We now come to the question, When and where did the Irish get their alphabet, and at what time did they begin to practise the art of writing? The present alphabet of the Irish, which they have used in all their books from the seventh century down, and probably for three hundred years before that, is only a modification—and a peculiarly beautiful one—of the Roman letters. This alphabet they no doubt borrowed from their neighbours, the Romanised Britons, within whose territory they had established themselves, and with whom—now in peace, now in war—they carried on a vigorous and constant intercourse.[1] The general use of letters in Ireland is, however, to be attributed to the early Christian missionaries.

But there is no reason to believe that it was St. Patrick, or indeed any missionary, who first introduced them. There probably were in Ireland many persons in the fourth century, or perhaps even earlier, who were acquainted with the art of[Pg 106] writing. Already, at the beginning of the third century at least, says Zimmer in his "Keltische Studien," British missionaries were at work in the south of Ireland. Bede, in his history, says distinctly that Palladius was sent from Rome in the year 431 to the Irish "who believed in Christ"—"ad Scottos in Christum credentes." Already, at the close of the third century, there was an organised British episcopate, and three British bishops attended the Council of Arles held in 314. It is quite impossible that the numerous Irish colonies settled in the south of England and in Wales could have failed to come into contact with this organised Church, and even to have been influenced by it. The account in the Acta Sanctorum, of Declan, Bishop of Waterford, said to have been born in 347, and of Ailbe, another southern bishop, who met St. Patrick, may be looked upon as perfectly true in so far as it relates to the actual existence of these pre-Patrician bishops. St. Chrysostom, writing in the year 387, mentions that already churches and altars had been erected in the British Isles. Pelagius, the subtle and persuasive heresiarch who taught with such success at Rome about the year 400, and acquired great influence there, was of Irish descent—"habet progeniem Scottic? gentis de Brittanorum vicinia," said St. Jerome. As St. Augustine and Prosper of Aquitaine call him "Briton" and "British scribe," he probably belonged to one of the Irish colonies settled in Wales or the South-west of England. His success at Rome is a proof that some Irish families at least were within reach of literary education in the fourth century. His friend and teacher, Celestius, has also been claimed as an Irishman, but Dr. Healy has shown that this claim is perhaps founded upon a misconception.[2]

"The influence of the ancient Irish on the Continent," says Dr. Sigerson, "began in the works of Sedulius, whose 'Carmen Paschale,' published in the fifth century,[Pg 107] is the first great Christian epic worthy of the name." Sedulius, the Virgil of theological poetry, flourished in the first half of the fifth century, and seems to have studied in Gaul, passed into Italy, and finally resided in Achaia in Greece, which he seems to have made his home. There are at least eight Irish Siadals (in Latin Sedulius, in English Shiel) commemorated by Colgan. The strongest evidence of Sedulius's Irish nationality is that the Irish geographer Dicuil, in the eighth century, quoting some of his lines, calls him noster Sedulius. John of Tritenheim, towards the close of the fifteenth century, distinctly calls him an Irishman natione Scotus, but attributes to him the verses of a later Sedulius. Dr. Sigerson, by a clever analysis of his verse-peculiarities confirms this opinion.[3]

In the "Tripartite Life of St. Patrick" we read that the druids at the king's court, when St. Patrick arrived there, possessed books, and when, at a later date, St. Patrick determined upon revising the Brehon law code, the books in which it was written down were laid before him. That there has come down to our time no written record earlier than the seventh or eighth century[4] is chiefly due to the enormous destruction of books by the Danes and English. The same causes produced a like effect in Britain, for the oldest surviving British MSS. are not even as old as ours, although the art of writing must have been known and practised there since the Roman occupation.

