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Ogham Few

Uath

OO-ah
Aicme hUatha
Origin 1948

Uath is the sixth letter of ogham, giving the sound H, and the first letter of the second family, Aicme hUatha, named after it. Its name is often connected with the hawthorn or whitethorn, and the word itself can mean terror or fear; the word-oghams liken it to a pack of hounds. The hawthorn was a hedge and boundary tree strongly linked in Irish folklore to the fairy folk and to sacred, dangerous thresholds not to be disturbed. From this it gathers associations of restraint, cleansing, and the guarded pause before a change. In the modern divinatory use of ogham, a twentieth-century reconstruction (Graves, 1948) rather than an ancient oracle, Uath is read for a threshold or waiting-time, a needful holding-back, and cleansing before one may safely pass.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1948 1Tradition: Modern tree-lore and tree calendar (Robert Graves, The White Goddess)
Origin Period
300 to 600 CE 1Tradition: Ogham inscriptions on stone
Origin Period
600 to 1000 CE 1Tradition: Medieval Irish manuscript tradition (In Lebor Ogaim and Auraicept na n-Eces)
Origin Period
Uath is attested in inscriptional ogham from the fourth to the sixth century, in the medieval Irish manuscript tradition through the tenth century, and, in the tree identification many readers now know it by, only from Robert Graves's The White Goddess in 1948, centuries after the alphabet's original use. 1
Place of Origin
A smaller group in Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man and south-west Britain 1
Place of Origin
Ireland, with the great majority of inscriptions in Kerry, Cork and Waterford 1
Origin of the Name
The letter name is recorded in the medieval Ogam Tract. The tree identification carried here (Hawthorn) is a gloss supplied by the medieval scholiasts, not part of the name: McManus shows that only about a third of the twenty names are securely tree words, the rest being ordinary nouns of other sense, or words fitted to trees because a tree alphabet was the scheme the glossators had settled on. 1
Language
Old Irish 1
Reading Keys
Keywords
Cleansing, the threshold 1
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
assembly of packs of hounds 1Tradition: Briatharogam Morainn mac Moin
Meaning in the Attesting Source
blanching of faces 1Tradition: Briatharogam Maic ind Oc
Meaning in the Attesting Source
most difficult at night 1Tradition: Briatharogam Con Culainn
Identity
Associated Letter
H 1
Tree Name
Hawthorn 1
Aicme
Aicme hUatha 1
Learn More
A Letter Named Horror, Later Assigned a Hawthorn

Uath is the most awkward letter in the row, and its awkwardness is a useful thing to see, because the tree scheme has to work hardest here.

The name

Uath means horror, terror, fear. It is not a plant of any kind. This is not a contested reading; it is what the word means.

The sound

The letter's value is also a problem. It stands for h, a sound that Old Irish did not have as an independent phoneme in the positions where an alphabet would need it. Some scholars have argued the letter never had a stable value in ordinary use at all, and it is vanishingly rare in the stone inscriptions.

So the first letter of the second aicme is a character named after an abstract emotion, representing a sound the language barely used.

The kennings

The briatharogaim gloss it with phrases about an assembly of packs of hounds and about blanching faces, fear, in other words. The kennings agree with the name. They say nothing about a tree.

The hawthorn

The hawthorn appears in the later scholiast layer, and the reasoning behind it is visible: hawthorn is the fairy tree, dangerous to cut, associated in Irish tradition with places one should not disturb. If a letter meaning terror must be assigned a tree, hawthorn is the obvious candidate.

It is a good inference. It is still an inference, made centuries after the letter was in use, by someone applying a scheme.

Reading it now

The modern divinatory meaning (caution, the threshold, what should not be approached carelessly, protection through fear), is unusually well grounded, because it derives from the letter name rather than from the tree. This is one place where the folklore and the philology point the same way.

It just does not point at a hawthorn.

Cutting Uath: One Stroke, and a Sound Irish Did Not Have

Ogham identifies a letter by its family and by a stroke count from one to five.

How the letter is formed

Uath opens the second family, Aicme hUatha, and is cut as one stroke on the second family's side of the line, the side opposite the first family. In the horizontal manuscript layout the second family is written above the line where the first family sits below it.

A letter with almost nothing to do

Uath is given the value H, and that is where the difficulty begins. Old Irish had no phoneme corresponding to an independent h, and the letter is correspondingly rare in the surviving inscriptions. A letter that encodes a sound the language does not use is unusual in an alphabet designed for that language, and it is one of the reasons scholars have argued that the ogham order was constructed on the model of a Latin alphabet rather than assembled from Irish phonology alone.

That argument is live rather than settled, and the atlas records it as a scholarly position rather than as a conclusion.

In the corpus

The surviving orthodox inscriptions are almost all personal names in the genitive, cut on standing stones in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man, dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to the sixth centuries. Uath appears in very few of them.

The hawthorn attached to this letter belongs to the later manuscript glosses and is recorded separately in this atlas.

Connections

Also Modeled As

Hawthorn (Uath), Celtic Tree Signs

The ogham few Uath and the Celtic tree-calendar sign Hawthorn (Uath) name the same letter and tree; this atlas models the ogham alphabet and the modern tree-calendar as separate entity types.

Source Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' PrimerGeorge Calder (ed.)

Attributed To

Auraicept na nEces, Esoteric Texts

The Auraicept sets out this letter's place in the ogham system and its mythic origin under Ogma.

Source Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' PrimerGeorge Calder (ed.)

Found In

Aicme hUatha, Aicmi (Ogham Groups)
Source A Guide to OgamDamian McManus

Named For

Hawthorn, Plants

Medieval tree-list attribution (Auraicept na nEces briatharogaim), distinct from the 1948 Graves tree-calendar reconstruction carried on the separate celtictreesign entities.

Source A Guide to OgamDamian McManus

Originates in Language

Old Irish, Languages
Source A Guide to OgamDamian McManus

Related To

Hawthorn (Uath), Celtic Tree Signs

What is not known, and what would settle it. The tree-calendar sign Hawthorn (Uath) shares its tree with the Ogham few Uath (hawthorn).

Source The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic MythRobert Graves
Sources
1. A Guide to Ogam
Damian McManus, An Sagart, 1991
  • On the letter names and the briatharogaim
  • On uath and the value of the h-letter
  • Found In: Aicme hUatha
  • Named For: Hawthorn
View the Source
Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' Primer
George Calder (ed.), John Grant, 1917
  • In Lebor Ogaim, the letter lists and word-oghams
  • Also Modeled As: Hawthorn (Uath)
View the Source
The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
Robert Graves, Faber and Faber, 1948Cited for the 1948 tree calendar, not as evidence of ancient practiceView the Source

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