Origins and Uses
A little history, a little speculation…

Ogham’s origins are uncertain.

In the Iron Age and the first four and a half centuries AD the Irish Celts had no written history for they did not see the need to write. Like the Greeks of Homer’s time they committed things to memory and passed them on orally.

It is likely that the druids and filí (poets or bards) knew how to write but deliberately did not commit their knowledge to script so as to concentrate the power of memory and to ensure the purity of the oral tradition. Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico (Of the Gallic Wars) asserts that the druids believed their teachings would be profaned if written down.

Although Ceasar, again in De Bello Gallico, notes that, “… in their public and private accounts, they make use of Greek letters”, the Irish used no written alphabet other than ogham until Christian missionaries introduced Latin letters.

The Irish were, however, certainly aware of Latin letters when ogham was in use. On one of the second-century CE “Ballinderry Dice” the numeral 5 is represented as three straight lines, echoing the oghamic characters fearn and ur – f and u standing for the Roman numeral V as consonant and vowel.

The names of the ogham feda

The names of the ogham feda are likely of earlier origin than the letter-forms themselves. The literal meaning of ogham is thought to be “skilled use of words”. The filí may have used the names in a peculiar form of cryptic speech in which things whose names start with the same sound belong to the same mystical class, a deeper correspondence than simple poetic alliteration.

While other naming schemes are used – there are examples of bird-ogham and colour-ogham for instance – trees were of primary symbolic importance in the druidic tradition, and so tree-ogham became the canonical form.

Against this, however, there is a scholarly opinion that, “The characters were probably given names in the 14th Century AD (no earlier) for teaching purposes so that children could recognise them.” (Ellis)

Nevertheless, it seems that at first ogham was a kind of oral “code” in which tree (or bird or colour or…) names could be substituted for the corresponding sounds or for other words beginning with those sounds. You can imagine the scene: A chieftain turns to his druid and asks, “Who gets the hero’s portion: Fionn or Cúchulainn?” To which the druid replies, “The alder [ fern = Fionn] stands taller than the hazel [coll = Cúchulainn].”

The order of the ogham feda

Both the letter forms and order of European alphabets have had remarkable endurance: ogham defies a ready relationship with other alphabets on both counts. This suggests an arcane significance to ogham.

The alphabet that underlies ogham was almost certainly a classical alphabet adapted for use in writing Celtic. Why, otherwise, would it include letters – huath (h) and straif (z) – that are not found in ogham inscriptions in Celtic? (Although they are used in Pictish inscriptions.) The two candidates are Chalcidic Greek, in use in Etruscan Italy in the last few centuries BCE, and Roman Latin.

But why this particular ordering of the ogham feda? The following explanation is attributed to R.A.S. Macalister.

To the Roman Latin alphabet the Celts added f (consonantal v) and ng to give 20 letters ―

A B C D E • G H I L M • N O Q R S • T V Z F NG

The vowels – A E I O V (i.e., A E I O U) – form an obvious group, but the order A O U E I presumes some bardic understanding of phonetics as it places the “broad”, back vowels before the “slender”, front ones.

The second aicme derives from the initials of the early Irish names for the numerals 1 to 5 – huath, da, tri, cathair, quic - to give H D T C Q.

This leaves the sequence ―

B G L M N • R S Z F NG

― which decomposes into two aicme by taking alternate letters.

The second aicme – G M R Z NG – is then rearranged by beginning with M, the “middle” letter of the original twenty, and working backwards. This seems to be an egregious sleight of hand by Macalister, but might well be in keeping with the bardic love of mystery and concealment.

The four aicme are finally ordered by the first letter of each but with the vowels last ―

B L N S F • H D T C Q • M G NG Z R • A O U E I

The reason for subsequently transposing N and F in the first aicme is obscure. The evidence for the original order is supposedly the name of the alphabet itself: beith-luis-nion. But many authorities hold that it always was B L F S N: Everson says, tanatlizingly, “One of these days I’m going to have to write a definitive page on this to put this irritating question to bed.”

Another theory is that the order of the ogham alphabet is phonological. But while there are phonetic relationships among pairs or triples of feda in the same aicme, there is no real consistency or progression in light of modern phonetics. (Contrast the logical arrangement of the principal glyphs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s tengwar.)

The table shows the “base” phonetic values of the letters (i.e., ignoring any eclipsis or lenition), based primarily on Dennis King’s notes on Old-Irish pronunciation (any errors are mine!).

Close phonetic relationships within an aicme are highlighted in bold (black or green).

Ogham as a substitution cipher

Whatever the logic behind the ordering, the druids and filí arrived at a tabular arrangement of the 20 letters reminiscent of what’s now known as a Polybius checkerboard, a cryptographic technique devised by the Greeks Polybius, Cleoxenes, and Democritus in the second century BCE.

The Polybius checkerboard allows each letter to be represented by a pair of numerical coordinates. Thus, it is a kind of substitution cipher. For example, CRYPTO (ΚΡΥΠΤΟ) would be encrypted as 25-42-45-41-44-35.

Were the druids and filí aware of Polybius’s cipher? Perhaps. In any case, by re-ordering the letters from the original Latin alphabet, they had essentially added a secret key to his substitution cipher, so creating a stronger cryptosystem – at least as long as the order of the letters remained a secret amongst only the druids and filí!

In Polybius’s signalling system the letter coordinates were conveyed using torches (perhaps by holding different numbers of torches to the right and left, perhaps by holding a torch in different positions in each hand, like semaphore flags).