The Irish had, however, another system of writing which[Pg 108] they themselves invented. This was the celebrated Ogam script, consisting of a number of short lines, straight or slanting,[5] and drawn either below, above, or through one long stem-line, which stem-line is generally the angle between two sides of a long upright rectangular stone. These lines represented letters; and over two hundred stones have been found inscribed with Ogam writing. It is a remarkable fact that rude as this device for writing is, it has been applied with considerable skill, and is framed with much ingenuity. For in every case it is found that those letters which, like the vowels, are most easily pronounced, are also in Ogam the easiest to inscribe, and the simpler sounds are represented by simpler characters than those that are more complex. To account for the philosophical character of this alphabet[6] "than which no[Pg 109] simpler method of writing is imaginable," a German, Dr. Rethwisch, who examined it from this side, concluded that "the natural gifts of the Celts and their practical genius for simplicity and observation ripened up to a certain stage far earlier than those of their Indo-European relations." This statement, however, rests upon the as yet unproved assumption that Ogam writing is pre-Christian and pagan. What is of more interest is that the author of it supposed that with one or two changes it would make the simplest conceivable universal-alphabet or international code of writing. It is very strange that nearly all the Irish Ogam stones are found in the south-west, chiefly in the counties of Cork and Kerry, with a few scattered over the rest of the country—but one in West Connacht, and but one or two at the most in Ulster. Between twenty and thirty more have been found in Wales and Devonshire, and one or two even farther east, thus bearing witness to the colonies planted by the Irish marauders in early Britain, for Ogam writing is peculiar to the Irish Gael and only found where he had settled. Ten stones more have been found in Scotland, probably the latest in date of any, for some of these, unlike the Irish stones, bear Christian symbols. Many Ogams have been easily read, thanks to the key contained in the Book of Ballymote; thanks also to the fact that one or two Ogams have been found with duplicates inscribed in Latin letters. But many still defy all attempts at deciphering them, though numerous efforts have been made, treating them as though they were cryptic ciphers, which they were long believed to be. That Ogam was, as some assert, an early cryptic alphabet, and one intended to be read only by the initiated, is both in face of the numbers of such inscriptions already deciphered and in the face of the many instances recorded in our oldest sagas of its employment, an absurd hypothesis. It is nearly always treated in them as an ordinary script which any one could read. It may, however, have been occasionally used in later times in a cryptic sense, names being[Pg 110] written backwards or syllables transposed, but this was certainly not the original invention. Some of the latest Ogam pillars are gravestones of people who died so late as the year 600, but what proportion of them, if any, date from before the Christian era it is as yet impossible to tell. Certain it is that the grammatical forms of the language inscribed upon most of them are vastly older than those of the very oldest manuscripts,[7] and agree with those of the old Gaulish linguistic monuments.

Cormac's Glossary—a work of the ninth or tenth century—the ancient sagas, and many allusions in the older literature, would seem to show that Ogam writing was used by the pagan Irish. Cormac, explaining the word fé says that "it was a wooden rod used by the Gael for measuring corpses and graves, and that this rod used always to be kept in the burial-places of the heathen, and it was a horror to every one even to take it in his hand, and whatever was abominable to them they (the pagans) used to inscribe on it in Ogam."[8] The sagas also are full of allusions to Ogam writing. In the "Táin Bo Chuailgne," which probably assumed substantially its present shape in the seventh century, we are told how when Cuchulain, after assuming arms, drove into Leinster with[Pg 111] his charioteer and came to the dún or fort of the three sons of Nechtan, he found on the lawn before the court a stone pillar, around which was written in Ogam that every hero who passed thereby was bound to issue a challenge. This was clearly no cryptic writing but the ordinary script, meant to be read by every one who passed.[9] Cuchulain in the same saga frequently cuts Ogam on wands, which he leaves in the way of Mève's army. These are always brought to his friend Fergus to read. Perhaps the next oldest allusion to Ogam writing is in the thoroughly pagan "Voyage of Bran," which both Zimmer and Kuno Meyer consider to have been committed to writing in the seventh century. We are there told that Bran wrote the fifty or sixty quatrains of the poem in Ogam. Again, in Cormac's Glossary[10] we find a story of how Lomna Finn mac Cool's fool (drúth) made an Ogam and put it in Finn's way to tell him how his wife had been unfaithful to him. A more curious case is the story in the Book of Leinster of Corc's flying to the Court of King Feradach in Scotland. Not knowing how he might be received he hid in a wood near by. The King's poet, however, meets him and recognises him, having seen him before that in Ireland. The poet notices an Ogam on the prince's shield, and asks him, "Who was it that befriended you with that Ogam, for it was not good luck which he designed for you?" "Why," asked the prince, "what does it contain?" "What it contains," said the poet, "is this—that if by day you arrive at the Court of Feradach the king, your head shall be struck off before night; if it be at night you arrive your head shall be struck off before morning."[11] This Ogam was[Pg 112] apparently readable only by the initiated, for the prince did not himself know what he was bearing on his shield.

