Ogham Fews
Aicme Muine
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Origin 1948
Gort is the twelfth letter of ogham, giving the sound G, in the third family Aicme Muine. Its name means a field or enclosed garden, and it is associated in the tree-lists with the ivy; the word-oghams call it greenest of pastures and sweeter than grasses. Ivy grows in persistent, spiralling coils, clinging and climbing and returning green through winter, and so gathers associations of tenacious growth, the winding search, and the interwoven path. In the modern divinatory use of ogham, a twentieth-century reconstruction (Graves, 1948) rather than an ancient oracle, Gort is read for persistent, spiralling growth, the labyrinthine journey of self-development, and a tenacity that binds and endures on the long and winding way toward the goal.
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 PeriodGort 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 (Ivy) 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 Sourcesating of multitudes 1Tradition: Briatharogam Con Culainn Meaning in the Attesting Sourcesuitable place for cows 1Tradition: Briatharogam Maic ind Oc Meaning in the Attesting Sourcesweetest grass 1Tradition: Briatharogam Morainn mac Moin Learn More
The Ogham Letter Gort
Gort 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 G and belongs to the third (Aicme Muine) 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; Gort is linked to the ivy, from which its letter-name derives.
The divinatory use of ogham, here the sense of growth and the labyrinth, 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 Gort: Two Oblique Strokes
A letter of the third ogham family is cut across the line at an angle rather than beside it.
How the letter is formed
Gort is the second letter of the third family, Aicme Muine, and is cut as two strokes crossing the line obliquely, parallel to one another.
Cutting an oblique stroke on stone
The oblique strokes of the third family are the most demanding to cut cleanly on an arris, because each has to be carried across the edge and down both faces of the stone at a consistent angle. On many surviving stones the third family shows more variation in execution than the first two, and badly weathered examples can be difficult to distinguish from the fourth family, whose strokes cross the line square. The distinction between an angled and a perpendicular crossing is the only thing separating ten of the twenty letters from ten others.
The sound
Gort carries the value G. It appears in the surviving orthodox inscriptions, a corpus of a few hundred stones consisting almost entirely of 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 gloss layer
The ivy attached to this letter belongs to the manuscript tradition, several centuries later than the inscriptions, and the seasonal schemes in modern circulation are later still. The atlas records the three layers as three separate things rather than as one continuous tradition.
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
Related To
What is not known, and what would settle it. The tree-calendar sign Ivy (Gort) shares its plant with the Ogham few Gort (ivy).
Sources
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