Ogham Fews
Aicme Forfeda
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Origin 600 to 900 CE
Emancholl, "twin of hazel", is the fifth of the five forfeda, devised to carry the sound ch. Its name relates it to Coll, hazel, ninth letter of the original alphabet, without duplicating that letter's own entry.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodDevised in the Old Irish period, roughly the seventh to ninth centuries, several centuries after ogham's working use on stone had passed. They are a scholastic addition to a script that was already historical when they were made. 1 Place of OriginIreland, as a scholastic addition made in the manuscripts rather than on stone 1 Origin of the NameThe name is built from the alphabet itself rather than from the world outside it: it names the letter as the twin of coll, hazel, rather than naming a thing. The medieval glossators give it no tree of its own, and it is the only forfid with no inscriptional attestation, so it is the clearest case of a letter that exists because the scheme wanted a fifth, not because a scribe needed to write something. 1 Identity
Associated LetterAE, the value it was reassigned in the manuscript scheme 1 Associated Letter CategoryOne of the five forfeda, additional letters glossed in the Auraicept na n-Eces, De dulib feda and In Lebor Ogaim, devised in the Old Irish period after Ogham's main working use on stone 2Tradition: Medieval Irish manuscript tradition Reading Keys
KeywordsIndirect wisdom, insight through reflection 3 Sourced to the subject's own accountDrawn from this letter's own attested naming as twin of Coll (hazel, itself associated with wisdom in the wider ogham tradition), since Emancholl carries no independent tree gloss of its own; modern reading-keyword, not medieval-attested content. Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceDoes not appear in orthodox ogham inscription at all, so it exists only as a manuscript letter 1 Meaning in the Attesting SourceTwin of hazel, from coll, the hazel, ninth letter of the original alphabet 1 Learn More
A Letter Named for Its Own Shape
Emancholl is unusual among the forfeda in that its name describes its form rather than its sound or its plant gloss. The word means twinned hazel, referring directly to Coll, hazel, the fourth letter of Aicme hUatha in the original twenty letter alphabet, and to the doubled appearance of Emancholl's own shape, which repeats Coll's stroke pattern on both sides of the stemline rather than the single side the original letter uses. The name is, in effect, a scribe's note on how the character was built, preserved as its title rather than lost to later commentary.
The letter was devised to carry the sound ch, another gap opened by sound change between the period the core alphabet was cut and the period the forfeda were added. Its relationship to Coll is closer than any other forfeda's relationship to a core letter, which has led some readers to treat it less as a wholly new character and more as a deliberately marked variant of an existing one, though the manuscript tradition consistently lists it as a fifth, independent forfeda rather than folding it back into Aicme hUatha. The naming choice also shows that whoever coined the term understood the letter as a construction, a visible doubling of an existing sign, rather than as a shape arrived at independently and only later compared to Coll.
Sources Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' PrimerGeorge Calder (ed.) with A Guide to OgamDamian McManus
What "Twinning" a Letter Tells Us About How Ogham Grew
Most ogham letters, forfeda included, were built by assigning a new stroke pattern to a needed sound. Emancholl was built differently, by taking an existing letter's form and doubling it, and naming the result for that doubling rather than for a tree, a loanword or an abstract description. That choice is a small but genuine window into how the scribes who extended ogham thought about the system they had inherited: not only as a fixed stock of shapes to memorize, but as a productive convention they could vary to generate a new, related sign when the situation called for one.
Whether Emancholl saw any real use outside the grammatical tracts that preserve it is not something the surviving evidence settles. None of the roughly four hundred inscribed ogham stones carries a forfeda letter of any kind, and Emancholl in particular, doubling an already rare need, ch, onto an already late invention, sits at the thin edge of what can be called an attested part of the alphabet rather than a scholarly proposal for how one might have been built. That thinness is worth stating directly rather than smoothing over, because popular ogham material tends to present all twenty five letters, core and forfeda alike, as equally solid, when the evidentiary weight behind each is genuinely uneven.
Sources A Guide to OgamDamian McManus with Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' PrimerGeorge Calder (ed.)
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attributed To
The Auraicept sets out this letter's place in the ogham system and its mythic origin under Ogma.
Found In
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