Ogham Stone: Part 1

Background Information

I happen to be in the miscellaneous group, meaning we had several different languages to choose from when making our artifact. I'll admit, I was in favor of choosing a simpler option, but was outvoted. We ended up choosing to write in Ogham (pronounced oh-um. The "g" is silent for some reason). I had not studied this writing system previously, so I did a little bit of research on it before meeting with my group to make our artifact.

Ogham is an alphabet that was used to write Old Irish between the 4rd and 6th centuries AD. It was also used somewhat by the Old Brythonic language. The inscription on the tablet we made is actually in Old Welsh, which Ogham was probably not used to transcribe, but more on that later. The letters were generally written wood or carved into stone, and consist of one straight line up the middle and straight lines either through the middle or off to the side (although the center line doesn't necessarily have to be straight). The script is read from bottom to top when it is vertical, as on our artifact, and left to right when it is horizontal. Often it was written around the edges of a stone in an arch shape. There are 25 letters: 15 consonant sounds,5 vowel sounds, and 5 diphthongs, and each letter is named after a different tree. There are a variety of theories as to where the alphabet came from, and most scholars believe it was modeled on an earlier script, possibly even the Roman script, but no one knows for sure.

The biggest problem with Ogham is that we know very little about it. The vast majority of the inscriptions that have been found in it are simply someone's name, which does not give us very much linguistic information. The people who spoke Old Irish switched to the Roman alphabet before they wrote much down. However, we can assume that the older version of Irish is at least very similar to the later version that we have better documented.

Actually Making the Thing

When we decided to do Ogham as our group language, we also decided that it would be totally awesome to do it in stone, as everyone saw today in class (I was actually there when the picture above was taken, I was somewhere to the left of where the camera cut off). Someone bought two pieces of sandstone as well as a chisel from the store, and someone else brought a hammer. We all met up to make our stone, which was when we realized that we had absolutely no idea what to write on it. We searched for about 2 hours on the internet and found very little. I'm not exactly sure what about this frustration made us turn to Old Welsh rather than Old Irish, but somehow it did. Some of the Ogham stones were found in Wales, but the internet disagrees with itself as to whether any of the stones were actually written in Welsh. It looked to me like the consensus was a little stronger on them not being written in Welsh, but it was difficult to be sure, and we did it in that language anyway. We considered two different phrases. The first is ir degion guragon tagc rodesit which means approximately "the nobles said 'let us make peace.'" I won't tell you what the second means, but it is read as I fynd tros y dwfr mae pont, and we found it in a book about Old Welsh written in around the year 1800. We mostly just matched the spelling with the key for what each Ogham letter stands for, but because Ogham was not made to write Old Welsh and does not have a "y," we looked up the pronunciation of that letter and did the best Ogham approximation we could manage.

Now it was time to actually carve the stone. We considered breaking it to make it smaller (there is quite a lot of empty space on the stone), but decided against it when we realized it would be very difficult to get it to break like we wanted it to, and we didn't have any room for error. We traced out the Ogham inscription onto paper so we knew how far away everything had to be spaced, then took the chisel and hammer and started pounding. Pounding it into stone took quite a while. It mostly went in pretty well, but there were a few hitches. At one point we were practicing on the edge and accidentally made it break off. Our chisel actually started getting pretty dull by the end, which made it difficult to make the lines as fine, and in some places the rock was uneven, so the marks wouldn't go in like we wanted to. There is one letter that is supposed to be a single diagonal line, but we messed up and put sort of two lines instead, in sort of a really long "v" shape. Oh well. There's nothing we knew how to do to fix it, so we just had to leave it there.

All in all, it was an interesting experience. I was glad that I wasn't the one doing the actual pounding, because it looked rather tiring. It definitely gave me more appreciation for those amazingly intricate stone statues that I've seen. Honestly, how did they get the stone to do that without messing up at all. In the end I thought our block turned out pretty cool, but it looks very primitive. We are definitely beginning stone carvers (when I say "we", I mean the guy in our group who actually did the pounding. He was awesome. The rest of us watched). I also hope the neighbors weren't too disturbed by all the loud pounding...

Stay tuned for part 2 of the Ogham Stone saga, which will detail my efforts in translation and an even more difficult carving!