are probably
far older than those used in the spoken language of the time. This is
a very important conclusion, and it must have a far-reaching bearing
upon the history of the earliest epic literature. Because if forms of
language much more ancient than any that were then current were
employed on pillar-stones in the third or fourth century, it follows
that this obsolescent language must have survived either in a written
or a regularly recited form. This immediately raises the probability
that the substance of Irish epic literature (which was written down
on parchment in the sixth or seventh century) really dates from a
period much more remote, and that all that is purely pagan in it was
preserved for us in the same antique language as the Ogam
inscriptions before it was translated into what we now call "Old
Irish."

The following is the Ogam alphabet as preserved on some 300 ancient
pillars and stones, in the probably ninth-century treatise in the
Book of Ballymote, and elsewhere:

[Illustration: Ogam Alphabet]

There are a great many allusions to this Ogam writing in the ancient
epics, especially in those that are purely pagan in form and
conception, and there can be no doubt that the knowledge of letters
must have reached Ireland before the island became Christianized.
With the introduction of Christianity and of Roman letters, the old
Ogam inscriptions, which were no doubt looked upon as flavoring of
paganism, quickly fell into disuse and disappeared, but some
inscriptions at least are as late as the year 600 or even 800. In the
thoroughly pagan poem, _The Voyage of Bran_, which such authorities
as Zimmer and Kuno Meyer both consider to have been committed to
parchment in the seventh century, we find it stated that Bran wrote
the fifty or sixty quatrains of the poem in Ogam. Cuchulainn
constantly used Ogam writing, which he cut upon wands and trees and
standing stones for Queen Medb's army to read, and these were always
brought to his friend Fergus to decipher. Cormac, king of Cashel, in
his glossary tells us that the pagan Irish used to inscribe the wand
they kept for measuring corpses and graves with Ogam characters, and
that it was a source of horror to anyone even to take it in his hand.
St. Patrick in his Confession, the authenticity of which no one
doubts, describes how he dreamt that a man from Ireland came to him
with innumerable letters.

In Irish legend Ogma, one of the Tuatha De Danann who was skill