Right at the beginning of this page, we mentioned the fact that we don’t have any writings that come to us from pagan hands, ‘sort of.’ Now we’ve got some of the basics out of the way, it’s probably as good a time as any to explain what we meant by that comment.
According to conventional wisdom, the pre-Christian Gaels eschewed reading or writing and preferred to stick to an oral tradition. Sometimes you might see people claiming that the druids actively prevented people from writing anything down (pertaining to their religious beliefs), perhaps hinting that by doing so the druids themselves could manage people’s religious beliefs and understanding with an iron fist, and retain their important position in society – keeping their fingers stuck firmly in the most fruitful pies.
There isn’t any actual evidence for any of that, but either way it’s also often said that the Gaels only became a literate people with the arrival of Christianity. This is because literacy would have been a necessary part of ecclesiastical training, so that priests, monks, bishops, or abbots could understand and study the Bible, and learn about the ins and outs of it by reading the most up-to-date scholarship of the day.
In the process of learning to read and write, those early ecclesiastics (like Palladius or Patrick, Columba and Columbanus) therefore also had to learn Latin – the lingua franca of the Church at the time – and as we stated near the start of this page, the first manuscripts or writings that were produced in Ireland were written in Latin, with vernacular Irish works coming a little bit later.
This all seems to make perfect sense, but it may not be quite true. Christianity is certainly responsible for the manuscript tradition, in a roundabout sort of way, but it’s not necessarily the source of all forms of literacy in Ireland, or the Gaelic world as a whole. From around the fourth to the eighth centuries, the Irish carved inscriptions onto large standing stones, using an alphabet called ogam (this is the Old Irish spelling, pronounced as it looks; in modern Irish it’s ogham). These inscriptions can be found in Ireland as well as the various places that had been colonised by the Irish in this period – in the Isle of Man and the western seaboard of Scotland, but also in parts of Wales, as well as England (primarily Devon and Cornwall). Some of the very earliest inscriptions can be found in Wales, so although we have a pretty good idea that the alphabet was invented by the Irish themselves, this doesn’t necessarily mean it was invented in Ireland itself; it’s possible the system may have originated amongst the Irish colonists in Wales – perhaps influenced by the local, literate Romano-British population. This is one theory, but it’s far from certain that it should be taken as fact. Either way, the Irish origins are supported by the fact that the inscriptions themselves are written in a form of Irish – the earliest examples being expressed in Primitive Irish, then ranging through Archaic Irish, and Old Irish.
The ogam alphabet consists of a number of different lines or notches, where each line or notch, or group of lines or notches, represents a certain letter:
Although ogam looks nothing like the Latin alphabet, its inventor(s) clearly had a detailed understanding of that language. For a start, each ogam letter can be identified with a Latin letter, or a combination of Latin letters, which then represent the same sort of sounds those Latin letters are meant to make (though certain adaptations had to be made, to accommodate a few peculiarities of Irish pronunciation, as it were). Besides the fact that each letter matches up so neatly with the Latin alphabet, it also seems likely that whoever worked on developing the alphabet had knowledge of a number of popular Latin grammarians, such as Donatus (who lived in the second century CE).14 This not only helps to reinforce these Latin origins, it also tells us the alphabet was most likely to have been invented sometime between the second century (at the very earliest), but before the fourth century (when ogam was first used on stone).
We might not know the precise date of ogam’s invention, but we can say that by the time the Gaels started to produce their ogam inscriptions – carving the names of certain people onto standing stones – in the fourth century, the writing system was obviously already well-established. Right from the start they took a pretty consistent approach to it all, which tells us they weren’t still figuring out the rules or the details, and having to work out the kinks as they went along. As an already mature system of writing, then, this would suggest that they’d been using it for quite some time – at least fifty years or so, perhaps, but possibly more. This gives us a likely origin for ogam some time in the third century CE, but maybe as early as the second century.
These dates would presumably mean the alphabet was invented by pagans – perhaps as a result of contact with Roman or Romano-British traders, if we’re assume a specifically Irish origin (in Ireland), or simply through close contact with the local Romano-British population if we assume origins in the colonies (in Wales). In either case, the Irish had an extensive network of contacts throughout the Roman world (and its colonies, like Gaul or Celtiberian Spain), either as a result of those colonies they’d established in Britain, or through trade. As a result, some knowledge of Latin would have obviously been useful even before Christianity came along and made it something of a necessity. It wouldn’t be a stretch to suppose that the Irish traders saw their business partners writing things down, and saw the value in it, even if it was only for inventory purposes or whatever. Given the style and form of ogam, in fact, it’s been suggested the lettering may have derived from an early tallying system (which hardly needed outside inspiration for the Irish to have developed it).
