GWION’S RIDDLE SOLVED

A Goidelic alphabet, called Ogham, was used in Britain and Ireland some centuries before the introduction of the Latin ABC. Its invention is credited in the mediaeval Irish Book of Ballymote to ‘Ogma Sun-face son of Breas’ – one of the early gods of the Goidels. Ogma, according to Lucian, who wrote in the second century AD, was pictured as a veteran Hercules, with club and lion-skin, drawing crowds of prisoners along with golden chains connected by their ears to the tip of his tongue. The alphabet consisted of twenty letters – fifteen consonants and five vowels – apparently corresponding to a deaf-and-dumb finger-language.

Numerous examples of this alphabet occur in ancient stone inscriptions in Ireland, the Isle of Man, North and South Wales, and Scotland; with one at Silchester in Hampshire, the capital of the Atrebates who took part in the Second Belgic Invasion of Britain between Julius Caesar’s raid and the Claudian conquest. Here are two versions: the first quoted from Brynmor-Jones and Rhys’s History of the Welsh People, and the second from Dr. Macalister’s Secret Languages of Ireland:

It will be seen that both these alphabets are ‘Q-Celt’, or Goidelic, because they contain a Q but no P; Goidels from the Continent were established in South-Eastern Britain two hundred years before the Belgic (P-Celt) invasions from Gaul in the early fourth century BC; and it is thought that the common language of Bronze Age Britain was an early form of Goidelic, as it was in Ireland. The Ogham alphabet quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary (as if it were the only one in existence) differs from both the Rhys and Macalister Oghams by having M.G.Y.Z.R. as its last line of consonants: but the Y is doubtless an error for NY, another way of spelling the Gn as in Catalogne. In still another version, quoted in Charles Squire’s Mythology of the British Isles, the fourteenth letter is given as ST and an X sign is offered for P.

Dr. Macalister proves that in Ireland Oghams were not used in public inscriptions until Druidism began to decline: they had been kept a dark secret and when used for written messages between one Druid and another, nicked on wooden billets, were usually cyphered. The four sets, each of five characters, he suggests, represented fingers used in a sign language: to form any one of the letters of the alphabet, one needed only to extend the appropriate amount of fingers of one hand, pointing them in one of four different directions. But this would have been a clumsy method of signalling. A much quicker, less conspicuous and less fatiguing method would have been to regard the left hand as a key-board, like that of a typewriter, with the letters marked by the tips, the two middle joints, and the bases of the fingers and thumb, and to touch the required spots with the forefinger of the right hand. Each letter in the inscriptions consists of nicks, from one to five in number, cut with a chisel along the edge of a squared stone; there are four different varieties of nick, which makes twenty letters. I assume that the number of nicks in a letter indicated the number of the digit, counting from left to right, on which the letter occurred in the finger language, while the variety of nick indicated the position of the letter on the digit. There were other methods of using the alphabet for secret signalling purposes. The Book of Ballymote refers to Cos-ogham (‘leg-ogham’) in which the signaller, while seated, used his fingers to imitate inscriptional Ogham with his shin bone serving as the edge against which the nicks were cut. In Sron-ogham (‘nose-ogham’) the nose was used in much the same way. These alternative methods were useful for signalling across a room; the key-board method for closer work. Gwion is evidently referring to Sron-ogham when he mentions, among all the other things he knows, ‘why the nose is ridged’; the answer is ‘to make ogham-signalling easier’.

This is the inscriptional form of the alphabet as given by Macalister:

 

Besides these twenty letters, five combinations of vowels were used in the deaf-and-dumb language to represent five foreign sounds. These were:

which represented respectively:

In inscriptions these letters were given elaborate characters entirely different from the other letters. Kh had a St. Andrew’s cross, Th had a lozenge, P a piece of lattice work, Ph a spiral, and X a portcullis.

