibliography

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— 1987. ‘An Irish Text on the Letters of the Alphabet’. In: Simon-Vandenbergen, A., ed., 3–16.Ambrose, Expositio in Psalmum CXVIII, PL XV: 1197–1526. Bremmer Jr., R. H., and K. Dekker, eds., 2007. Foundations of Learning: The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in

the Early Middle Ages. Storehouses of Wholesome Learning I (Paris/Leuven/Dudley, MA).Calder, G., ed., 1917. Auraicept na n-Éces, The Scholars’ Primer. Being the Texts of the Ogham Tract from the Book of

Ballymote and the Yellow Book of Lecan, and the Text of the Trefhocul from the Book of Leinster Edited from EightManuscripts, with Introduction, Translation of the Ballymote Text, Notes, and Indices (Edinburgh).

Carney, J., 1975. ‘The Invention of the Ogom Cipher’, Ériu 26: 53–65.Eusebius of Caesarea, Demonstratio evangelica, liber 10, cap. 5, PG XXI: 787–90.Fellows-Jensen, G., B. Holmberg, M. Lerche Nielsen and M. Stoklund, eds., 2006. Runes and their Secrets: Studies in

Runology. Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Runes and Runic Inscriptions, Jelling, 2000(Copenhagen).

Gerschel, L., 1962. ‘L’ogam et le nombre’, Études Celtiques 10: 127–66; 516–57.Goldschmidt, L., 1930. Der babylonische Talmud (Berlin).Graves, C., 1876. ‘The Ogam Alphabet’, Hermathena 2: 443–72.— 1879. ‘On the Ogam Beith Luis Nin’, Hermathena 3: 208–44.Graves, R., 1961 (reprint 1971). The White Goddess (London).Griffiths, A., 1999. ‘The Fuþark (and Ogam): Order as a Key to Origin’, Indogermanische Forschungen 104: 164–210. — 2006. ‘Rune-names: the Irish Connexion’. In: Fellows-Jensen, G., et al., eds., 83–116.— 2007. ‘The Canterbury Psalter’s Alphabet Glosses. Eclectic but Incompetent?’. In: Bremmer Jr, R. H., and K.

Dekker, eds., 213–51.Jerome, Epistula XXX ad Paulam, PL XXII: 441–5. — Liber de nominibus hebraicis, PL XXIII: 771–858 (also known as Liber interpretationis hebraicorum nominum.— Liber de situ et nominibus locorum hebraicorum, PL XXIII: 859–928B.Kelly, F., 1976. ‘The Old Irish Tree–list’, Celtica 11: 107–24.Lagarde, P. de, 1870. Onomastica Sacra (Göttingen).Macalister, R., 1937. The secret languages of Ireland (Cambridge), 1–36.McManus, D., 1983. ‘A Chronology of the Latin Loan-words in Early Irish’, Ériu 34: 21–71.— 1986. ‘Ogam: Archaizing, Orthography and the Authenticity of the Manuscript Key to the Alphabet’, Ériu 37: 1–31.— 1988. ‘Irish Letter-names and their Kennings’, Ériu 39: 127–68.— 1989. ‘Runic and Ogam Letter-names: a Parallelism’. In: Ó Corráin, D., et al., eds., 144–8.— 1991. A Guide to Ogam (Maynooth).Meroney, H., 1949. ‘Early Irish Letter-names’, Speculum 24: 19–43.Müller, D. H., 1911. ‘Die Deutungen der hebräischen Buchstaben bei Ambrosius’, Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserliche

Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 167. Band, 2. Abhandlung (Vienna).Ó Corráin D., L. Breatnach and K. McCone, eds., 1989. Sages, Saints and Storytellers. Celtic Studies in Honour of

Professor James Carney (Maynooth).Ó Flaherty, R., 1685. Ogygia: seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia & etc, Translated by J. Hely, 1793. ‘Ogygia, or a

Chronological Account of Irish Events (Collected from Very Ancient Documents Faithfully Compared with EachOther & Supported by the Genealogical & Chronological Aid of the Sacred and Profane Writings of the Globe’)(Dublin).

Schrijver, P., 1997. ‘On the Nature and Origin of Word-initial H- in the Würzburg Glosses’, Ériu 48: 205–27.Simon-Vandenbergen, A. M., ed., 1987. Studies in Honour of René Derolez (Ghent).Sims-Williams, P., 1992. ‘The Additional Letters of the Ogam Alphabet’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 23: 29–

75.— 1993. ‘Some Problems in Deciphering the Early Irish Ogam Alphabet’, Transactions of the Philological Society 91:

133–80.Stokes, W., 1898. ‘O’Mulconry’s Glossary’. In: Stokes and Meyer, eds., vol.1, 232–324, 473–81.Thurneysen, R., 1928. ‘Auraicept na n’Éces’ (a review of Calder, 1917), Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, 17: 277–

303.— 1937. ‘Zum Ogom’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (PBB) 61: 188–208.Stokes, W., and K. Meyer, 1898–1904. Archiv für celtische Lexikographie, 2 vols. (Halle).Vendryes, J., 1927. ‘Sur un nom ancien de l’arbre’, Revue Celtique 44: 313–9.— 1941. ‘L’écriture ogamique et ses origines’, Études Celtiques 4: 83–116. Wünsche, A., ed., 1909, Aus Israels Lehrhallen, IV. Kleine Midraschim zur jüdischen Ethik, Buchstaben und Zahlen-Symbolik, 168–98: ‘Erste (ältere) Rezension des Alphabet-Midrasch des R.’Akiba. (Jellinek Bet ha Midrasch III, 50–64.) Nach dem Krakauer und Amsterdamer Drucke’; 198–269: ‘Zweite (jüngere) Rezension des Alphabet-Midrasch desR.’Akiba. (Jellinek Bet ha Midrasch III, 12–49.) Nach dem Konstantinopolitaner und Venediger Drucke’ (Leipzig).