The Periods of Ogam Usage

By David Stifter, Katherine Forsyth, Deborah Hayden, Nora White

This is a revised excerpt from Stifter, White & Forsyth (2024: 218–221), which will appear in a volume edited by Alex Mullen and George Woudhuysen on 28 December this year (link here). In this article, we distinguish four more or less distinct periods of ogam usage in history, with the invention of the writing system constituting, as it were, ‘Period 0’.

Period 0. Due to a lack of historical sources, the date and circumstances of the invention of the ogam script are shrouded in darkness. Inferences about its origin are based on the character of the script itself and on the geo­gra­phical distribution of the earliest inscriptions and their dates, which are often rather circumstantial. The earliest dates that archaeology has produced are assigned to the late 4^th century A.D., namely for the Silchester stone from a villa in Hampshire (E-HAM-001 = CIIC 496), for an unpublished small stone from the royal site of Raffin, Co. Meath (I-MEA-007), and for an unpublished bronze votive plaque from New­grange (I-MEA-010), part of a much larger col­lection of objects that includes Roman finds. The conservative esti­mate is that the invention of the writing system took place not much earlier than this in the 4^th century. However, structural arguments for an earlier invention, perhaps as early as the 1^st or 2^nd century A.D., have been put forward (Harvey 2001; 2017: 59). Furthermore, it is probably just a modern misconception, suggested by their sheer numbers, that ogam pillars represent the earliest type of use of the script.

It is likely that the invention of ogam was a single event in history, created by an individual who was familiar with Latin writing and grammatical theory. Because of the chrono­logical coincidence, there may be a connection with the arrival of Christianity in Ireland (Swift 1997).

A region for the natural meeting of Irish language and Latin learning would be the west of Roman Bri­tain, where Irish settlements had been established in late antiquity and speakers of Irish would have come into contact with a tra­dition of public written monu­ments, deeply engrained in Roman culture. However, there are also arguments that speak for Ireland as the cradle of ogam. The monuments in southern Ireland, including those with early linguistic fea­tures, outnumber those in Wales manifold. For southern Britain, Ziegler (1994) assigns 15 of the 44 ogams to her earliest period; Sims-Williams (2003), more cautiously, counts 12. The percentage of stones with early features can therefore hardly be called as impressive as one would expect if ogam had originated there. If ogam had been imported into Ireland from Britain, the question could be asked why the dominant local format – bilingual epitaphs in Irish and Latin – was so completely ignored on the other side of the sea. It is hard to conceive how one of the distinctive features of ogam, the convention of verticality, could have first arisen in the context of Roman epigraphy that is exclusively horizontal. Conversely, it is easy to see how the external model of ogam influenced the local Latin epigraphy in Wales to become vertical. From a functional perspective, the available formulae are much more diverse in Ireland than in Southern Britain. If it is legitimate to use this analogy, biodiversity is typically much greater at the point of origin than in re­gions to which species spread by later colonialisation. Ireland looks thus like the starting point and southern Britain is the region into which the tradition spilt over.

On balance, therefore, an invention in Ireland appears more likely. It looks as if the practice was exported early to Wales and Cornwall and was quickly combined with the local tradition of Latin epigraphy, but only with a fraction of the formulaic rich­ness of Irish ogams. Unlike Ireland, there are no ogams with manifestly late, i.e. Old Irish linguistic and ortho­graphic traits in southern Britain.

Period 1 ‘classical ogam’. The 5^th–7^th centuries are usually regarded as the heart of the ogam tradi­tion. Traditionally this is labelled the ‘orthodox period’, but in order to avoid the impression that texts after that period are ‘unorthodox’, we call it the ‘classical period’, in the sense of the first major flour­ishing of the tradition. Notwithstanding the practical difficulties in dating indivi­dual inscriptions, it is likely that most of the extant corpus in Ireland, and apparently all of the monu­ments in southern Britain, belong to this phase. Some of the stones from Gaelic Scotland, Man, and Pictland also belong to this period, but in all three areas ogam continued to be used monumentally for several centuries more (to the 10^th or even 11^th century). Linguistically, classical ogam spans the Primi­tive Irish stage (4^th–6^th centuries) of the deve­lop­ment of the Irish language, and Archaic or Early Old Irish (7^th century) – two stages of the language that are drastically different from each other typo­logically and grammatically. If the stones from Pictland are in a form of Pictish, that language would also be recorded in ogam.

