Fearn

Fearn is a letter of ogham, the earliest form of writing in the Irish language, cut as sets of strokes across a central line. It stands for the sound F and belongs to the first (Aicme Beithe) of the four aicme, the groups of five into which the twenty principal letters are divided.

Letter, tree and later meaning

Ogham is a genuine antiquity: some four hundred inscriptions survive, most on standing stones in Ireland and western Britain, cut between roughly the fourth and sixth centuries. Each letter also bears a name, and medieval Irish scholars glossed many of those names with trees and with word-kennings; Fearn is linked to the alder, from which its letter-name derives.

The divinatory use of ogham, here the sense of guidance and foundation, is not attested in the early inscriptions. The reading of ogham as an oracle, and much of the elaborate tree-lore attached to it, belongs to the medieval glossary tradition and, above all, to the modern neo-druidic revival of the twentieth century. It is presented here as that later tradition, laid over a script whose first purpose was to record names in stone.

Every ogham letter is identified by its family and by a count of strokes, and nothing else.

How the letter is formed

Fearn is the third letter of the first family, Aicme Beithe, and is cut as three strokes on that family's side of the line. On a standing stone the line is the arris of the stone itself and the inscription is normally read from the bottom upward.

The sound that moved

This is one of the letters where the epigraphic record and the manuscript tradition disagree about the value, and the disagreement is a fact about the Irish language rather than about the alphabet. In the language of the inscriptions the letter stands for a w sound. That sound became f in Old Irish by a regular change, and the manuscripts, written in the later language, name the letter Fearn and give it the value F.

The letter did not change. The pronunciation of the word it was named after did, and the name went with it. Anyone reading an early inscription with the manuscript values in hand will misread this letter, which is one of the reasons the two traditions are kept apart in this atlas.

Where it appears

Fearn occurs in the surviving inscriptions, which consist almost entirely of personal names in the genitive case, cut in Ireland and in Irish-settled districts of Britain between roughly the fourth and sixth centuries. The alder that later glosses attach to the letter belongs to the manuscript layer and is recorded separately.