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| Ogham |
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| Click to Download Beth-Luis-Nion, The Ogham Script |
| The Language of Trees The readers of Ogham, and researchers like me, owe gratitude and appreciation to Curtis Clark, the creator of the original Beth-Luis-Nion Ogham font. This page is his work. |
| Ogham is a form of writing used by the Celtic peoples of the British Isles prior to the introduction of the Roman alphabet and Christianity. Each letter of the Ogham alphabet has the name of a tree or other plant, and each of these trees had a meaning in the Celtic religion, and possibly in the Goddess-centered religions of the Old Europeans that preceded the Celts. The tree-alphabet was also used by the Celts for divination, but few details were recorded. The trees and the alphabet are still used by modern Witches (Wiccans), Druids, and other followers of Goddess-spirituality and pagan paths. It is for these that I created this font (although Celtic scholars may also find it useful). The alphabet consists of twenty letters. Each letter consists of from one to five strokes extending from or crossing a horizontal line. Ancient Ogham inscriptions are generally found cut into the edge of hewn stone, with the edge representing the horizontal line. When the edge is actually horizontal, the letters read from left to right. Vertical edges were usually written from top to bottom, and in the case of a three-edge structure, such as a dolmen arch, the writing began at the lower left, ran up the left side, across the top, and down the right side. The Beth-Luis-Nion font is named after the first three letters of the alphabet (although there is some disagreement about the sequence, and an alternate alphabet is called beth-luis-fearn). Here is the alphabet, with the corresponding trees: |
| 1. Keyboard mapping of font 2. Irish pronunciation rendered crudely into English 3. Based on my (his) own research 4. This character was used as "p" in Brythonic languages; the "p" sound does not occur in Goedelic languages except in loan-words, and the "ng" sound supposedly occurs in neither, another piece of evidence that the tree-alphabet, if not the Ogham, is pre-Celtic. References: Glass-Koentop, Pattalee. 1991. Year of Moons, Season of Trees. Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul, Mn. Graves, Robert. 1966. The White Goddess. 2nd, enlarged edition. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. |
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