Contents:
Carnivora the Winged Scavenger. Seeds of the Soul. Shamani the Raging Flame.
Madara the Midnight Warrior. In His Majesty's Postal Service. A Terraria Short Story. Sword of the Sands. A complete starter kit bundle filled with fantasy and poetry. Lore of the Underlings: Poetry While You Wait: National Poetry Month Rykar the Fire Hound. Dwarves of the World. Whispers from a Vanished Ocean. Initiate - Doll Book 1-Episode 3. The Sasquatch Sheriff of Sorcerer's Gulch.
A Change in Fortune. Initiate - Hex Book 1-Episode 4.
A Day in a Life in After World: Hours of the Day. Not in the tree-hugging sense, but as in respect, awe, admiration. Seeing trees being cut almost hurts, and certainly makes me feel incredibly sad. In Irish mythology, tree lore features… Read More. Posted on 18th May by Ali Isaac. Posted on 22nd Apr by Ali Isaac. One of the most intriguing mysteries we have inherited from our early Irish ancestors, in my opinion, is the lack of historical documentation they left behind.
It is generally accepted, nowadays, that theirs was an oral tradition.
The evil lord Balor and his dark Druid Mathgen send the traitorous Bres with an inhuman army to recapture the isle of Eire. Debra Like Liked by 1 person Reply. The Legend of Anlahn. I wish the old growth redwoods of my Northern California had the same regard as Irish hawthorn trees. Some of these messages seem to have been cryptic in nature and some were also for magical purposes. Posted on 5th Jun by Ali Isaac. Whilst it was thought to be auspicious, bringing good fortune and prosperity to the landowner, it was also thought to belong to the magical folk of the Otherworld, the Sidhe.
Posted on 5th Jun by Ali Isaac. A third theory put forward by the noted ogham scholar R. Macalister was influential at one time, but finds little favour with scholars today.
According to this theory, the alphabet was transmitted in oral form or on wood only, until it was finally put into a written form on stone inscriptions in early Christian Ireland. Later scholars are largely united in rejecting this theory, however, [22] primarily because a detailed study of the letters [ citation needed ] shows that they were created specifically for the Primitive Irish of the early centuries AD.
The supposed links with the form of the Greek alphabet that Macalister proposed can also be disproved. Macalister's theory of hand or finger signals as a source for ogham is a reflection of the fact that the signary consists of four groups of five letters, with a sequence of strokes from one to five. A theory popular among modern scholars is that the forms of the letters derive from the various numerical tally-mark systems in existence at the time. This theory was first suggested by the scholars Rudolf Thurneysen and Joseph Vendryes , who proposed that the ogham script was inspired by a pre-existing system of counting based around the numbers five and twenty, which was then adapted to an alphabet form by the first ogamists.
They came to the plain of Shinar to study the confused languages at Nimrod 's tower the Tower of Babel. Finding that they had already been dispersed, Fenius sent his scholars to study them, staying at the tower, co-ordinating the effort. The names he gave to the letters were those of his 25 best scholars.
Ogma was skilled in speech and poetry, and created the system for the learned, to the exclusion of rustics and fools. The first message written in ogam were seven b' s on a birch, sent as a warning to Lug mac Elathan , meaning: For this reason, the letter b is said to be named after the birch, and In Lebor Ogaim goes on to tell the tradition that all letters were named after trees, a claim also referred to by the Auraicept as an alternative to the naming after Fenius' disciples.
Strictly speaking, the word ogham refers only to the form of letters or script, while the letters themselves are known collectively as the Beith-luis-nin after the letter names of the first letters in the same manner as the modern "Alphabet" deriving from the Greek Alpha and Beta. This was to fit into his own theories which linked the Beith-luis-nin to a form of the Greek alphabet current in Northern Italy in the 6th and 5th centuries BC.
However, there is no evidence for Macalister's theories, and they have since been discounted by later scholars. There are in fact other explanations for the name Beith-luis-nin. One explanation is that the word nin which literally means 'a forked branch' was also regularly used to mean a written letter in general.
Beith-luis-nin could therefore mean simply 'Beith-luis letters'. The other explanation is that Beith-luis-nin is a convenient contraction of the first five letters thus: Five additional letters were later introduced mainly in the manuscript tradition , the so-called forfeda. The Ogam Tract also gives a variety of some variant or secret modes of writing ogham 92 in the Book of Ballymote , for example the "shield ogham" ogam airenach , nr.
