A cypher, i.e., an alphabet derived from a
pre-existing alphabet, the Ogham may or may not have been. I
advance no opinion upon that, but an invention of the Christian
time it most assuredly was not. No sympathetic and careful student
of the Irish bardic literature can possibly come to such a
conclusion. The bardic poems relating to the heroes of the ethnic
times are filled with allusions to Ogham inscriptions on stone, and
contain some references to books of timber; but in my own reading I
have not met with a single passage in that literature alluding to
books of parchment and to rounded letters.
If the Ogham was derived from the Roman characters introduced by
Christian missionaries, then these characters would be the more
ancient, and Ogham the more modern; books and Roman characters
would be the more poetical, and inscriptions on stone and timber in
the Ogham characters the more prosaic. The bards relating the lives
and deeds of the ancient heroes, would have ascribed to their times
parchment books and the Roman characters, not stone and wood, and
the Ogham.
In these compositions, whenever they were reduced to the form in
which we find them to-day, the ethnic character of the times and
the ethnic character of the heroes are clearly and universally
observed. The ancient, the remote, the archaic clings to this
literature. As Homer does not allude to writing, though all
scholars agree that he lived in a lettered age, so the old bards do
not allude to parchment and Roman characters, though the Irish
epics, as distinguished from their component parts, reached their
fixed state and their final development in times subsequent to the
introduction of Christianity.
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