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Aicmi (Ogham Groups)

Aicme Beithe

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Origin 300 to 600 CE

Aicme Beithe is the first of the four aicmi, or groups, of five letters each that make up the twenty letters of Ogham, the ancient Irish alphabet attested on stone inscriptions from roughly the fourth to the sixth century CE, mostly in the Primitive Irish of that period. It takes its name from its first letter, Beithe, generally identified with the birch, and the group also contains the letters for L, F, S and N. Ogham letters are carved as sets of strokes along a central line, and grouping them into four aicmi of five letters, based on the number and orientation of those strokes, is part of the script's original design rather than a later scholarly overlay. The detailed tree symbolism attached to each individual Ogham letter in modern popular sources, most influentially Robert Graves's 1948 book The White Goddess, is a twentieth century poetic reworking, not a straightforward continuation of the medieval Irish tradition, though the medieval texts do give some letters plant based names.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
300 to 600 CE 1Tradition: Ogham inscriptions on stone
Origin Period
600 to 1000 CE 1Tradition: Medieval Irish manuscript tradition (In Lebor Ogaim and Auraicept na n-Eces)
Origin Period
Aicme Beithe is attested in inscriptional ogham from the fourth to the sixth century, with the alphabet's grammatical and literary elaboration in the medieval Irish tradition continuing through the tenth century. 1
Place of Origin
Ireland. 1
Origin of the Name
The group is named for its own first letter, beithe. Its five letters are b, l, f, s and n, written as one to five strokes cut to the right of the stemline. The word aicme means 'family' or 'class'; the grouping is a feature of the script itself and is set out in the medieval Ogam Tract. 1
Language
Old Irish 1
Identity
Member Letters
Beith, Luis, Fearn, Saille, Nion 1
Learn More
Aicme Beithe, the First Family

The ogham alphabet is organised into four aicmi, families or groups, of five letters each, and each group takes its name from its first letter. Aicme Beithe is the first, named for beith, and its five letters are beith, luis, fern, sail and nin, giving the sounds b, l, f or v, s and n. In the script the letters of this group are cut as one to five strokes to the right of the stemline, or below it when the line is horizontal. Ogham is attested in some four hundred surviving stone inscriptions, chiefly in Ireland and in Welsh and Scottish areas of Irish settlement, dating from roughly the fourth to the seventh centuries, and the great majority are simple memorial formulae giving a personal name in the genitive.

Beithe's own name is one of the more secure cases in a system otherwise full of dispute: modern scholarship, chiefly Damian McManus's A Guide to Ogam (1991), accepts beithe as a genuine, unambiguous tree name, birch, one of only about five of the twenty ogham letter names that etymology and the medieval glosses agree on without real controversy. That relative certainty makes Aicme Beithe an unusual case to open the alphabet with, since the letter-name debates that affect several of its sibling groups, addressed in the articles on Aicme hUatha and Aicme Muine, do not apply to its own founding letter in anything like the same degree.

How the First Family Is Cut

An aicme is a family of five ogham letters that share one way of meeting the writing line and differ only in how many strokes they carry.

The geometry

Aicme Beithe is cut as strokes lying to one side of the line and not crossing it. Its five members carry one, two, three, four and five such strokes: Beith, Luis, Fearn, Saille and Nion, with the values B, L, F and S and N.

On a standing stone the line is the arris, the edge where two faces meet, and the strokes of this family run out onto one of those faces. In the horizontal layout used by the manuscripts the same family is written below the line.

Why the families are named this way

Each aicme takes its name from its own first letter, in the genitive: the family of Beithe, the family of Uath, the family of Muin, the family of Ailm. The naming is descriptive rather than doctrinal, and it is the manuscripts, not the stones, that record it.

The mirror problem

Aicme Beithe and Aicme hUatha use identical strokes on opposite sides of the same line. Nothing in the marks themselves says which side is which; that depends on the reader knowing the direction of the inscription. Read a stone the wrong way round and every letter of these two families becomes its counterpart in the other, producing a different text rather than an obviously wrong one. The convention of reading upward along the left arris exists to remove that ambiguity.

Twenty letters follow from four families of five, and the whole alphabet is that arithmetic.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Attributed To

Auraicept na nEces, Esoteric Texts

The Auraicept explains the grouping of ogham letters into aicmi of five.

Source Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' PrimerGeorge Calder (ed.)

Disciplines That Use This

Ogham, Disciplines

The four aicmi, the letter groups the alphabet is organised into.

Source A Guide to OgamDamian McManus

Originates in Language

Old Irish, Languages
Source A Guide to OgamDamian McManus
Sources
1. A Guide to Ogam
Damian McManus, An Sagart, 1991the aicmi and the letter valuesView the Source
Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' Primer
George Calder (ed.), John Grant, 1917View the Source
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