Ogham Fews
Aicme Ailme
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Origin 1948
Ur is the eighteenth letter of ogham, giving the sound U, in the fourth family Aicme Ailme. Its name is associated in the tree-lists with heather (and the word ur can also mean moist earth, clay, or that which is fresh); the word-oghams speak of cold dwellings and the propagation of plants. Heather clothes the open moor, blooms in purple abundance, and was long linked to honey, mead, passion, and the making of ecstatic drink, as well as to healing. From this it gathers associations of passion, healing, and the opening between worlds. In the modern divinatory use of ogham, a twentieth-century reconstruction (Graves, 1948) rather than an ancient oracle, Ur is read for passion and healing, the fertile freshness of the earth, and the ecstatic opening of the gates between the seen and the unseen.
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 PeriodUr 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 (Heather) 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 Sourcein cold dwellings 1Tradition: Briatharogam Morainn mac Moin Meaning in the Attesting Sourcepropagation of plants 1Tradition: Briatharogam Maic ind Oc Meaning in the Attesting Sourceshroud of a lifeless one 1Tradition: Briatharogam Con Culainn Learn More
The Ogham Letter Ur
Ur 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 U 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; Ur is linked to the heather, from which its letter-name derives.
The divinatory use of ogham, here the sense of passion and healing, 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 Ur: Three Notches in the Vowel Family
Ur is a vowel, and in ogham the vowels have a geometry of their own.
How the letter is formed
Ur is the third letter of the fourth family, Aicme Ailme, and is cut as three short strokes crossing the line at a right angle.
Square against oblique
The only difference between the third family and the fourth is the angle at which the strokes meet the line: oblique for the consonants of Aicme Muine, square for the vowels of Aicme Ailme. Three oblique strokes are nGetal; three square ones are Ur. On a clean stone the distinction is obvious. On a worn one it is the commonest source of dispute in the epigraphy after stroke counts themselves, and it is the reason careful editions of ogham inscriptions describe the angle of every crossing character rather than simply transcribing letters.
The sound
Ur carries the value U. It appears throughout the surviving corpus, which consists almost entirely of personal names in the genitive case, cut on standing stones in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Britain, and dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to the sixth centuries.
The gloss
The heather attached to this letter belongs to the manuscript tradition, centuries later than the stones. This atlas keeps the epigraphic letter, the medieval gloss and the modern calendrical schemes as three separate records rather than merging them into one.
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
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