The Great Big Ogham Resource Thread

Three people today have already asked about ogham, and I'm sure there will be many more—so, since I'm a devotee of Ogma and heavily involved with ogham, and the sharing of information is part of my duty as a bard-in-training, I figured I'd write up a thread with information and resources for everyone. This thread will probably be a work in progress, on and off as I learn new information, and I'd prefer to keep it resources and info only. If you want to discuss ogham, swap tips, or just chat casually, there's a discussion thread for that here.

What is ogham?

Ogham is a system of writing consisting of notches attached to a central "stem" that was developed in order to write in early and Old Irish. Its primary usage was in the form of inscriptions on stone monuments, but the letters were also carved into wood or metal as a method of sending messages or denoting ownership of the item. It is also used in mythology for magical purposes and occasionally for divination. You may also see words written in ogham as marginalia in Irish texts—notes from the monks illuminating manuscripts about a variety of things, such as their mood at the time of writing or the conditions they are working in.



There are approximately 400 surviving monuments inscribed with ogham in Ireland and parts of Britain, the majority of which are in the south of Ireland. Outside of Ireland, the largest collection is in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Because ogham was used mainly in monumental carving, it may be read either horizontally or vertically. On some stones, an inscription goes up vertically and continues in an unbroken line horizontally across the top of the monument. It is read vertically from bottom to top and horizontally from left to right. This means that notches found on the right side of a vertical stem are on the bottom of a horizontal stem, while left notches are found on the top.

The ogham alphabet consists of twenty main letters (also called feda or sometimes nin) and five or six additional letters, or forfeda (extra feda). You may occasionally see the ogham alphabet referred to as the beith-luis-nin, which means either "the beith-luis letters" (after the first two letters of the system, akin to "alphabet" or "futhark"), or is a shorthand for beith-luis-fearn-sail-nion (beith-LFS-nion), after the first five letters.

Some of the letters in the alphabet are not used in modern Irish—most notably, ceirt represents the letter Q, straif represents Z, ngéadal is transcribed as nG or GG, and eamhancholl is often given as X (or AE—more on that in a moment). Most of these represent sounds either lost as the language evolved, or no longer transcribed in the same way: Q has the value [kʷ], now lost; nG has the value [gʷ], now generally just transcribed as a G; Z could have represented a number of things, but was probably TS or ST; X is the sound now represented by the Irish CH (on my personal ogham chart, I have rendered eamhancholl as such).

Some of the forfeda, as you can see, have multiple possible sounds. Originally, the forfeda seem to have represented sounds that were considered to be missing from the original twenty letters (most notably the P, which was lost in early Irish and was not required until Latin loanwords became prevalent in the language). Later scholars, however, seem to have interpreted the original five forfeda as vowels, and rendered pín, the previous P sound, as iphín, the IA dipthong, instead (as well as changing eamhancholl from X/CH to AE). However, since the P was now once again missing from the alphabet, an additional P was once again added, this time based on the B (one underside notch, running parallel instead of perpendicular) and referred to as a "soft beith."

I myself prefer to use the earlier versions of the forfeda, and have foregone peith in my divination set altogether, but whether you use twenty, twenty-five, or twenty-six letters is entirely up to you.



But how do I use it?

A lot of people use ogham for divination—myself included. But here's the thing: there is no actual record of any divinatory methodology in historical Irish writings. It is possible that ogham were used for divination, and that the method was merely kept secret and passed on orally by the druids who used it, as there are mentions of the use of "letters" in divination in a handful of myths. It is also possible that ogham as a divination tool was merely a poetic invention by the bards, storytellers, or scribes who preserved the mythology, a way of making the druids more powerful and mysterious than they actually were. We have no way of knowing. However, what this does demonstrate is that the Irish Gaels were at least aware of the theoretical possibility of using ogham as a divinatory tool, which is plenty to make it a useful system for thousands of people.

So, how is it done? There are a number of methods, and many of them are personal. The beauty of there being no extant records of methodology is that everyone gets to make up and use whatever works best for them.

The most common methods involve carving or inscribing the letters of the ogham onto staves and either drawing or tossing them to interpret the results. Some people like to draw them in "spreads," somewhat like the method used in tarot; this has the advantage of having lots of material, as practically any tarot spread can be adapted for use with ogham. My personal preferred method is to grab a small handful of staves and toss them at the floor or my desk, and interpret the pattern they fall in intuitively. This is a less structured and more personal method that will obviously not work for everyone, but I believe that it is most likely the best approximation of a historical method—more or less. As with any other method of ogham divination, the best we can get is our best guess.