All the same, some academics do argue in favour of Christian origins for the ogam’s invention, pointing to the timeframe we’re dealing with here. Given the fact that the writing system shows obvious knowledge of Latin grammarians in particular, this would point to its invention within a decidedly learned milieu, which – it’s assumed – wouldn’t have included the likes of traders, who really only needed to know enough Latin to get by. As part of their training, early Irish ecclesiastics not only had to learn how to speak Latin, but how to read and write it, so they could better understand the Bible, and the learned commentary that had been written about it by scholars and ecclesiastics from all over the Christian world. This required a far greater degree of expertise in Latin, and so it meant the works of Latin grammarians (like Donatus) had to be studied in great depth. In this respect, it could be argued that the most likely environment for the invention of an alphabet like ogam would have been Christian, because they had the learning, the knowledge, and the resources to do so.
None of this really addresses the question of why they invented a system of writing that was so different to the alphabet they had based it on. They could have just used Latin lettering, after all – as they did later on when they began writing in Irish in their manuscripts. It could be that ogam had always been intended for carving onto stone, and so the lettering was created with this use in mind – it’s far easier to carve lines and notches than letters, after all. Again, however, if ogam took some time to develop into a fully-fledged system, which was only then carved onto stone, its inventor(s) would have presumably needed to use some other materials to practice on, like wood, wax tablets, or bark/early parchment-type materials. The literature does describe druids, gods, and warriors carving ogam letters onto wooden sticks, for example – for a variety of purposes – but the fact remains that we just don’t have any confirmed evidence of ogam writing from before the fourth century. Besides stone, ogam lettering was also sometimes carved into things like jewellery, bone utensils, spindle whorls, etc., but none of the examples that have been found so far can be dated with any real confidence to much earlier than the seventh century, and these examples often show clear evidence of a Christian milieu.
The problem here is, a lot of the materials we’re dealing with here, like wood or early attempts at some sort of paper or parchment, are all organic. They’re small and delicate, and they don’t tend to stand the test of time unless they’re found in incredibly exceptional circumstances. Waterlogged conditions will preserve organic matter because of the anaerobic conditions – there’s no oxygen for bacteria to thrive in, so things like wood, bone, fabric, or even flesh won’t rot like they otherwise normally would. Because these conditions are relatively rare, though, it’s hardly a surprise to find that there’s a lack of any firm evidence for ogam’s existence at an early date, prior to its appearance on the stones. This whole situation is an example of the old adage: an absence of evidence is not (always) evidence of absence.
Until we find an example of ogam on something that can be firmly dated to an early date (before the fourth century CE), the questions surrounding the origins of ogam will continue to be hotly debated. At the moment, the argument could really go either way, but even if we can prove ogam really is pre-Christian in origin (and so the inscriptions could represent writing from actual pagans), that doesn’t tell us anything about who was carving the inscriptions themselves, and the people who are named in those inscriptions could have been pagan or Christian regardless.
The inscriptions are always very short – usually giving little more than a name, perhaps with some genealogical or other identifying details like a patronymic (the name of their father), the name of a grandfather, and/or a more distant ancestor. Very occasionally they might also identify the individual’s occupation, or mention their status as a ‘client’ or vassal of someone else, but this is quite rare. As a general rule they’re all very formulaic in the way the individuals are described, and they don’t give us anything more than that. We don’t find any pagan prayers or liturgy outlined on the stones, or anything like that.
This isn’t to say the ogam is useless, however. The value of these inscriptions is that sometimes the names that are carved onto stone might mention a distant ancestor – a founding figure of the dynasty or population group they belonged to. In some cases, we can see that this distant ancestor is obviously a deity – a divine ancestor – and so regardless of the alphabet’s origins, whether they might be Christian or pre-Christian, we can still see clear remnants of pre-Christian or ‘pagan’ belief from a time when pagans were still around (and perhaps even in the majority). In other cases, the names that people are given clearly articulate a sense that emulating certain deities was a desirable thing, or that they had some sort of formal, dedicatory relationship with them. To talk more about this sort of thing, though, we need to really delve more into linguistic matters, so we’ll be coming back to all of this in the next page, when we take a look at that subject more closely.15
References
14 Fionnbarr Moore, ‘The Ogam Stones of County Kerry,’ in Griffin Murray (Ed.), Medieval Treasures of County Kerry (2010), 7.
15 For more about ogam see: Damian McManus’s A Guide to Ogam (1991), and Ogam Stones at University College Cork (2004); see also R.A.S. Macalister’s Corpus inscriptionum insularum Celticarum Volume I (1945).
On the debate surrounding the dating of the gaming die see: Hencken and Stelfox, “Ballinderry Crannog No. 2,” in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature Vol. 47 (1942), 54-55; p75; Stevenson, ‘The Beginnings of Literacy in Ireland,’ in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (Section C) Volume 89 (1989), 141-142.
Eòlas 