Quert

Quert 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 Q and belongs to the second (Aicme hUatha) 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; Quert is linked to the apple, from which its letter-name derives.

The divinatory use of ogham, here the sense of beauty and choice, 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.

Each ogham letter is a family and a stroke count, and Quert closes the second family with the maximum count.

How the letter is formed

Quert is the fifth letter of the second family, Aicme hUatha, cut as five strokes on that family's side of the line.

The letter that outlived its sound

Quert stands for a sound that Primitive Irish distinguished from plain C and that Old Irish did not. The distinction is preserved in the inscriptions, most visibly in the word for son, which appears in the early inscriptions with this letter and in the later language without it. The word runs through the surviving corpus because the inscriptions are overwhelmingly of the form name, son of, name.

By the time the manuscript tradition came to explain the alphabet, the sound was gone. Quert had become a letter with a name, a position and no living value, and the manuscripts handle it by supplying a tree gloss and moving on.

Why this matters for reading the corpus

The presence or absence of this letter is one of the criteria used to date an inscription on linguistic grounds, and the corpus is dated that way rather than archaeologically in most cases. The stones themselves rarely come with a datable context, so the language on them does the work.

The apple attached to Quert comes from the manuscript glosses, several centuries after the stones, and is recorded separately in this atlas.