ᚙ

Emancholl

twin of hazel

A doubling; two of the same thing crossed

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
ae originally /x/, the ch of loch; later the diphthong ae
Position
25
Group
The forfeda
Root meaning
eman, twin + coll, hazel — a description of the letter's construction
Medieval tree gloss
hazel, doubled (following the name rather than imposing on it)
Unicode
U+1699
Timing
No traditional answer survives
Yes / No
No traditional answer survives

Upright

  • a twin
  • doubling
  • a pair
  • repetition
  • a harsh sound
  • difficulty
  • two of a kind
  • an intensification

In the rune poems

lúad sáethaig

groan of a sick person

Bríatharogam Morainn mac Moín · Emancholl
the forfeda kennings are fragmentary and vary between manuscripts

no reliable second and third kennings survive

later manuscript tradition · Emancholl

A name that describes its own construction

Emancholl is a compound: eman, twin, plus coll, hazel. Twin of hazel.

Coll is the ninth letter, the C, and the name is not talking about the tree at all. It is talking about the letter. Emancholl is built from two C-shapes latticed across the stemline — literally a doubled Coll — and the name says exactly that.

That makes it the second self-describing letter in the forfeda, alongside Uilleann, which is named for being bent. Both are scribes' letters, named from the drawing board rather than from the world, and both give the game away about when and how the forfeda were made.

Its sound follows the same logic. Coll is /k/; a doubled Coll is /x/, the fricative in Scottish loch or German Bach. Doubling the letter roughens the sound.

A kenning that makes the noise

Lúad sáethaig is the groan or utterance of a sáethach, a sick or afflicted person, and it is the best joke in the Ogham corpus.

The letter stood for /x/ — a voiceless velar fricative, produced by forcing air through a narrowed throat. It is the sound of clearing mucus, of a rasping cough, of somebody groaning.

So the kenning does not describe the letter's meaning. It imitates its sound. Say /x/ and you have made the noise a sick person makes; the kenning names that noise and thereby names the letter.

That is the same trick Ailm's kennings use — describing the sound rather than a referent — and the two are the only letters in the alphabet that do it. Ailm is the open vowel of a cry; Emancholl is the scrape in a throat. Both are metalinguistic, and both suggest their composers were thinking about phonetics as such.

And then it became a vowel

Like the other forfeda, Emancholl was caught in the manuscript reorganisation.

When the scribes decided the fifth aicme should be a clean series of vowel diphthongs, this letter's /x/ was discarded and it was assigned ae. A character built to represent a harsh consonant, and named for a doubled consonant letter, became a vowel.

The kenning survived the change, which is why we still have it, and it now sits attached to a letter whose sound no longer produces the groan it describes.

The tree tradition had an easy job here for once. The name already contains coll, hazel, so the gloss is simply hazel again — doubled. It is the only forfid where the arboreal assignment follows the name instead of overriding it, and that is because the name happened to contain a tree by accident.

In reading

No stable divinatory tradition attaches to Emancholl, and modern sets that supply one are constructing it.

What the letter genuinely offers is doubling. It is two of the same character crossed over each other, and its sound is what happens when you intensify a simpler one. In a spread that reads as a repetition, a pair, a thing occurring twice, or a situation that is a harsher version of one already seen.

Lúad sáethaig gives a second and bleaker reading, and it is the only content the kenning tradition supplies: the sound of somebody unwell. Difficulty voiced rather than described. It is not a health omen and should not be used as one, but it does mark the point where strain becomes audible.

The hazel connection is available through the name, and it is worth remembering that it is a connection to the letter Coll rather than to the tree. Emancholl is not about knowledge or nuts. It is about Coll happening twice.

Questions to sit with

  • What is happening twice here that you have been treating as one event?
  • Is this a new difficulty or a harsher version of an old one?
  • The kenning is the sound of strain becoming audible. What has just become audible?

Frequently asked questions

Twin of hazel: eman, twin, plus coll, hazel. But it is naming the letter, not the tree. Coll is the ninth character, the C, and Emancholl is built from two C-shapes latticed across the stemline — a doubled Coll, and the name says so.

Because it imitates the sound. The letter stood for /x/, the fricative in Scottish loch, produced by forcing air through a narrowed throat — the noise of a rasping cough or a groan. Lúad sáethaig names that noise and thereby names the letter, rather than describing any meaning.

One: Ailm, whose kennings call it the loudest groan and the beginning of a call, describing the open vowel A rather than any referent. Ailm and Emancholl are the only metalinguistic letters in the alphabet, and both suggest their composers were thinking about phonetics as such.

By accident. The name already contains coll, hazel, so the glossators simply assigned hazel doubled. It is the only forfid where the arboreal assignment follows the name instead of overriding it, and only because the name happened to contain a tree word for unrelated reasons.

No stable tradition attaches to it, so any reading is constructed. What the letter offers is doubling — two of the same character crossed, and a sound that is an intensified version of a simpler one. It reads as repetition, a pair, or a harsher version of something already seen.

Ogham

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