I take this to have been the finger key-board, with the vowels conveniently grouped in the centre:

 

Julius Caesar records in his Gallic War that the Druids of Gaul used ‘Greek letters’ for their public records and private correspondence but did not consign their sacred doctrine to writing ‘lest it should become vulgarized and lest, also, the memory of scholars should become impaired.’ Dr. Macalister suggests that the Ogham alphabet, when complete with the extra letters, corresponds fairly closely with an early, still somewhat Semitic, form of the Greek alphabet, known as the Formello-Cervetri which is scratched on two vases, one from Caere and the other from Veii in Italy, dated about the fifth century BC. The letters are written Semitically from right to left and begin with A.B.G.D.E. He assumes that the ‘Greek letters’ used by the Druids were this alphabet of twenty-six letters, four more than the Classical Greek, though they discarded one as unnecessary; and I think that he has proved his case.

But did the Druids invent their finger-language before they learned this Greek alphabet? Dr. Macalister thinks that they did not, and I should agree with him but for two main considerations. (1) The order of letters in the Ogham is altogether different from the Greek: one would have expected the Druids to follow the original order closely if this was their first experience of alphabetic spelling. (2) If the five foreign letters were an original part of the Ogham alphabet why were they not integrated with the rest in its inscriptional form? It would have been simple to allot them nicks as follows:

 

And why in the finger-alphabet were they not spelt out with the nearest equivalent combinations of consonants – CH for Kh, CS for X, and so on -instead of being expressed allusively in vowel combinations?

That the vowel combinations are allusive is easily understood from the finger diagram above. In order to express the Kh sound of the Greek letter chi, the Druids used the Latin combination of C and H, but expressed this allusively as Ea, by reference to the fourth finger, the E digit, on which the letter C occurs, and to the thumb, the A digit, on which the letter H occurs. Similarly for X, pronounced ‘CS’, they used the E digit, on which both C and S occur, but introduced this with the A digit on which H occurs; H being a silent and merely ancillary letter in Celtic languages, and its use here being merely to form a two-vowel combination of A and E. Th is written Oi and Ph is written Ui because Th is a shrill variety of D (as theos in Greek corresponds with the Latin deus ‘god’), and because Ph is a shrill variety of F (as phegos in Greek corresponds with the Latin fagus ‘beech-tree’). D occurs on the O digit and F on the U digit; so to differentiate Th from D and Ph from F, the I is made the combination vowel of O in one case and U in the other – I in Irish being used as an indication of shrillness of sound. Finally P is written la, because B which was originally pronounced P in the Celtic languages (the Welsh still habitually confound the two sounds), occurs on the A digit; the I is an indication that P is distinguished from B in foreign languages.

I conclude that the twenty letters of the Ogham alphabet were in existence long before the Formello-Cervetri alphabet was brought to Italy from Greece and that the Gallic Druids added the five foreign letters to them with such disdain as virtually to deny them any part in the system. What complicates the case is that the ancient Irish word for ‘alphabet’ is ‘Beth-Luis-Nion’ which suggests that the order of letters in the Ogham alphabet was originally B.L.N., though it had become B.L.F. before the ban on inscriptions was lifted. Besides, the accepted Irish tradition was that the alphabet originated in Greece, not Phoenicia, and was brought to Ireland by way of Spain, not Gaul. Spenser records this in his View of the Present State of Ireland (1596): ‘it seemeth that they had them [the letters] from the nation that came out of Spaine.’

The names of the letters of the B.L.F. alphabet are given by Roderick O’Flaherty in his seventeenth-century Ogygia, on the authority of Duald Mac Firbis, a family bard of the O’Briens who had access to the old records, as follows: 

When recently I wrote on this subject to Dr. Macalister, as the best living authority on Oghams, he replied that I must not take O’Flaherty’s alphabets seriously: ‘They all seem to me to be late artificialities, or rather pedantries, of little more importance than the affectations of Sir Piercie Shafton and his kind.’ I pass on this caution in all fairness, for my argument depends on O’Flaherty’s alphabet, and Dr. Macalister’s is a very broad back for anyone to shelter behind who thinks that I am writing nonsense. But the argument of this book began with the assumption that Gwion was concealing an alphabetic secret in his riddling poem. And the answers to the riddles if I have not got them wrong – though ‘Morvran’ and ‘Moiria’, ‘Ne-esthan’ and ‘Neiagadon’, ‘Rhea’ and ‘Riuben’ do not seem to match very well – approximate so closely to the ‘Boibel Loth’ that I feel justified in supposing that O’Flaherty was recording a genuine tradition at least as old as the thirteenth century AD and that the answers to the so-far unsolved riddles will be found in the Boibel-Loth letter-names not yet accounted for.