In the ogham feda the coordinates are specified by the form of each fid: the row (aicme) is indicated by the orientation and length of the line(s); the column by the number of lines.

But there were ways other the ogham feda the druids and filí may have signalled the ogham coordinates…

Ogham signing

It is widely thought that druids and filí used an oghamic sign language to communicate with one another secretly.

In British Sign Language (BSL) fingerspelling many of the consonants are “drawn” by the fingers of the right hand on the “page” of the left - almost literally for j. But all the vowels – a, e, i, o, u – are indicated in a systematic, rather than graphic, way: by touching the right index finger to the tips of the left thumb and fingers.

The druids and filí seem to have followed a wholly systematic way for ogham.

The thumb and finger tips became b, l, f, s, n and the vowels – in the order a, o, u, e, i, of course – were the base of the thumb and fingers. The other two aicme were indicated by touching the first and second joints of the thumb and fingers.

This system seems to have afforded an easy and inconspicuous way of communication.

The left hand might be likened to the keypad of a mobile phone! People who use SMS text messaging a lot – mostly teenagers! – can develop a remarkable acuity in sending messages; druids and filí would presumably have developed similar skill in signalling in this way.

BSL fingerspelling itself and deafblind manual provide more accurate parallels.

Fingerspelling is a very small part of BSL: the bulk of any conversation uses signs for whole words and short phrases. Nevertheless, those who are good at fingerspelling alone can go amazingly fast. The limiting factor is the other person’s ability to “read” fluently enough to keep up.

Deafblind manual is a system of communication where all words are fingerspelled in full onto the receiver’s hand. People using deafblind manual might achieve a speed of up to 60 words per minute.

Finger-ogham seems to be more nuanced than BSL finger spelling and lacks the physical contact of deafblind manual. Nevertheless, it’s not unreasonable to think that skilled druids and filí could coverse with finger-ogham at more than 30 words per minute. Covert signing would be slower, however.

Other oghamic signing systems exist. One example is the leg-ogham or cossagam (cos-ogham) from The Book of Ballymote. In cossagam the filí, while seated, used the fingers of his hand in various positions along his shin to indicate the ogham fid: to the right of the shinbone for the b-aicme, to the left for the h-aicme, diagonally athwart for the m-aicme, and straight across for the a-aicme. The number of fingers used indicated which few of the aicme is meant: for example, two fingers placed to the right of the shinbone would mean the luis.

Another system is nose-ogham or sron-ogham, in which the nose is used in much the same way. Graves states that Gwion is evidently referring to sron-ogham when he mentions, among all the other things he knows, “why the nose is ridged”; the answer is “to make ogham signalling easier”.

These alternative methods were useful for signalling across a room. A modern parallel is tic-tac, the sign language in which bookmakers communicate with each other on a race course.

At some point, the oghamic script was developed from the filí’s sign language – perhaps merged with a contemporaneous tally-stick tradition: there is an inescapable link between finger-ogham and counting in fives. Perhaps the script and signing systems were coæval.

When and for what was oghamic script first used?

On the surviving stones ogham’s use is clearly limited to the recording of names and genealogies. While it does not lend itself to use as a script for recording events, laws, or religious procedures, we cannot know with any certainty the uses of ogham inscriptions on wooden wands. The idea that ogham was used in antiquity for occult or magical purposes plagues critical commentary, but there is only indirect evidence for this from the ancient Irish myths and sagas.

In the story of “Baile Mac Buain” we hear of a library of tamlorga filidh or flesc filidh (poet’s staves or poet’s rods) on which ancient stories and sagas are inscribed. (These may have been bound in the form of a fan.) When a yew and an apple tree grew over the graves of the ill-fated lovers Baile and Aillinn they were cut down and made into wand-books on which the filí cut the lovers’ sad story in ogham.

In the “Voyage of Bran” we are told that Bran writes poetry in ogham, having written down fifty or sixty quatrains of a poem on ogham rods. In the Táin saga Cúchulainn carves warnings and challenges the warriors of Ailill and Medb on pieces of wood. In a tale from the Fenian Cycle, Lomna writes a cryptic message to Fionn Mac Cumhail informing him of his wife’s infidelity. More often ogham was used to inscribe magic spells. At the funerals of great heroes it was used to inscribe the hero’s name on a wand of aspen to be placed in the tomb. (Ellis)

From the standing stones we know that oghamic script was used by the early middle ages. The oldest manuscript source is the Auraicept na nÉces (The Scholar’s Primer), claimed as a seventh-century Irish grammar written by a scholar named Longarad. But the earliest surviving copy of this is in The Book of Ballymote, compiled by Maghnus Ó Duibhgeánáin of Co. Sligo in 1390.

But how much earlier was it first used? The “Ballinderry Dice” suggest at least an awareness of the numerology of ogham as early as the second century CE, if not the use of true oghamic script. The reference to carving ogham in the Táin, suggests that it was in use maybe as early as the time of Christ and certainly within the first few centruries CE. But this reference might have been inserted by a scribe perhaps as late as the 12th century and is therefore unreliable in attempting to date the origin of oghamic script.

Was ogham used at all before the stone inscriptions? Certainly the peoples of the British Isles had been marking stones for 3000 years. It seems odd, then, that there are no oghamic inscriptions earlier than 400 CE if ogham did exist. But perhaps it was only with the coming of Christianity and the waning of druidic power that the prohibitions on writing were relaxed.