Aicmi (Ogham Groups)
Aicme Forfeda
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Origin 700 to 900 CE
Aicme Forfeda, the group of additional letters, is a fifth grouping added to the four core aicmi of Ogham several centuries after the alphabet's working use on stone, glossed in the medieval manuscript tradition (Auraicept na n-Eces, De dulib feda and In Lebor Ogaim). Its five letters represent sounds and diphthongs felt to be missing from the original twenty, several of them influenced by the Latin alphabet that Irish scribes were using alongside Ogham by the time these letters were devised.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period700 to 900 CE 1Tradition: Manuscript grammatical tradition (Auraicept na n-Eces), not monumental inscription Origin PeriodAicme Forfeda, the supplementary group of additional letters, is a later accretion to the ogham alphabet, attested in the manuscript tradition of the Scholars' Primer from the seventh to the ninth century rather than in the earlier inscriptional corpus. 1 Place of Origin Origin of the NameForfeda means additional letters. Unlike the four core aicmi, which are attested on stone from roughly the fourth to sixth century CE, the forfeda survive only in the medieval scholarly tract tradition, chiefly Auraicept na n-Eces, and their number and order are not consistent across manuscripts. 1 Identity
Member LettersEabhadh, Or, Uilleann, Ifin, Emancholl 1 Learn More
A Fifth Group, Added After the Stone Alphabet
Ogham as it survives on stone is a twenty letter alphabet in four aicmi of five: Beithe, hUatha, Muine and Ailme, each a family of notch and line strokes cut along the edge of a standing stone, mostly commemorating a name in Primitive Irish. Aicme Forfeda does not belong to that inscriptional layer. It appears only in the later manuscript tradition, chiefly the grammatical tract Auraicept na n-Eces and companion texts such as De dulib feda and In Lebor Ogaim, compiled by Irish scholars working from roughly the seventh to ninth century onward and copied in medieval manuscripts centuries after monumental ogham had gone out of use.
The five forfeda, Eabhadh, Or, Uilleann, Ifin and Emancholl, were devised to cover sounds and diphthongs the original twenty letters did not represent, and in some manuscript traditions to supply a letter for borrowed sounds such as p, which Primitive Irish lacked. Their number is not fixed across sources: some tracts list four, others five, and a few extend the set further. No forfeda letter is confirmed on a surviving ogham stone, which marks the aicme as a literate, scholarly extension of the alphabet rather than a fifth family cut by the same hands that carved the original four.
Sources Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' PrimerGeorge Calder (ed.) with A Guide to OgamDamian McManus
What the Forfeda Were Actually For
Modern popular writing on ogham often treats Aicme Forfeda as a set of tree letters on the same footing as the original twenty, each assigned a plant and a divinatory keyword. The medieval sources do not support reading them that way. The tree associations attached to the core aicmi come from the kennings preserved in the ogham tracts themselves, word riddles built around each letter name, and even there scholars disagree on how far the tree scheme was a real mnemonic system versus a later gloss. For the forfeda, the tree names are thinner still: several, including Or and Ifin, carry meanings tied to metal or plant terms that shift between manuscripts, and Emancholl is explicitly a doubled form of Coll, hazel, rather than an independent tree.
What the medieval grammarians clearly did use the forfeda for is filling gaps in a working alphabet applied to a changing language. Old Irish had sounds and diphthongs, and eventually loanwords, that a twenty letter stone alphabet designed for an earlier stage of the language could not spell cleanly. The forfeda are best read as a scribe's solution to that problem, occurring in manuscript ogham and marginal glosses rather than in landscape inscriptions, which is also why their exact roster and order stayed unsettled long after the four stone aicmi had become fixed.
Sources Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' PrimerGeorge Calder (ed.) with A Guide to OgamDamian McManus
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attributed To
The Auraicept explains the grouping of ogham letters into aicmi of five.
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