If you have some woodworking skill, staves are not difficult to make. All you need to do is find some small sticks, chop them into two- or three-inch lengths, scrape the bark off one side, and carve or burn the letter into them. If you don't have woodworking skills (I do not), there are a number of sellers online who will make sets for you, at varying price levels—my set was made by Witchy's Crafts on Etsy, though I don't believe they do ogham staves anymore. And if you just want to test them out, you can make a basic ogham set with a bundle of popsicle sticks and a marker.

What do the letters mean?

Ah-hah. Now this is the part where it gets sticky.

The most prevalent meanings you will find ascribed to the ogham letters, particularly online and in pagan circles, are typically referred to as the "tree ogham," so named because each letter is assigned a corresponding tree. This is so overwhelmingly common that it can occasionally be hard to find ogham staves that aren't carved from the wood of these different trees (this is a large part of why I had mine custom-made—they're made of elder wood). This is largely attributed to that scourge of Celtic scholarship, Robert Graves, and his book The White Goddess, but its origins are considerably earlier; Graves himself based his work on theories proposed by Robert A.S. Macalister (who, it must be noted, was not a fan of Graves' work), and the tree ogham itself dates to the middle ages, where it can be found in a text called the Auraicept na n-Éces, or the Scholar's Primer.



However, modern scholarship does not support the tree correspondences as the original meanings of the letters. Damian McManus, who is the leading modern scholar of ogham, has instead used three different sets of bríatharogam, or kennings—mnemonic devices used by scholars to recall the meaning of each letter—to translate most of the ogham letters, and believes that only around a third of them have meanings related to trees. It is thought that the Auraicept most likely glossed the letter meanings as trees because of confusion to do with the letters being referred to as feda, or "trees." This was, of course, due to their "branching" appearance, but because some of the letters do actually gloss as trees, it was taken as a sign that they all did. This resulted in some odd contortions to force the kennings to mean various trees, which persists to this day thanks to Graves' poor scholarship.

So what are the kennings, and what do they most likely mean?

These are the three sets of kennings, as translated by McManus in his book Irish Letter-Names and their Kennings.



You can also find these in text format on the Bríatharogam page on Wikipedia, which also lists the most likely meanings that each kenning points to. The only source given is McManus's book, and I assume the meanings are listed therein, but I don't have an image of that page, so I'll copy out the list from Wikipedia.

ᚁ (B) Beith: Birch
ᚂ (L) Luis: Flame or herb
ᚃ (F) Fearn: Alder
ᚄ (S) Sail: Willow
ᚅ (N) Nion: Branch-fork

ᚆ (H) Úath: Fear
ᚇ (D) Dair: Oak
ᚈ (T) Tinne: Iron bar
ᚉ (C) Coll: Hazel
ᚊ (Q) Ceirt: Bush, conflated with rag

ᚋ (M) Muin: Neck, trick, and/or love
ᚌ (G) Gort: Field
ᚍ (nG) nGéadal: Slaying
ᚎ (Z) Straif: Sulphur
ᚏ (R) Ruis: Red

ᚐ (A) Ailm: Pine, possibly
ᚑ (O) Onn: Ash
ᚒ (U) Úr: Earth (as in soil, not the world)
ᚓ (E) Eadhadh: Unknown
ᚔ (I) Iadhadh: Yew

ᚕ (EA) Ébhadh: Unknown
ᚖ (OI) Óir: Gold
ᚗ (UI) Uileann: Elbow joint
ᚘ (P) Pín: Thorn
ᚙ (CH) Eamhancholl: Twin-of-hazel, thought to be witch hazel

You'll notice that of course despite McManus's best efforts, two of the letters remain unknown. I have decided, personally, to gloss eadhadh as "aspen," which is what it corresponds to in the tree ogham; I feel that this is fairly reasonable, as based on its kennings it is very likely some kind of tree. I have elected to gloss ébhadh as "salmon," because I read it somewhere as a suggestion and it makes sense to me. I have elected to gloss ailm not as "pine," but as "groan," as in the groan of a pine tree, because its kennings refer entirely to the sound and not to the tree they may have come from. There is more discussion of all of the letters' meanings on both the Bríatharogam page on Wikipedia and the individual pages for each letter.

