The Third Forfeda and Its Missing Sound

Uilleann is the third of the five forfeda, devised to carry a diphthong close to ui that the original twenty ogham letters, cut for an earlier and phonetically different stage of the Irish language, had no way to spell as one single sign. The Auraicept na n-Eces glosses it with edlend, honeysuckle, keeping to the tree and plant naming convention that the core alphabet is known for even though, as the letter Or shows elsewhere in this same supplementary group, that convention was not applied without exception.

Honeysuckle is a climbing, twining plant, and later popular writing on ogham has sometimes read a symbolic connection between that growth habit and the keyword sense of choice or attraction assigned to the letter. That reading belongs to modern ogham divination material rather than to the Auraicept or any other medieval source, which glosses the letter for its sound value and its plant name without attaching a moral or divinatory meaning to either. The distinction matters because the modern and medieval layers of ogham interpretation are often merged in popular accounts in a way the surviving textual evidence does not support, and a reader who wants the medieval material on its own terms has to actively separate the two.

Sources Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' PrimerGeorge Calder (ed.) with A Guide to OgamDamian McManus