Ogam Stones at University College Cork

Cork University Press, Cork, first edition, 2004. Printed wrappers, 8vo, 22 cm,. vii, 24 pp, ills, maps. From the Introduction - "As our earliest written source of the Irish language, the oldest documentation of Irish personal names, indeed the earliest tangible evidence of Irish scholarship and learning, the Ogam inscriptions hold a place of considerable importance in the history of Irish letters. If their importance has been understated from time to time by some Irish scholars, who regarded them at worst as meaningless, or as forgeries, or dismissed the Ogam script as a mere cipher of the Latin alphabet, recent research has led to a more favourable appreciation of the achievement of the Ogamists, even if many aspects of their creation remain the subject of speculation. We will probably never know exactly when, where or why this peculiar script and its unique alphabet were devised, nor what inspired them, but we do know that from the Old Irish period (seventh-ninth century) until the demise of the native schools of Classical Modern Irish (seventeenth century) the Ogam system was the framework for the study of Irish letters and was regarded as uniquely Irish. According to one tradition inspired by the Biblical narrative on the creation of linguistic diversity (Genesis 11), and found in the early medieval Irish poets' primer, the Auraicept na nEces, the Irish language (Goidelc) and its script (Ogam or the Beithe-luis-nin) were created from the best of every other language and designed specifically for the use of scholars. Near Fine.