Origin 1948
Ailm is the sixteenth letter of ogham, giving the sound A, and the first letter of the fourth family, Aicme Ailme, named after it. Its name is associated in the tree-lists with the fir or pine (and sometimes the palm), and the word-oghams call it the loudest of groanings, evoking a cry or a great sighing sound. The tall evergreen fir stands high above the forest, visible from afar and keeping its green through winter, and so gathers associations of far sight, high perspective, and endurance. In the modern divinatory use of ogham, a twentieth-century reconstruction (Graves, 1948) rather than an ancient oracle, Ailm is read for vision and perspective, the clarity gained by rising above the immediate moment to see the whole landscape of a situation.
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 PeriodAilm 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 (Silver Fir) 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 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Sourcebeginning of an answer 1Tradition: Briatharogam Maic ind Oc Meaning in the Attesting Sourcebeginning of calling 1Tradition: Briatharogam Con Culainn Meaning in the Attesting Sourceloudest groan 1Tradition: Briatharogam Morainn mac Moin Identity
Associated Letter Learn More
The Ogham Letter Ailm
Ailm 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 A and belongs to the fourth (Aicme Ailme) 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; Ailm is linked to the silver fir or pine, from which its letter-name derives.
The divinatory use of ogham, here the sense of vision and perspective, 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 Ailm: One Notch Square Across the Line
The fourth family of ogham holds the vowels, and it is cut differently from the other three.
How the letter is formed
Ailm opens the fourth family, Aicme Ailme, and is cut as one short stroke crossing the line at a right angle. On a standing stone these characters are often no more than notches on the arris itself, short enough that they need not run onto either face, which is why the fourth family is sometimes described as notched rather than stroked.
Vowels in one family
All five vowels sit together in the fourth family, in the order A, O, U, E, I. That is neither the Latin order nor an order suggested by the sounds, and it is one of the pieces of evidence in the long argument about how the ogham sequence was arrived at. Grouping the vowels and giving them a distinct geometry is, by contrast, an obviously practical decision: a reader scanning a stone can pick out the vowel skeleton of a word before working through the consonants.
The sound
Ailm carries the value A. It is frequent in the surviving corpus of orthodox inscriptions, which consist 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 silver fir attached to this letter belongs to the manuscript gloss tradition and is recorded separately here.
Connections
Attributed To
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
Source A Guide to OgamDamian McManus
Named For
Pine, Plants Tree-list attribution to fir or pine (Auraicept na nEces briatharogaim); pine is the matching live plant entity, distinct from the 1948 Graves tree-calendar reconstruction carried on the separate celtictreesign entities.
Source A Guide to OgamDamian McManus
Originates in Language
Source A Guide to OgamDamian McManus
Sources
1. A Guide to Ogam
Damian McManus, An Sagart, 1991- On the letter names and the briatharogaim
- Found In: Aicme Ailme
- Named For: Pine
View the Source Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' Primer
George Calder (ed.), John Grant, 1917In Lebor Ogaim, the letter lists and word-oghamsView 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 Essays About This Entity (1 essay)
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