All ancient Irish literature, then, is unanimous in attributing a knowledge of Ogam to the pre-Christian Irish. M. d'Arbois de Jubainville seems also to believe in its pagan antiquity, for when discussing the story of St. Patrick's setting a Latin alphabet before Fiach, and of the youth's learning to read the Psalms within the following four-and-twenty hours, he remarks that the story is just possible since Fiach should have known the Ogam alphabet, and except for the form of the letters it and the Latin alphabet were the same.[12]

St. Patrick, too, tells us in his "Confession" how after his flight from Ireland he saw a man coming as it were from that country with innumerable letters, a dream that would scarcely have visited him had he known that there was no one in Ireland who could write letters.[13]

The Ogam alphabet, however, is based upon the Roman. Of this there can be no doubt, for it contains letters which,[Pg 113] according to the key, represents Q (made by five upright strokes above the stem line), Z, and Y, none of which letters are used in even the oldest MSS., and two of which at least must have been borrowed from the Romans. The most, then, that can at present be said with absolute certainty is, as Dr. Whitley Stokes cautiously puts it, that these Ogam inscriptions and the language in which they are couched are "enough to show that some of the Celts of these islands wrote their language before the fifth century, the time at which Christianity is supposed to have been introduced into Ireland."[14] The presence of these Roman letters never used by the Irish on vellum, and the absence of any aspirated letters (which abound even in the oldest vellum MSS.) are additional proofs of the antiquity of the Ogam alphabet.

The Irish themselves ascribed the invention of Ogam to [the god] Ogma, one of the leading Tuatha De Danann,[15] and although it may be, as Rhys points out, philologically unsound to derive Ogam from Ogma, yet there appears to be an intimate connection between the two words, and Ogma may well be derived from Ogam, which in its early stage may have meant fluency or learning rather than letters. Certainly there cannot be any doubt that Ogma, the Tuatha De Danann, was the same as the Gaulish god Ogmios of whom Lucian, that pleasantest of Hellenes, gives us an account so delightfully graphic that it is worth repeating in its entirety as another proof of what I shall have more to speak about later on, the solidarity—to use a useful Gallicism—of the Irish and the Continental Gauls.

[Pg 114]

