The Ogham Alphabet

The name ‘Tricia’ written in Ogham, on wood

Ever heard of the Ogham alphabet? No, I hadn’t either until I started to get involved in the world of Joe Duff, designer of JVD Claddagh Rings. Despite what you might think when you google the term, Ogham is pronounced oh-um, with the accent on the first syllable. Almost like if you dropped the h of home, but not quite.

Ogham is nearly two thousand years old and survives in inscriptions in Ireland and some parts of Wales. It’s organised into four groups of marks: notches, left side strokes, right side strokes and diagonal or perpendicular strokes. For short inscriptions you usually read vertically, from bottom to top. In the picture above, you can see the inscription uses a vertical line, contained by an up arrow and a down arrow. Reading from the bottom: three left strokes is a T, five diagonal strokes is an R, five notches is an I, four left strokes is a C, then there’s another I, and one notch is an A - TRICIA. Yes, this was a JVD Claddagh Rings creation for a lady called Tricia.

The origins of Ogham are somewhat unclear, but it certainly predates Old Irish, and of course modern Irish, or Gaelic as you might have heard it called. Many of the surviving inscriptions show personal names. Ogham is technically the form of the marks themselves, whereas the collective word for them is Beith-Luis-Nin - the first few letters - rather like we use the word ‘alphabet’ which we borrow from the Greek ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’. To further fan the flames of confusion, many of the names of the Ogham alphabet are also words for trees, which may lend some insight into the language’s rustic origins.

At JVD Claddagh Rings, a strong connection to Ireland’s history and heritage is important, through the Claddagh ring itself and back in time to the island’s earliest scripts and inscriptions. This is why some gift boxes containing hand-made JVD Claddagh Rings show the inscription of the dedicated person’s name in Ogham.

To find out more about Ogham, you can go here.

You can shop the JVD Claddagh Rings range here.