It's worth noting: you do not necessarily have to agree with my glosses. I am not an expert, and I certainly don't read Old Irish (hell, I barely read modern Irish—yet). These are just what works best for me. The entire system we're trying to reconstruct here is so murky and indefinite that virtually everyone is going to come up with their own interpretations, and I think it's better that way. Anyone claiming to know how ogham was used in ancient times is going to be wrong, because we don't have that information. As far as we know it no longer exists. So don't get too hung up on accuracy. Just go with what works.

Okay, now what?

So, we have our kennings, and the probable meanings of each letter. That's a great start—but how do you get divination out of that? Well, the answer is "basically any way you want." That's the fun of it.



But here's what I did.

First, I looked at the kennings, and tried to squeeze every last drop of symbolism, meaning, and nuance out of them that I could. What does "withered foot with fine hair" imply about a birch tree, or about a person? What does it likely mean that luis could possibly mean both flame and herb? What on earth does a branch-fork have to say about a situation? This was not the project of a moment; I spent a solid couple of days sorting through the kennings and all the meanings I could extrapolate, and I'm still refining them all to a degree to this day.

Next, I looked into as much Irish symbolism as I could. Thanks to the proliferation of tree ogham divination websites, there's lots of symbolism for the various types of trees, and there's plenty for many of the other letters as well. Some of this was intuitive; some of it was based on folklore I already knew; some of it was based on things I looked up and learned. Some letters are more straightforward than others—compare óir and ailm, for example. This was part of my process of trying to distill meanings from the kennings, and is also something I'm still adapting as I get better at divination and learn more symbolism.

Once I had as much of that together as I could, I started practicing. I do small readings for myself whenever I want to know something or have questions about my religious path; I do readings for friends; I read situations as needed. I interpret intuitively; nowadays I'm also working on trying to do my interpretation through poetry—which is a trip and a half, I tell you what. Sometimes I do simple one-stave draws for basic questions; I also occasionally do obstacle/action/outcome draws, though usually for other people (I prefer freeform for myself). And I work at it whenever I feel I need to—that's the key.

I do have a fairly comprehensive list of the associations and meanings that I use for divination, and I have occasionally shared that with friends in order to get them started, but I'm hesitant to share it publicly, just because I don't want anyone to take my interpretations as the authoritative ones. As I've said already, no one knows how (or even if) this system was used in the past. I've put a lot of thought and work into this, but I'm not the expert. I would much rather see everyone make their own interpretations, come up with their own systems, and do whatever works best. It's entirely possible that we'll have a similar interpretation of the letters, especially if you use the same research-based method of finding correspondences as I did, and that's fine—but I think you should come to it yourself, rather than just assuming that I'm right.

Who's responsible for this, anyway?

All right, so we've got all this information and some good ideas. Great! Is there anything else we really need to know?

Yes, actually, and that is the mythological origins of ogham. There are two versions of the story. The first is that after the Tower of Babel fell, ogham, along with the Irish language, was invented by the Sythian king Fenius Farsa (not an actual Sythian king, a Sythian king of Irish legend). He took the best parts of all the confused languages at the base of the Tower in order to create Irish, and made ogham as a perfected writing system to represent it. Now, obviously this is a post-Christianization legend, but it's still pretty good—who doesn't like stories that proclaim Irish as the best language ever?

But as far as I'm concerned it's still just a story. The real deal is the second mythological origin, which states that ogham was invented by Ogma, the warrior bard and poet-champion of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Ogma is already associated not only with words, eloquence, and poetry (obviously), but also with divination—bards were thought to be seers, and in folklore Ogma is of course considered the patron of bards. And so just as it is widely considered inappropriate to use the Norse runes without acknowledging Odin's sacrifice, I would consider it inappropriate to use ogham without honouring Ogma as its inventor.



You don't have to become a devotee (though, come on, seriously, why wouldn't you?), but it is a good idea to pay your respects, at the very least. I never cast or draw a single stave without asking Ogma's blessing and thanking him for the reading, and of course I also give him offerings. Credit where credit is due, after all—he did invent them.

Where did I learn all this?

A lot of the process is my own invention or extrapolation, as I hope should be obvious. I am indebted to the translation work of Damian McManus, particularly Irish Letter-Names and their Kennings and his Guide to Ogam. Most of the information I have included in this post derives ultimately from his work, but it can also be found on Wikipedia—visit the Ogham, Bríatharogam, and Ogham letter pages.