MacNeill — Notes on Irish Ogham Inscriptions. 333 



St. Adamnan's documents. It must have taken at least two centuries for 

 names like *BUdvlcds, *Luguvlcds to change through -vzcas, -veca, JRitavec, 

 Luguvec, *Bethvech, *Zugvech (cf. Menueh = Menvech > *Mindvlcas, Inchagoill 

 literal inscription), into the JRetJiach, Zugaeh, of the early genealogies. The 

 occurrence of the earlier beside the later Ogham forms proves that the 

 earlier were preserved by tradition in the schools of Ogham writing. 

 The successive transformations in every stage (except the stage of the long 

 unaccented vowel) can be abundantly exemplified from the existing material. 



It was not only that Christianity, with its Latin culture, had no use 

 for the cumbrous Ogham alphabet, or merely shunned a cult which was 

 of pagan origin, was preserved by pagan experts, and was probably accom- 

 panied by pagan observances. There is evidence of early Christian hostility 

 to the native learning. An ancient grammarian^ asks, " Why is Irish 

 called a worldly language ? " and again, " Why is he who reads Irish said 

 to he unruly {borh) in the sight of God ? " These are clearly traditional dicta 

 of the Irish Christians. The tradition must be older than MS. Irish, of 

 which the oldest specimens are devoutly Christian. It must be older 

 than the seventh century, when Christian hymns were composed in Irish. 

 It must therefore have reference to a pagan culture, and in particular to 

 the reading of Irish in the Ogham characters. It is to be observed that 

 not a scrap, so far as we know, of the traditional knowledge of Ogham 

 forms, or of knowledge of the Ogham orthography, or of the early lan- 

 guage of the Ogham period, was preserved by MS. writers. They knew 

 the symbols of the Ogham alphabet, and beyond these apparently nothing. 

 There is a definite and complete breach between the Ogham and the MS. 

 tradition. The Ogham tradition, I contend, was pagan to the last, and the 

 MS. tradition was Christian from the first. 



Macalister notes that, where the eponyms of tuatha, introduced by the 

 term mucoi, originally existed in Kerry Oghams, in one half of the instances 

 these eponyms have been effaced, while the remainder of the inscription is 

 left untouched. He rightly concludes that mere accident affords no satis- 

 factory explanation of these facts. A drawing by Petrie, reproduced in the 

 Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (1891, p. 620), 

 represents No. 25 of Macalister's collection. The eponym and part of the 

 introductory term mucoi have been removed from the stone ; and it is 

 quite evident from the drawing that they were removed by violent con- 

 cussion, which detached two large sharply angular segments from the top 

 of a pillar about 5 feet high. The difference between the fracturing and 



iBB315a3. 



