Ogham Fews
Aicme hUatha
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Origin 1948
Coll is the ninth letter of ogham, giving the sound C (a hard K), in the second family Aicme hUatha. Its name means hazel, and the medieval word-oghams call it the fairest of trees. In Irish myth the hazels of wisdom grew about a sacred well and dropped their nuts into it, feeding the salmon of knowledge; to eat the hazelnut or the salmon was to gain poetic wisdom and inspiration. From this the hazel gathers strong associations of concentrated knowledge, divination, and the inspired word. In the modern divinatory use of ogham, a twentieth-century reconstruction (Graves, 1948) rather than an ancient oracle, Coll is read for wisdom and creative inspiration, the gathering of essential knowledge, and the intuitive insight that feeds poetry, learning, and sound judgment.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1948 1Tradition: Modern tree-lore and tree calendar (Robert Graves, The White Goddess) Origin Period300 to 600 CE 1Tradition: Ogham inscriptions on stone Origin Period600 to 1000 CE 1Tradition: Medieval Irish manuscript tradition (In Lebor Ogaim and Auraicept na n-Eces) Origin PeriodColl 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 OriginA smaller group in Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man and south-west Britain 1 Place of OriginIreland, with the great majority of inscriptions in Kerry, Cork and Waterford 1 Origin of the NameThe letter name is recorded in the medieval Ogam Tract. The tree identification carried here (Hazel) 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 Identity
Associated Letter Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Sourcefairest tree 1Tradition: Briatharogam Morainn mac Moin Meaning in the Attesting Sourcefriend of nutshells 1Tradition: Briatharogam Maic ind Oc Meaning in the Attesting Sourcesweetest tree 1Tradition: Briatharogam Con Culainn Learn More
The Ogham Letter Coll
Coll 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 C and belongs to the second (Aicme hUatha) 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; Coll is linked to the hazel, from which its letter-name derives.
The divinatory use of ogham, here the sense of wisdom and inspiration, 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.
Cutting Coll: Four Strokes in the Second Family
Ogham encodes each letter as a family plus a count of strokes from one to five.
How the letter is formed
Coll is the fourth letter of the second family, Aicme hUatha, and is cut as four strokes on that family's side of the line.
Two letters for one modern sound
Coll carries the value C, and the letter that follows it, Quert, carried a distinct sound in the language of the inscriptions. In Primitive Irish the two were different phonemes. By the Old Irish of the manuscripts they had fallen together, leaving Quert with no distinct value and Coll doing the work of both.
That merger is visible in the inscriptions themselves. It is one of the clearest cases where the ogham corpus is evidence for the history of the Irish language rather than merely a curiosity of writing, because the letters record a distinction the later language no longer made and the manuscripts could no longer explain.
In the corpus
The surviving orthodox inscriptions are almost entirely personal names in the genitive case, cut on standing stones in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Britain, dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to the sixth centuries. Coll is common in them.
The hazel attached to this letter belongs to the manuscript glosses, and the calendar schemes in modern circulation are later still. The atlas keeps the three layers apart.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attributed To
The Auraicept sets out this letter's place in the ogham system and its mythic origin under Ogma.
Originates in Language
Related To
What is not known, and what would settle it. The tree-calendar sign Hazel (Coll) shares its tree with the Ogham few Coll (hazel).
Sources
Essays About This Entity (1 essay)
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.