Even the Younger Futhark are introduced as a kind of "Viking ogham" nrs. A letter for p is conspicuously absent, since the phoneme was lost in Proto-Celtic , and the gap was not filled in Q-Celtic , and no sign was needed before loanwords from Latin containing p appeared in Irish e. The base alphabet is therefore, as it were, designed for Proto-Q-Celtic. The others, except for emancholl , have at most only one certain 'orthodox' see below inscription each. The Auraicept itself is aware that not all names are known tree names, saying "Now all these are wood names such as are found in the Ogham Book of Woods, and are not derived from men", admitting that "some of these trees are not known today".
Only five of the twenty primary letters have tree names that the Auraicept considers comprehensible without further glosses, namely beith "birch", fearn "alder", saille "willow", duir "oak" and coll "hazel".
Sidhe: The Alphabet of the Trees [Shari Schultz] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. A sidhe is a fairy mound that acts as a portal between. Sidhe: The Alphabet of the Trees - Kindle edition by Shari Schultz. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like.
All the other names have to be glossed or "translated". According to the leading modern ogham scholar, Damian McManus, the "Tree Alphabet" idea dates to the Old Irish period say, 10th century , but it post-dates the Primitive Irish period, or at least the time when the letters were originally named. Its origin is probably due to the letters themselves being called feda "trees", or nin "forking branches" due to their shape. Since a few of the letters were, in fact, named after trees, the interpretation arose that they were called feda because of that.
The other names have a variety of meanings, which are set out in the list below. Of the forfeda , four are glossed by the Auraicept:. Monumental ogham inscriptions are found in Ireland and Wales , with a few additional specimens found in southwest England Devon and Cornwall , the Isle of Man , and Scotland , including Shetland and a single example from Silchester in England. They were mainly employed as territorial markers and memorials grave stones. The stone commemorating Vortiporius , a 6th-century king of Dyfed originally located in Clynderwen , is the only ogham stone inscription that bears the name of an identifiable individual.
The more ancient examples are standing stones , where the script was carved into the edge droim or faobhar of the stone, which formed the stemline against which individual characters are cut.
The text of these "Orthodox Ogham" inscriptions is read beginning from the bottom left-hand side of a stone, continuing upward along the edge, across the top and down the right-hand side in the case of long inscriptions. Roughly inscriptions are known in total a number, incidentally, very close to the number of known inscriptions in the contemporary Elder Futhark , of which the highest concentration by far is found in the southwestern Irish province of Munster. Over one third of the total are found in County Kerry alone, most densely in the former kingdom of the Corcu Duibne.
Later inscriptions are known as " scholastic ", and are post 6th century in date. The term 'scholastic' derives from the fact that the inscriptions are believed to have been inspired by the manuscript sources, instead of being continuations of the original monument tradition. Scholastic inscriptions are written on stemlines cut into the face of the stone, instead of along its edge. Ogham was also occasionally used for notes in manuscripts down to the 16th century. A modern ogham inscription is found on a gravestone dating to in Ahenny, County Tipperary.
In Scotland, a number of inscriptions using the ogham writing system are known, but their language is still the subject of debate. It has been argued by Richard Cox in The Language of Ogham Inscriptions in Scotland that the language of these is Old Norse, but others remain unconvinced by this analysis, and regard the stones as being Pictish in origin.
However, due to the lack of knowledge about the Picts, the inscriptions remain undeciphered, their language possibly being non- Indo-European.
The Pictish inscriptions are scholastic, and are believed to have been inspired by the manuscript tradition brought into Scotland by Gaelic settlers. A rare example of a Christianised Ogham stone can be seen in St. As well as its use for monumental inscriptions, the evidence from early Irish sagas and legends indicates that ogham was used for short messages on wood or metal, either to relay messages or to denote ownership of the object inscribed. Some of these messages seem to have been cryptic in nature and some were also for magical purposes.
In addition, there is evidence from sources such as In Lebor Ogaim , or the Ogham Tract , that ogham may have been used to keep records or lists, such as genealogies and numerical tallies of property and business transactions.