Ogham Fews
Aicme Beithe
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Origin 1948
Saille is the fourth letter of ogham, giving the sound S, in the first family Aicme Beithe. Its name means willow, and the medieval word-oghams gloss it with images of pallor, the wan color of the lifeless, echoing the willow grey-green leaves. Growing beside water and long linked in folklore to the moon, to grief, and to enchantment, the willow gathers associations of intuition, dreams, emotion, and the flowing feminine depths of the mind. In the modern divinatory use of ogham, a twentieth-century reconstruction (Graves, 1948) rather than an ancient oracle, Saille is read for lunar intuition, the life of dreams and feeling, and a yielding, receptive attunement to the tides of the unconscious.
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 PeriodSaille 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 (Willow) 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 Sourcebeginning of honey 1Tradition: Briatharogam Con Culainn Meaning in the Attesting Sourcepallor of a lifeless one 1Tradition: Briatharogam Morainn mac Moin Meaning in the Attesting Sourcesustenance of bees 1Tradition: Briatharogam Maic ind Oc Learn More
The Ogham Letter Saille
Saille 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 S and belongs to the first (Aicme Beithe) 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; Saille is linked to the willow, from which its letter-name derives.
The divinatory use of ogham, here the sense of intuition and the moon, 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 Saille: Four Strokes in the First Family
The ogham alphabet stores a letter as a position: which family, and how many strokes.
How the letter is formed
Saille is the fourth letter of the first family, Aicme Beithe, and is cut as four strokes on that family's side of the line. On a stone the line is the arris and the strokes run out from it; in the manuscripts the line is horizontal and the first family sits below it.
Why four strokes is the practical limit minus one
Five is the maximum count in any family, and it is not an arbitrary ceiling. A reader counts strokes by eye, and beyond about five the count stops being reliable at a glance on a weathered stone. Four families of five gives twenty letters, which is close to what the language of the inscriptions actually needed. When the manuscript tradition wanted more characters it did not extend the count past five; it invented a fifth family of composite shapes instead, the forfeda, which look nothing like the first twenty and were never in ordinary epigraphic use.
The sound
Saille carries the value S, one of the commonest consonants in the personal names that make up almost the whole surviving corpus. Those inscriptions were cut in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man, and are dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to sixth centuries.
The willow attached to this letter comes from the later manuscript glosses and is treated separately here.
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 Willow (Saille) shares its tree with the Ogham few Saille (willow).
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