Ogham and The Celtic Tree Language

Dreoilín's avatarDreoilin's Weblog

This is not meant to be a definitive on the topic, but rather some random thoughts that I pose for people to think about when thinking of the Ogham. It is my thought that the Ogham and the Celtic tree alphabet though similar, are different from each other.

Could it be possible that it was created by Irish scholars or Druids for political, military or religious reasons to provide a secret means of communication in opposition to the authorities of Roman Britain. The Roman Empire, which then ruled over neighbouring Britain, represented a very real threat of invasion to Ireland, which may have acted as a spur to the creation of the alphabet. Alternatively, in later centuries when the threat of invasion had receded and the Irish were themselves invading the western parts of Britain, the desire to keep communications secret from Romans or Romanised Britons would still have provided…

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Fidchell

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Fidchell

Have you ever wondered what people played prior to chess? Throughout Europe people played various board games. Some ranging in giant tables sizes with many pieces right down to some boards that were a foot in size.

Fidchell was a board game people played in Ireland. It was simple in design, a 7 square by 7 square board with 25 pieces. Fidchell also went by other spellings in Irish as Fitchneal and Fithcheall. They all have one thing in common and that is the etymology of the word comes to translate to wood-sense/wood-intelligence/wood-knowledge. A game about having a wisdom from playing with and on pieces of wood. This will be starting us on an adventure to a theme behind the surface of the game. What of this wood wisdom?

So far we have mentioned that the game was played on a 7 by 7 board and that there was…

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