Eadhadh

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Eadhadh is the

The kennings for this letter value are quite cryptic. Medieval "arboreal" glossators assign crand fir no crithach "'true tree' or aspen" (Crann Creathach in modern Irish) to this letter, though this has little to recommend it by way of either the kennings or the etymology.

McManus

McManus also suggests that "brother of birch" may be a kenning erroneously displaced to the penultimate of the original twenty letters, from the penultimate forfeda which had an original letter name pín [p] that when changed later to ifín necessitated the invention of peithe [p] also called beithe bog "soft beithe", hence "brother of birch".^[4] This is informed conjecture, however, and will probably not be resolved unless a full complement of kennings from the Con Culainn tradition is ever discovered (at present their values for many of the forfeda for that tradition are unattested). It could also simply be that beithe is to peithe (a rhyming pair of ogham letters) as edad is to idad, and that edad is brother of beithe for this reason.

Bríatharogam

In the medieval kennings, called Bríatharogaim or Word Ogham the verses associated with edad are:

érgnaid fid - "discerning tree/chap" in the Bríatharogam Morann mic Moín

commaín carat - "exchange of friends" in the Bríatharogam Mac ind Óc

bráthair bethi (?) - "brother of birch (?)" in the Bríatharogam Con Culainn.^[5]

References