    "The Celts,"[16] says Lucian, "call Heracles in the language of their country Ogmios, and they make very strange representations of the god. With them he is an extremely old man with a bald forehead and his few remaining hairs quite grey; his skin is wrinkled and embrowned by the sun to that degree of swarthiness which is characteristic of men who have grown old in a seafaring life; in fact, you would fancy him rather to be a Charon or Japetus, one of the dwellers in Tartarus, or anybody rather than Heracles. But although he is of this description he is nevertheless attired like Heracles, for he has on him the lion's skin, and he has a club in the right hand; he is duly equipped with a quiver, and his left hand displays a bow stretched out, in these respects he is quite Heracles.[17] It struck me then that the Celts took such liberties with the appearance of Heracles in order to insult the gods of the Greeks and avenge themselves on him in their painting, because he once made a raid on their territory, when in search of the herds of Geryon he harassed most of the Western peoples. I have not yet, however, mentioned the most whimsical part of the picture, for this old man Heracles draws after him a great number of men bound by their ears, and the bonds are slender cords wrought of gold and amber, like necklaces of the most beautiful make; and although they are dragged on by such weak ties they never try to run away, though they could easily do it, nor do they at all resist or struggle against them, planting their feet in the ground and throwing their weight back in the direction contrary to that in which they are being led. Quite the reverse, they follow with joyful countenance in a merry mood, and praising him who leads them, pressing on, one and all, and slackening their chains in their eagerness to proceed; in fact, they look like men who would be grieved should they be set free. But that which seemed to me the most absurd thing of all I will not hesitate also to tell you: the painter, you see, had nowhere to fix the ends of the cords since the right hand of the god held the club and his left the[Pg 115] bow; so he pierced the tip of his tongue and represented the people as drawn on from it, and the god turns a smiling countenance towards those whom he is leading. Now I stood a long time looking at these things and wondered, perplexed and indignant. But a certain Celt standing by, who knew something about our ways, as he showed by speaking good Greek—a man who was quite a philosopher I take it in local matters—said to me: 'Stranger, I will tell you the secret of the painting, for you seem very much troubled about it. We Celts do not consider the power of speech to be Hermes as you Greeks do, but we represent it by means of Heracles, because he is much stronger than Hermes. Nor should you wonder at his being represented as an old man, for the power of words is wont to show its perfection in the aged; for your poets are, no doubt, right when they say that the thoughts of young men turn with every wind, and that age has something wiser to tell us than youth. And so it is that honey pours from the tongue of that Nestor of yours, and the Trojan orators speak with a voice of the delicacy of the lily, a voice well covered, so to say, with bloom, for the bloom of flowers, if my memory does not fail me, has the term lilies applied to it. So if this old man Heracles (the power of speech) draws men after him, tied to his tongue by their ears, you have no reason to wonder; as you must be aware of the close connection between the ears and the tongue. Nor is there any injury done him by the latter being pierced; for I remember, said he, learning, while among you, some comic iambics to the effect that all chattering fellows have the tongue bored at the tip. In a word, we Celts are of opinion that Heracles himself performed everything by the power of words, as he was a wise fellow, and that most of his compulsion was effected by persuasion. His weapons, I take it, were his utterances, which are sharp and well-aimed, swift to pierce the mind, and you too say that words have wings.' Thus far the Celt."

We see, then, that the Irish legend that it was Ogma (who is also said to have been skilled in dialects and poetry) who invented the Ogam alphabet, so useful as a medium through which to convey language, is quite borne out by the account given to Lucian of the Gaulish god Ogmios, the eloquent old man whose language was endowed with so great a charm that he took his hearers captive. He turns, says Lucian, towards his willing captives with a smiling face, and the Irish Ogma,[Pg 116] too, is called Ogma "of the shining countenance."[18] Nor does the Gaul in dressing Ogma as a Hercules appear to have acted altogether whimsically, because not only is Ogma skilled in poetry and dialects and the inventor of Ogam, but he is also all through the battle of Moytura actually depicted as the strong man of the De Danann, strong enough to push a stone which eighty pair of oxen could not have moved.

The modern Irish names for books, reading, writing, letters, pens, and vellum, are all derived from the Latin.[19] But there seem to have been other names in use to designate the early writing materials of the Irish. These were the Taibhli Fileadh, "poets' tablets," and Tamhlorg Fileadh, which is translated by O'Curry as poets' "headless staves." This latter word, whatever may be the exact meaning of it, is at least pure Gaelic. We read in the "Colloquy of the Ancients" that St. Patrick began to feel a little uneasy at the delight with which he listened to the stories of the ancient Fenians, and in his over-scrupulous sanctity he feared it might be wrong to extract such pleasure from merely mundane narrations. Accordingly he consulted his two guardian angels on the matter, but received an emphatic response from both of them, not only to the effect that there was no harm in listening to the stories themselves, but actually desiring him to get them written down "in poets' támhlorgs and in the words of ollavs, for it will be a rejoicing to numbers and to the good people to the end of time, to listen to those stories."[20] An[Pg 117] ancient passage from the Brehon Laws prescribes that a poet may carry a tábhall-lorg or tablet-staff, and O'Curry acutely suggests that these so-called tablet-staves were of the nature of a fan which could be closed up in the shape of a square stick, upon the lines and angles of which the poet wrote in Ogam. We can well imagine the almost superstitious reverence which in rude times must have attached itself, and which as we know did attach itself, to the man who could carry about in his hand the whole history and genealogy of his race, and probably the catchwords of innumerable poems and the skeletons of............