We can begin our secondary process of unravelling Gwion’s riddles by putting Idris at place 14 as an equivalent of Idra; and removing the J from Jose (Joseph) and Jesu (Jesus), neither of which names – as Gwion the Hebrew scholar may have known – originally began with J; and transposing Uriel and Hur – for the mediaeval Irish had long lost their aspirated H, so that Hur and Uria easily got confused. Then if the answers to our unsolved riddles are to be found in the unused letters of the Boibel-Loth, this leaves us with ACAB and JAICHIM; and with five unsolved riddles:

‘Moiria’, the Boibel-Loth equivalent of ‘Morvran’, suggests ‘Moreh’, or ‘Moriah’, at both of which places Jehovah, in Genesis, makes a covenant with Abraham and allots a dominion to him and to his seed for ever. Another name for Moriah is Mount Zion, and in Isaiah, XVIII Mount Zion is mentioned as the Throne of the Lord of Hosts who ‘scatters, distributes and treads underfoot’. ‘Moiria’ also suggests the Greek word moira, a share, lot or distribution. If Moriah’ is the answer to the first of these five unsolved riddles, it must be linked with ‘I have been bard of the harp to Deon of Lochlin’; and we must credit the scholarly Gwion with interpreting the word as meaning Mor-Iah, or Mor-Jah, ‘the god of the sea’, the word ‘Mor’ being the Welsh equivalent of the Hebrew ‘Marah’ (the salt sea). He is in fact identifying Jah, the Hebrew God, with Bran who was a grain-god as well as a god of the alder. The identification is justified. One of the early gods worshipped at Jerusalem and later included in the synthetic cult of Jehovah was the harvest god Tammuz for whom first-fruits of grain were yearly brought from Bethlehem (‘the house of bread’). The natives of Jerusalem were still wailing for him at the Feast of Unleavened Bread in Isaiah’s day and according to Jerome he had a sacred grove at Bethlehem. It will be remembered that the Temple was built on the ‘threshing floor of Araunah’, which sounds uncannily like Arawn. Moreover, Bran’s crow was equally sacred to Jehovah. Still more conclusive is Jehovah’s claim to the seventh day as sacred to himself. In the contemporary astrological system the week was divided between the sun, moon and seven planets, and the Sabians of Harran in Mesopotamia, who were of Aegean origin, put the days under the rule of seven deities, in the order still current in Europe: Sun, Moon, Nergal (Mars), Nabu (Mercury), Bel (Jupiter), Beltis (Venus), Cronos (Saturn). Thus Jehovah, the god whose holiest day is Saturday, must be identified with Cronos or Saturn, who is Bran. We should credit Gwion with understanding this, and also with knowing that Uriel and Uriah are the same word, El and Jah being interchangeable names of the Hebrew God.

The divine name of Alpha written in four letters turns out to be ‘Acab’ in O’Flaherty’s list of letter-names; which suggests Achab (Ahab) King of Israel, a name borne also by the prophet who appears in the Acts of the Apostles as ‘Agabus’. It is the name ‘Agabus’ which explains the secondary riddle ‘I have been loquacious before I was gifted with speech’, for Agabus (who according to the pseudo-Dorotheus was one of the Seventy Disciples) is mentioned twice in the Acts of the Apostles. In the first mention (Acts XI) he signified by the Spirit that there would be a famine. Gwion pretends to understand from signified that Agabus made signs, prophesied in dumb show, on that occasion, whereas in Acts XXI he spoke aloud with: ‘Thus saith the Holy Ghost.’ But Achab is not a divine name: in Hebrew it means merely ‘Father’s brother’. However, Acab is the Hebrew word for ‘locust’, and the golden locust was among the Greeks of Asia Minor a divine emblem of Apollo, the Sun-god.1 Gwion in another of the poems in the Romance, called Divregwawd Taliesin, styles Jesus ‘Son of Alpha’. Since Acab is the equivalent in this alphabet of Alpha in the Greek, this is to make Jesus the son of Acab; and, since Jesus was the Son of God, to make Acab a synonym of God.

