The thirteenth letter carries three incompatible identifications and no way to choose between them on the evidence, which makes it worth an entry of its own.
The candidates
- Reed, which is what this atlas records and what most modern practice uses.
- Broom, the shrub, which appears in the later scholiast glosses.
- Wounding or killing, which is what the linguistics suggest.
McManus connects the name to a root meaning to wound or slay. The briatharogaim support him: the kennings speak of a physician's sustenance and the beginning of slaying, which reads as an association with wounds, and with the healing of wounds, rather than with any plant.
How reed got there
The reed enters through the scholiast layer, and the modern preference for it over broom is largely inherited from Graves, whose calendar needed a plant for this month and who chose reed.
The subsequent divinatory meanings follow from the choice: reeds by water, the arrow shaft, the pipe, direct action, cutting through. Coherent, and downstream of a fourteenth-century guess reinforced by a 1948 poem.
The letter itself
The sound is ng, and it is another of the letters that barely occurs on stone. Several of the rarest ogham letters are also the ones with the least stable names, which is not a coincidence: a character used often is a character whose name gets remembered.
What to keep
The wounding sense has the best philological case and is the oldest reading the kennings support. The reed has the tradition, in the sense that a few centuries of scholiasts and eighty years of practitioners have used it.
Both are recorded here. They are not the same claim and they do not rest on the same evidence.