I’ve now got access to Damian McManus’ ‘A Guide to Ogam’ (Maynooth Monographs 4; An Sagart, Maynooth 1997), and also a copy of Howard Meroney’s 1949 article ‘Early Irish Letter Names’ (Speculum 1949 Vol.24/1 pp19-43).

McManus’ book seems to me to be a very comprehensive exposition of the scholarship on all aspects of the Ogham to the date of publication. It would appear to be both scarce and sought-after, commanding rather silly prices on the net, and causing the library to allow me at it on a ‘reference only’ basis.

Both these writers consider that not all the names for the letters represented by the Ogham characters were originally tree names. The idea that they are is described by Meroney as a “strangely erroneous opinion” that “has prevailed for hundreds of years“. In fact only BEITHE, FERN, SAIL, DAUR and COLL are certainly the names of trees. Meroney quotes an earlier scholar Charles (NOT Robert!) Graves as saying that “it can be shown with almost certainty of proof” that NIN, (H)UATH, TINNE, MUIN, GORT, STRAIF, UR, OIR, UILLEN and EMANCOLL are NOT the Irish names of trees or plants. The only attestations to their being tree names are to be found in the early grammatical treatises and glossaries…no supporting evidence is to be found in non-grammatical writings.

According to McManus, in the Old Irish period the names for the letters (which he considers to be coeval with the creation of the Ogham) were still - for the most part - familiar words, and formed the basis for the Briatharogam, or Word Ogham, three series of ‘kennings’ known as Morrainn mic Moin’s, Maic ind Oc’s, and Con Culainn’s Word Oghams. These kennings preserve the original meanings of the words. However, as some of the letter names became increasingly obsolete and misunderstood, the desire to schematise the Ogham, together with the fact that largest category of names are the names of trees, and the fact that the Irish word ‘fid’ means both ‘letter’ and ‘tree’, led to the evolution of the ‘fiction’ that the Ogham was fundamentally a tree-alphabet.

According to Meroney, Calder in his version of the Auraicept gives a misleadingly simplified view, omitting for instance the fact that PIN has rowan, pine and gooseberry attached to it, and CEIRT/QUEIRT has apple-tree, holly, quicken and aspen. “Taken separately indeed,” he says, “the glosses render seventeen of the twenty-five names with a diversity which no woodsman could reconcile and no grammarian should trust.”

These are the meanings of the letter names according to these writers:

BEITHI: ‘birch’
LUIS: either from luise/loise meaning ‘flame’, or ’lus’ meaning ’plant, herb’.
FERN: ’alder’ or ’shield’. McManus supposes a primitive Irish form ‘werna’: hence the value w (= v) in the early inscriptions.
SAIL: ’willow’.
NIN: ’fork’ (the upright fork supporting one end of the weaver’s beam) or ’loft’.

(h)UATH: from ’uath’: ’fear, horror’. The Ogham sign itself, says Meroney, “suggested the alternative name sce ’thorn’ (not ’thorn-tree’).” For McManus, the addition of H was “no more than a cosmetic solution to the problem created by the loss of the original initial consonant…lost before the period of the inscriptions”.
DUIR: ’oak’.
TINNE: from ’tindi’: ’bar/rod of metal, axle, ingot, mass of molten metal’, “probably related to Old Irish ’tend’ meaning ’strong’ or ’tind’ meaning ’brilliant’".
COLL: ’hazel’.
QUEIRT/CE(I)RT: Said to be related to Welsh ’perth’ meaning ‘bush’, and cognate with Latin ’quercus’ meaning ’oak’. “By the Old Irish period, however” (says McManus) “it was confused with the word ceirt, ’rag’”. Meroney also gives ’rag’.

MUIN: Several meanings: ’love or esteem; upper part of the back or neck; a wile, ruse, or trick’.
GORT: ’field’.
(n)GETAL: ’i.e. ’cetal’ meaning ’charm’ says Meroney; McManus says: ’killing, slaying’…an old verbal noun of ’gonid’ meaning ’wounds, slays’.
STRAIPH: ‘sulphur’.
RUIS: ‘redness’; “in particular the redness in the face brought on by embarrassment”.

AILM: Meroney says that the kennings point to its position in the Ogham, and McManus that they relate to the sound of the letter, rather than to its meaning. The word is attested only once in the literature as meaning ‘pine-tree’.
ONN: ‘wheel’; or Old Irish ‘onn’ meaning ‘ash-tree’.
UR: ‘humus, soil, earth, clay’.
EDAD and IDAD: described as “an artificial pairing”, neither being attested as a word in its own right. May relate to words for ‘salmon’ or ‘yew’. The same applies to EBAD.

EMANCOLL: ‘double C’. (Hence also ‘double hazel’, for which Calder puts ‘Witch Hazel’, probably meaning ‘Wych Elm’).
UILEN/UILLEND: ‘elbow’?
PIN/IPHIN: from Latin ‘pinus’ meaning ‘pine’.
OIR: from Latin ‘aurum’ meaning ‘gold’.

Says Meroney: “If the foregoing identifications are accepted, many theories about the oghamic alphabet will fall by their own weight. Arguments based, for example, on the tree-lore of antiquity…now seem but remotely pertinent.” McManus says that the nature of the Ogham “is such that it is impossible to pinpoint its source of inspiration or to identify its framers in time or space with any degree of accuracy”. The Irish learned class of filid seem the most likely candidates, “and the grammar school would account for many of its features”. As to a precursor for the script itself, he says that the “only theory…which commands general approval today is that which associates it with the row numerals of the tally stick.” What it became, at the time of the monuments, was “the Irish equivalent of Roman monumental script”. As the centuries went by, the Ogham fell into disuse, but the letter names were kept for educational purposes in the teaching of Irish.

The idea that the Ogham had its roots in an exclusively pagan culture is criticized by McManus on the basis that the ‘cult’ of the early monuments “falls within the Christian period”. The assertion that the monuments were interfered with by defacement, alteration, or the addition of crosses to Christianize them is based on a presupposition that they were created by pagans, rather than constituting proof that they were so created. The damage is, in the majority of cases, most probably the result of ‘secondary appropriations’, weathering, and accident. The very limited nature of the inscriptions means that the absence of specifically Christian sentiments proves nothing; and although the language used has conservative elements (naturally associated with written rather than spoken language), it is not of an archaic or essentially pre/non-Christian nature.

So, according to these writers, what was once a series of letter names, only some of which were the names of trees, evolved into the ‘tree alphabet’ that we have today. That the Ogham tree list had a basis in historical druidry would on this basis seem unlikely. Nonetheless, so far as I’m concerned, it can still be described as druidic to the extent that druidry - in the version that I espouse - has at its core the tree/human interface.