As for ‘Jaichim’, or ‘Jachin’, that was the name of one of the two mysterious pillars of Solomon’s Temple, the other being  ‘Boaz’. (The rabbis taught that Boaz meant ‘In it strength’, that Jachim (yikkon) meant ‘He shall establish’, and that they represented respectively the sun and the moon. The Freemasons seem to have borrowed this tradition.) How it happened that Solomon raised two pillars, one on each side of the façade of the Temple, called ‘Boaz’ (a word which is supposed by Hebrew scholars to have once had an L in the middle of it) and ‘Jachin’ – is a question that need not concern us yet. All we must notice is that Jaichim is the last letter of this alphabet, and that I in Celtic mythology is the letter of death and associated with the yew tree. Thus Jaichim is a synonym for Death – Euripides in his Frantic Hercules used the same word, iachema, to mean the deadly hissing of a serpent – and how Death came into the world, and what comes after Death, have always been the grand subjects of religious and philosophical dispute. Death will always remain upon the Earth, according to Christian dogma, until the Day of Doom.

Here, then, is Taliesin’s grand conundrum, taken to pieces and reassembled in orderly form, with the answer attached to each riddle:

So it seems that the answer to the conundrum is a bardic alphabet, closely resembling O’Flaherty’s, but with Morvran for Moiria, Ne-esthan for Neiagadon, Rhea for Riuben, Salome for Salia,1 Gadarn for Gath, Uriel for Uria, and Taliesin for Teilmon.

This may seem an anticlimax. Beyond establishing that the Boibel-Loth is at any rate as old as the thirteenth-century Red Book of Hergest in which the Hanes Taliesin occurs, and not a mere pedantry or artificiality of O’Flaherty’s, what has been learned?

Well: by the time that O’Flaherty published the alphabet, the secret of its meaning had evidently been lost and there seemed to be no reason for further concealment of the letter-names. It had indeed been published long before in a tenth-century bardic primer. But we may be sure that Gwion with his Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing would never have gone to such extravagant lengths in confusing the elements of their conundrum unless the answer had been something really secret, something of immensely greater importance than a mere ABC. But the only hope of getting any further in the chase lies in discovering what meaning the letters of the alphabet have apart from the proper names which are attached to them in the riddle. Do they perhaps spell out a secret religious formula?

* * *

Since solving this grand conundrum I realize that I misread the riddle: ‘I was chief overseer of the work of the Tower of Nimrod’, though I gave the correct answer. It refers to a passage in The Hearings of the Scholars, where ‘The Work of the Tower of Nimrod’ is explained as the linguistic researches carried on there (see Chapter Thirteen) by Feniusa Farsa and his seventy-two assistants. The tower is said to have been built of nine different materials: 

and these nine materials are poetically explained as:

The twenty-five noblest of the seventy-two assistants who worked on the language are said to have given their names to the Ogham letters. The names are as follows:

It will be noticed that the list is a somewhat degenerate one, with Hiruad (Herod) for Hur, and Nabgadon (Nebuchadnezzar) for Neesthan. The five last names represent the ‘foreign letters’ absent from the original canon. The ‘chief overseer’ of the riddle is not, as one would suspect, Feniusa Farsa, nor either of his two leading assistants, Gadel and Caoith, but Babel; for it is explained in the same section of the book that Babel is the letter B, that the birch is its tree and that ‘on a switch of Birch was written the first Ogham inscription made in Ireland, namely seven B’s, as a warning to Lug son of Ethliu, to wit, “Thy wife will be seven times overseer.”’ Lug realized that the seven B’s represented birch seven times repeated but, to make sense of the message, he had to convert the seven B’s, represented by single nicks, into two other letters of the same flight, namely S and F (four nicks and three nicks) the initials of the operative Irish words sid and ferand.

This riddle is conclusive proof, if any doubt remains, of Gwion’s acquaintance with contemporary Irish bardic lore.