Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Aicme Ailme, the Fourth Family, and the Tree Question

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Aicme Ailme, the Fourth Family, and the Tree Question

Aicme Ailme is the fourth group, named for ailm, and its five letters are ailm, onn, ur, edad and idad, representing the vowels a, o, u, e and i. In the script these are cut as one to five notches across the stemline. A fifth group, the forfeda or supplementary letters, was added later to write sounds the original twenty could not.

The popular name tree alphabet needs qualifying: the medieval Irish glossaries do give tree names for many of the letters, and some letter names are certainly tree words, but McManus has shown that only about a third are securely trees, that others are ordinary words of quite different meaning, and that the systematic tree scheme is a later scholastic construction. The elaborate tree calendar and tree divination widely circulated today derive from Robert Graves's The White Goddess (1948), a work of poetic imagination that scholars of early Irish have consistently rejected as history.

Sources A Guide to OgamDamian McManus with Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' PrimerGeorge Calder (ed.), The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic MythRobert Graves

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.