Of Ogham and Rocks--

I ended up being assigned to the miscellaneous group for our writing unit final. As a group we chose to work in the Ogham language, which was cool because it's a predecessor of the Brythonic and Goidelic languages that I researched this unit.
Diane was in my group and so she hit a lot of the little factoids and stuff, so I'll just focus on my perspective on the group project. After deciding to work in stone, we all gathered together with our "tools of learning" - hammer, chisel, stone, and a couple laptops. Those of us with laptops (like me) worked towards finding a good set of Old Irish that we would inscribe into our stone. We decided early on that we didn't just want to put down a name and information about their genealogy, which turned out to be a really hard thing to do. Most of the Ogham we found was just that - records of a name, their father and mother, and maybe their home. We kinda flip-flipped over to Old Welsh at some point, and ended up taking a phrase out of an old book from sometime back in the 1800s. At that point it was just plug-and-chug: taking the letters and writing their Ogham equivalents.

Done with the actual translation, we were ready to carve the thing into stone. At first, we wanted to break the stone so one of them would literally be three times bigger than the other like the assignment stated, but as we took the chisel and hammer to the rock, we found it would be pretty much impossible to get all the way through the thing. The reality kind of set in that carving a rock would not be that easy, even as cool as it would be. We all went inside then feeling a little deflated, very cold, and scared that the neighbors might kill us.

We decided it'd be best if we did a tracing first so we wouldn't have the "high school student council poster" problem where you start really big then make your letters really, really small to all fit. This turned out to work like a charm - at that point it was as easy as pounding the lines into the stone. Not to say it WAS easy, but there wasn't much thought involved :) Nothing really went wrong. There was one misplaced strike that might have made a line a little wider than we thought, and due to dips and hills in the stone sometimes the lines didn't come out just how we wanted them. Overall though, the stone looked really cool!

Due to a very unfortunate communication issue that was nobodies fault in particular, I didn't get notification when the group got back together on Saturday to carve the other transcription. I did try and keep track of what they had done though, and I thought it was really cool how we were able to take all these languages and make a connection to those who have gone before us. Carving in stone as opposed to scribbling on a sheet of paper really feels permanent, like the message will stay there forever. I know we're studying history, and it made me feel like I was becoming something "historical".

In that way, I can get a feel for what these ancient people before us did to preserve their knowledge and legacy. It did give me a better understanding of them and the way they lived back during the 4th Century!