TORREYA 



A.<OEN 



Vol. 23 No. 3 



May-June, 1923 



THE FLORAL ALPHABET OF THE CELTS 



By Ivar Tidestrom 



In an address given before the Botanical and Biological 

 Societies of Washington the writer showed that a number of 

 plant species, for example Arctostaphylos unedo and Erica 

 mediterranea (Mediterranean heath) range from the north- 

 African plateau northward to southwestern Ireland, and that 

 the Iberian flora, properly speaking, ends in Ireland. Attention 

 was also called to the fact that the plants in question are absent 

 from Great Britain proper. Zoological records also indicate a 

 similar boundary separating Erin from Great Britain.^ Eth- 

 nology, however, cannot produce any such line of cleavage, for 

 the "Celtic"^ stock is readily recognized and identifiable through- 

 out Great Britain, France, and Spain, not to mention Ireland 

 itself. Celtic dialects, moreover, still survive, though in altered 

 form, in Galicia, Brittany, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. 



Wishing to clear up, if possible, the origin of certain very 

 old words in my mother tongue, the Swedish language, I was 

 led into the study and exploration, so to speak, of the Celtic 

 field. The Celtic alphabet itself was truly a revelation; the 

 poetic Celt had a floral alphabet all his own, nearly all of his 

 letters were named for trees or shrubs, and his very life may be 

 said to have been wrapped up with a sort of primitive botany. 

 The letters of other languages, — Hebrew and Scandinavian for 

 example, were originally symbols of surrounding objects or 

 names of deities. The Celt alone confined his alphabetic sym- 

 bolism almost entirely to the plant world. 



We are wont to designate as "dark ages" those days when 

 an insignificant fraction of the human race was literate, and 

 modern times as the age of light. We hold ourselves immeas- 



1 For a detailed account of the Iberian elements in the Irish flora see Prae- 

 ger's "Tourist Flora of Southwestern Ireland." 



-The word "Celtic" is used throughout this paper in the commonly ac- 

 cepted sense, /. e., applying to the Gaelic inhabitants of the British Islands 

 and France. 



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