Ogham Fews
Aicme Ailme
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Origin 1948
Onn is the seventeenth letter of ogham, giving the sound O, in the fourth family Aicme Ailme. Its name is associated in the tree-lists with gorse or furze (and in some sources the ash), and the word-oghams describe it as a helper or wounder of horses, for gorse was used as fodder and its spines prick. Gorse blooms with golden flowers through much of the year, even in winter, and was gathered and burned, and so gathers associations of persistent hope, warmth, and the gathering of resources. In the modern divinatory use of ogham, a twentieth-century reconstruction (Graves, 1948) rather than an ancient oracle, Onn is read for enduring hope and the gathering of what one needs, a bright persistence and warmth that carries one through the lean and dark seasons.
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 PeriodOnn 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 (Gorse) 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 Sourceequipment of warrior bands 1Tradition: Briatharogam Con Culainn Meaning in the Attesting Sourcesmoothest of craftsmanship 1Tradition: Briatharogam Maic ind Oc Meaning in the Attesting Sourcewounder of horses 1Tradition: Briatharogam Morainn mac Moin Learn More
The Ogham Letter Onn
Onn 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 O 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; Onn is linked to the gorse or furze, from which its letter-name derives.
The divinatory use of ogham, here the sense of gathering and hope, 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 Onn: Two Notches in the Vowel Family
The fourth ogham family cuts short strokes square across the line, and Onn takes two of them.
How the letter is formed
Onn is the second letter of the fourth family, Aicme Ailme, and is cut as two short strokes crossing the line at a right angle. On stone these are frequently notches on the arris that do not extend onto the faces at all.
Notches are the least durable characters
Because the fourth family is cut short and directly on the edge, it is the first family to disappear as a stone weathers. The arris is the most exposed part of the surface, and a notch has less material behind it than a stroke that runs down a face. Inscriptions that survive with their consonants legible and their vowels uncertain are a recognised pattern in the corpus, and readings of such stones are correspondingly cautious about vowel counts.
The sound
Onn carries the value O. The surviving orthodox inscriptions, a few hundred stones in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man, are almost entirely personal names in the genitive case, dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to the sixth centuries.
The later layers
The gorse attached to this letter comes from the medieval manuscript glosses, and the calendar and divinatory schemes in modern circulation descend from twentieth-century work later still. The atlas records the three as three, rather than presenting the modern material as though it came off the stones.
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
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