Divinity Atlas
Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists
have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which
expertise the answer needs.
These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows
only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where
the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the
hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither
one settles it alone.
You can send evidence on some of these. A pilot is open on 55 questions in one field, Palaeography. Each says what would resolve it; send something that meets that bar, with a source anybody can check, and an editor will weigh it. Sending evidence does not guarantee the question will be resolved, and it does not have to be your field to read what is being asked. See what is open.
Grouped by the shape of the gap rather than its subject: what sort of thing is unresolved.
Filter By Specialty 99 fields, 1 selected
Showing 1 of 608 questions, filtered to 1 specialty.
correspondence-testing 1
Recorded as unresolved.
Birch (Beth)
Do Robert Graves's specific letter-to-month tree pairings in the 13-sign Celtic tree calendar correspond to anything beyond his own argument in The White Goddess?
Open Birch (Beth)
Why It Is Open Graves built the thirteen sign sequence in The White Goddess, 1948, by pairing his own reading of the Beth-Luis-Nion tree names to a thirteen month lunar calendar he reconstructed himself. That the wider tree calendar is his modern invention rather than an attested ancient system is not in dispute, and the tree names match because he took them from Ogham. What nobody has examined is the step after that: whether placing a given tree at a given calendar position reflects anything in the surviving Ogham material, or only his argument. No Celtic studies scholar has tested his month by month assignments either way, which is why this is an unfilled gap rather than a disagreement between camps. One question covers all thirteen signs, because the pairing is one act rather than thirteen.
What Would Settle It A philological comparison of Graves's month-by-month tree assignments against the Ogham letter-name glosses preserved in the Auraicept na nEces and the Briatharogam tracts, by a scholar of medieval Irish, to establish whether any assignment beyond the shared name is supportable.
Expertise Needed Celtic studies, medieval Irish philology
Question posed in
A Guide to Ogam, Damian McManus.