Straif

Straif is the clearest instance in the row of a letter whose oldest recorded sense is not botanical at all, and whose modern meaning nevertheless works.

What the name points at

McManus connects straif to sulphur. The oldest of the kennings glosses it as the strongest of reddening, the most powerful of the agents that redden or dye.

Both readings point the same way, and neither points at a plant. They point at a process: the corrosive substance used in metalworking and dyeing, the thing that stains and etches and cannot be undone once applied.

The blackthorn

Draighean, the blackthorn, arrives in the later scholiast material, and the reasoning behind it is recoverable. Blackthorn in Irish tradition is the thorn that draws blood, the wood of the cudgel, the tree of ill luck, and its sloes yield a dark stain.

If a letter associated with reddening and corrosion must be given a tree, the blackthorn is well chosen. It is still a choice, made afterwards, by someone working to a scheme.

Why the modern reading survives the correction

Because it happens to descend from the older sense rather than the newer one. Straif is read now for necessary harm, for the thing that changes what it touches, for irreversibility, for consequences that cannot be withdrawn.

That is sulphur. It is not really blackthorn folklore at all, even though blackthorn is the name attached.

Which is worth noticing, because it cuts against the easy assumption that the medieval tree assignments corrupted everything downstream of them. Sometimes the older meaning came through anyway.

A third-family ogham letter crosses the line at an angle, and Straif takes four such strokes.

How the letter is formed

Straif is the fourth letter of the third family, Aicme Muine, cut as four parallel strokes crossing the line obliquely.

The value, and why it is written Z

The manuscripts hand this letter to a Latin-trained scribe who needs a Latin character for it, and the character chosen is Z. That choice tells us what the scribes did, not what the letter sounded like. Latin z was itself a borrowed letter with an unstable value in medieval usage, so it functioned as a place to put a sound that the ordinary Latin alphabet had no slot for.

Proposals for the original value cluster around a sibilant distinct from plain S, and the letter's rarity in the surviving inscriptions means the question cannot be closed from the corpus as it stands. The atlas records the manuscript convention as a convention and leaves the earlier value open.

In the corpus

The surviving orthodox inscriptions number a few hundred, are almost entirely personal names in the genitive case, and were cut on standing stones in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man, dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to the sixth centuries.

The blackthorn attached to this letter belongs to the manuscript gloss tradition and is recorded separately in this atlas.