Ogham Fews
Aicme Ailme
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Origin 1948
Eadhadh is the nineteenth letter of ogham, giving the sound E, in the fourth family Aicme Ailme. Its name (Old Irish Edad) is obscure, and its meaning was already uncertain to the medieval glossators; it is commonly associated in the tree-lists with the aspen or white poplar, and the word-oghams call it a discerning tree. The aspen leaves tremble and shiver in the least breath of wind, a motion long read as the tree speaking or as courage held in the face of fear. From this it gathers associations of endurance, courage, and steadfastness under trial. In the modern divinatory use of ogham, a twentieth-century reconstruction (Graves, 1948) rather than an ancient oracle, Eadhadh is read for courage against fear and the endurance that stands firm, quietly resolute, through adversity and doubt.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1948 1Tradition: Modern tree-lore and tree calendar (Robert Graves, The White Goddess) Origin Period300 to 600 CE 1Tradition: Ogham inscriptions on stone Origin Period600 to 1000 CE 1Tradition: Medieval Irish manuscript tradition (In Lebor Ogaim and Auraicept na n-Eces) Origin PeriodEadhadh is attested in inscriptional ogham from the fourth to the sixth century, in the medieval Irish manuscript tradition through the tenth century, and, in the tree identification many readers now know it by, only from Robert Graves's The White Goddess in 1948, centuries after the alphabet's original use. 1 Place of OriginA smaller group in Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man and south-west Britain 1 Place of OriginIreland, with the great majority of inscriptions in Kerry, Cork and Waterford 1 Origin of the NameThe letter name is recorded in the medieval Ogam Tract. The tree identification carried here (Aspen) is a gloss supplied by the medieval scholiasts, not part of the name: McManus shows that only about a third of the twenty names are securely tree words, the rest being ordinary nouns of other sense, or words fitted to trees because a tree alphabet was the scheme the glossators had settled on. 1 Identity
Associated Letter Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Sourcebrother of birch 1Tradition: Briatharogam Con Culainn Meaning in the Attesting Sourcediscerning tree 1Tradition: Briatharogam Morainn mac Moin Meaning in the Attesting Sourceexchange of friends 1Tradition: Briatharogam Maic ind Oc Learn More
The Ogham Letter Eadhadh
Eadhadh is a letter of ogham, the earliest form of writing in the Irish language, cut as sets of strokes across a central line. It stands for the sound E and belongs to the fourth (Aicme Ailme) of the four aicme, the groups of five into which the twenty principal letters are divided.
Letter, tree and later meaning
Ogham is a genuine antiquity: some four hundred inscriptions survive, most on standing stones in Ireland and western Britain, cut between roughly the fourth and sixth centuries. Each letter also bears a name, and medieval Irish scholars glossed many of those names with trees and with word-kennings; Eadhadh is linked to the aspen, from which its letter-name derives.
The divinatory use of ogham, here the sense of endurance and courage, is not attested in the early inscriptions. The reading of ogham as an oracle, and much of the elaborate tree-lore attached to it, belongs to the medieval glossary tradition and, above all, to the modern neo-druidic revival of the twentieth century. It is presented here as that later tradition, laid over a script whose first purpose was to record names in stone.
Cutting Eadhadh: Four Notches in the Vowel Family
Eadhadh is the fourth of the five vowels, and like the rest of its family it is cut square across the line.
How the letter is formed
Eadhadh is the fourth letter of the fourth family, Aicme Ailme, and is cut as four short strokes crossing the line at a right angle.
Twenty letters, and then the problem of more
Eadhadh sits near the end of the original twenty. Those twenty are what the stones use, and they are enough for the language of the inscriptions. The manuscript tradition, working with Latin loanwords and with sounds the older orthography had no character for, wanted more, and added a fifth group called the forfeda.
The forfeda are unlike everything before them. They are composite shapes rather than counts of strokes, they vary between manuscripts, and they are effectively absent from the orthodox epigraphic corpus. They belong to a scholarly tradition writing about ogham rather than to the practice of cutting it, which is a distinction worth holding on to when reading any modern chart that presents twenty-five ogham characters as a single alphabet.
The sound
Eadhadh carries the value E. The surviving orthodox inscriptions are almost all personal names in the genitive case, cut in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Britain and dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to the sixth centuries.
The aspen attached to this letter is a manuscript gloss and is recorded separately in this atlas.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attributed To
The Auraicept sets out this letter's place in the ogham system and its mythic origin under Ogma.
Originates in Language
Sources
Essays About This Entity (1 essay)
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.