Gort

Gort 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 G and belongs to the third (Aicme Muine) 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; Gort is linked to the ivy, from which its letter-name derives.

The divinatory use of ogham, here the sense of growth and the labyrinth, 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.

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.