EN (English)
ᚉ
Coll
hazel tree
Concentrated nourishment, and the knowledge that comes with it
Ogham glyphs are shown in Unicode, laid out left to right. On a standing stone the letters run bottom to top along the arris, so this row is a convenience rather than a facsimile.
- Sound
- c /k/
- Position
- 9
- Group
- Aicme hÚatha
- Root meaning
- hazel — genuine, cognate with Welsh collen
- Medieval tree gloss
- hazel (the gloss agrees)
- Unicode
- U+1689
- Timing
- Autumn; the nut harvest
- Yes / No
- Yes, and it is good
Upright
- hazel
- nourishment
- sweetness
- concentrated value
- knowledge
- inspiration
- abundance
- a harvest
In the rune poems
caíniu fedaib
fairest of trees
carae blóesc
friend of nutshells
milsem fedo
sweetest of trees
A genuine tree, and a well-liked one
Coll means hazel, cognate with Welsh collen and standing near Latin corylus. It is the fourth of the eight secure botanical names, and unusually the kennings are straightforwardly affectionate.
Caíniu fedaib, fairest of trees. Milsem fedo, sweetest of trees. Carae blóesc, friend of nutshells — carae is a friend, and blaosc is a shell or husk.
Three lists, three compliments. Ogham's kennings are more often grim than not, so a letter that gets praised three times over is doing something for people.
Calories
The reason is nutritional and it is not romantic.
Hazelnuts are among the most calorie-dense wild foods available in Ireland: roughly 60 per cent fat, storable through winter once dried, and harvestable in quantity by anyone. They do not need cultivation, ploughing, a plough team or a good summer. They need somebody to go and pick them.
Mesolithic sites across Ireland and Britain are full of burnt hazelnut shells in numbers that indicate systematic, large-scale processing. At Mount Sandel in County Derry, one of the earliest known settlements in Ireland, hazelnut shell is a dominant find. This was a staple for thousands of years before agriculture and remained a serious supplement long after.
So sweetest of trees is a statement about food, and friend of nutshells is a joke about how much shell you generate getting at it. Anyone who has processed a quantity of hazelnuts will recognise the observation.
The Salmon of Knowledge
Hazel carries the best-known wisdom myth in the Irish tradition, and it is worth stating accurately.
In the story, nine hazels grow around a well — variously the Well of Segais or Connla's Well — and drop their nuts into the water. A salmon eats them and takes all the world's knowledge into itself. The poet Finn Eces catches the salmon after seven years and sets the boy Demne to cook it, warning him not to eat any. The boy burns his thumb on the cooking fish, puts it in his mouth, and receives the knowledge instead. He becomes Fionn mac Cumhaill, and thereafter recovers wisdom by biting that thumb.
The hazel is the source in that chain. Knowledge is in the nut before it is in the fish.
What this is: a genuine medieval Irish narrative, well attested. What it is not: evidence about the Ogham letter. The story attaches to the tree, and this letter is named for the tree, but no source connects the myth to the fid. The inference is reasonable and it is an inference.
Hazel also had legal weight. It is among the airig fedo, the nobles of the wood, in the Old Irish tree-rankings, with fines for unlawful felling scaled accordingly.
In reading
Coll is concentrated value in a small package.
The practical reading is nourishment: something that feeds, stores well, and is available to whoever goes and gets it. Unlike a harvest, it does not require a season's investment. Hazelnuts are gathered, not grown. In a spread that often marks a resource already available and not yet collected.
The knowledge reading is the popular one and it is legitimate, provided its route is understood. It arrives through the Salmon of Knowledge rather than through the kennings, which say nothing about wisdom at all. Used that way Coll is knowledge of a particular kind — dense, contained, needing to be cracked open, and acquired accidentally by someone who was not supposed to have it.
The shell matters. Carae blóesc is a friend of shells, and there is no getting at the kernel without dealing with the husk. Coll tends to mark things that are worth the work of opening but are genuinely closed.
The last stroke before the strange one
Coll is four strokes to the left of the stemline. The next letter, Ceirt, is five — and Ceirt carries a sound that Old Irish did not have.
That makes the end of this aicme the point where the alphabet's age becomes visible. Coll is a plain /k/, unremarkable in any period of Irish. Ceirt is /kʷ/, a labiovelar that had already merged away by the time anyone was writing manuscripts.
The two letters sit next to each other, and one of them is a fossil.
Questions to sit with
- What is available to you that only needs collecting rather than growing?
- There is no kernel without dealing with the shell. What are you avoiding opening?
- Fionn got the knowledge by accident, cooking it for someone else. What have you learned while doing something else?
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