Period 2 ‘reformed ogam’. The period from the 8^th century onwards throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period is often called ‘scholastic’ ogam, as if the practical use of the script had ceased and it had become the object of learned interest alone. But not only had ogam always been a scholarly phenomenon, it is becoming increasingly evident that the tradition was kept alive both inside and outside scrip­toria. Nevertheless, with the ‘explosion’ of Irish monastic learning, ogam was drawn into this orbit and many practical aspects of ogam writing became heavily influenced by or iden­tical to the Latin-script-based Old Irish manuscript tradition. This is most evident in the radically dif­fe­rent orthography, but also in the reinterpretation of the value of individual signs, and in manuscript-in­spired discourse markers such as feather marks to indicate the beginning of texts, or in word spacing. We propose the term ‘reformed ogam’ for the period when manuscript spelling practices replaced the clas­sical ogam orthography, without wanting to create the impression that the script was now confined to a two-dimen­sional medium. Still, the number of objects – monuments and instrumenta – in Ireland is small com­pared to that of the first period, whereas in Scotland and the Isle of Man ogam epi­graphy flourished and expanded during this period. In Scotland especially, the inventory diversified in the shapes of the letters and in the attested formulae. The languages recorded in this period are Old, Middle and Classical Modern Irish as well as Scottish Gaelic, and perhaps Pictish in Scotland.

Period 3 ‘antiquarian ogam’. Knowledge of the ogam script lingered in Scotland till at least the 16^th century and never died out in Ireland. Unlike other ancient writing systems, it did not have to be deciphered by modern scholars. The medieval learned tradition of Ireland produced tracts on ogam which preserve information on how to decode them, so that even after the end of independent Gaelic culture in the middle of the 17^th century, there were scholars in Ireland up to the middle of the 19^th century who could read or produce ogam inscriptions. They are few in number and they are typically in Modern Irish, with odd English examples. In this period, ogam often formed part of a broader interest in alphabets and cryptography, and many examples are found alongside schemes of letter-forms for other languages or script systems. Palaeographically, antiquarian ogam is characterised by vowels written with full-band strokes, and by the extensive use of forfeda; occasionally scribes employed distinctive forms of the script, such as that known as ‘bound ogam’, in which the strokes of letters are connected or ‘bound’ with a horizontal stroke through their distal tips.

Period 4 ‘revivalist ogam’. The active use of ogam was never entirely abandoned and continues up to the present day. With the revival of Irish language and culture from the end of the 19^th century and with the beginning of the academic study of the ‘Celtic’ past, ogam came back prominently into the public eye. As a conspicuous token of Gaelic culture and Celticism, it has occupied a small, but important niche in the cultural consciousness of 20^th– and 21^st-century Ireland. It is, for instance, found on private and public buildings, and with the digital revolution and its inclusion in Unicode in 1999 (cf. Adrian Doyle’s blog post), ogam can now also be used for computer applications. It is characteristic of the use of the script in the revival­ist period that it is practically never used for the language it was origi­nally designed for, namely Primi­tive Irish, but chiefly for Modern Irish and for other languages, especially English. In public epigraphy full-band vowels dominate, whereas computer-based fonts have a preference for vowel dots. Letters are typically separated from another by small spaces.

References

Harvey, Anthony (2001). ‘Problems in dating the origin of the Ogham script’, in John Higgitt, Katherine Forsyth and David N. Parsons (eds.), Roman, Runes and Ogham. Medieval Inscriptions in the Insular World and on the Continent. Donington, 37–50.

Harvey, Anthony (2017). ‘Languages and Literacy in Mid-First-Millennium Ireland: New Questions to Some Old Answers’, in Nancy Edwards, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Roy Flechner (eds.), Trans­forming Landscapes of Belief in the Early Medieval Insular World and Beyond. Converting the Isles II. Turnhout: Brepols, 47‒63.

Poppe, Erich (2018). ‘Writing Systems and Cultural Identity: Ogam in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland’, Language & History 61/1–2, 23–38.

Sims-Williams, Patrick (2003). The Celtic Inscriptions of Britain: Phonology and Chronology, c. 400–1200 [= Proceedings of the Philological Society 37]. Oxford–Boston: Blackwell.

Stifter, David, Nora White, and Katherine Forsyth (2024). ‘Early Literacy and Multilingualism in Ireland and Britain’, in: Alex Mullen and George Woudhuysen (eds.), Languages and Communities in the Late-Roman and Post-Imperial Western Provinces. Oxford University Press, 203–235.

Swift, Cathy (1997). Ogam Stones and the Earliest Christians. Maynooth: Department of Old and Middle Irish.

Ziegler, Sabine (1994). Die Sprache der altirischen Ogam-Inschriften. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.