Idea

Ogham

ogham · Old Irish ogam

Say it: ohm (in English, OG-um) /oːmˠ/

Ireland’s earliest writing: notches cut along the edge of a stone.

Open it on the full site There every name opens, and a web shows who is kin to whom.

Read from the bottom up. Most ogham stones are memorials from about the fourth to the seventh century, carrying a name and a lineage. The letters have names such as beithe (birch), coll (hazel) and dair (oak), but at most eight of the twenty are really trees. The idea that every letter is a tree is medieval, and the “Celtic tree calendar” was invented by Robert Graves in 1948.

In the tales

The Children of Lir A jealous stepmother, a druid’s wand, and four children who must live nine hundred years as swans.
The Fate of the Children of Tuireann Three brothers stone Lugh’s father to death. His price sounds small: three apples, a pigskin, a spear, a hound’s whelp, and three shouts on a hill.
The Wooing of Étaín A fly on the wind drops into a golden cup and is born again, remembering nothing. A thousand years on, her first husband comes to Tara to play for a kiss.
The Cattle Raid of Cooley An argument in bed over who is richer ends in a war for a brown bull, and one young man holding a ford against all Ireland.
Oisín in Tír na nÓg Niamh of the Golden Head carries Fionn’s son away to the Land of the Young. Three hundred years go by like three, and then he asks to go home.
The Voyage of Bran Music puts Bran to sleep, and he wakes beside a silver branch in blossom. He is gone a year, he thinks. At home he is already an old story.

Sources

Medieval manuscript. Written down by Irish scholars between the eighth and seventeenth centuries.

Each tale above lists the sources it is retold from. Every source the site draws on is listed on the full site.