Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Cutting Gort: Two Oblique Strokes

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Cutting Gort: Two Oblique Strokes

A letter of the third ogham family is cut across the line at an angle rather than beside it.

How the letter is formed

Gort is the second letter of the third family, Aicme Muine, and is cut as two strokes crossing the line obliquely, parallel to one another.

Cutting an oblique stroke on stone

The oblique strokes of the third family are the most demanding to cut cleanly on an arris, because each has to be carried across the edge and down both faces of the stone at a consistent angle. On many surviving stones the third family shows more variation in execution than the first two, and badly weathered examples can be difficult to distinguish from the fourth family, whose strokes cross the line square. The distinction between an angled and a perpendicular crossing is the only thing separating ten of the twenty letters from ten others.

The sound

Gort carries the value G. It appears in the surviving orthodox inscriptions, a corpus of a few hundred stones consisting almost entirely of personal names in the genitive case, cut in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Britain and dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to the sixth centuries.

The gloss layer

The ivy attached to this letter belongs to the manuscript tradition, several centuries later than the inscriptions, and the seasonal schemes in modern circulation are later still. The atlas records the three layers as three separate things rather than as one continuous tradition.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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