Ogham Muin: the vine, the nape or the voice, eleventh letter

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Muin, the eleventh letter of the ogham, opens the family of oblique strokes. Its name probably means “nape”; tradition assigns it the vine. Sources, folklore and modern reading.

Key points

Letter	ᚋ Muin (M)
Phonetic value	/m/
Family (aicme)	Aicme Muine, third family
Form	One oblique stroke crossing the baseline
Tree (medieval gloss)	Vine (according to tradition), sometimes bramble
Modern divinatory meaning	Voice, harvest, expression

The letter and its form

Muin is the eleventh letter of the ogham and the first of the third family, the aicme Muine, whose strokes are oblique and cross the baseline instead of staying on one side. Muin is written with a single oblique stroke. Its value is that of an /m/, well attested on stones.

This family comprises five letters, from Muin to Ruis. On stones, these oblique strokes cross the edge itself; a single oblique stroke is only just distinguishable from a simple scratch, hence the attention it requires of the reader.

The tree or plant

The Old Irish word muin covers three homonyms: “nape, upper back”, “cunning, stratagem” and “love, esteem”. Linguists regard “nape” as the most plausible origin of the letter’s name, but without certainty. The word is related to Welsh and Latin terms designating the neck or a collar.

Medieval tradition nevertheless associates the letter with the vine, and modern lists sometimes add the bramble. But the vine is not a native plant of Ireland: wine was imported there. The gloss should therefore be taken as a learned construction, not as a memory of the landscape.

What the medieval sources say

The three series of kennings are enigmatic: “the strongest in effort” (Morann series), “proverb of the massacre” (Mac ind Óc series) and “path of the voice” (Cú Chulainn series). The last formula fits well with the sense of “nape”: the neck is what carries the voice.

As with several other letters, the formulas do not confirm the botanical gloss. Specialists hold that at most eight of the twenty letter names are genuine names of trees.

Element	Status
Letter form and its value	Attested on carved stones (around the 4th-6th centuries)
Name of the letter	Transmitted by medieval manuscripts
Associated tree	Gloss from medieval treatises, sometimes uncertain
Divinatory meaning	Modern (20th century), disputed by specialists

Culture and folklore

If one takes the bramble (Rubus fruticosus) rather than the vine, one meets a popular belief widespread in the British Isles and Ireland: blackberries should no longer be picked after Michaelmas (29 September), because the devil is said to have spat on them. It is a folk custom, useful above all as a reminder that the blackberry season has an end.

The vine, for its part, belongs to a quite different story, that of wine and its rites, much more tied to the Mediterranean world and to Gaul than to ancient Ireland.

Modern divinatory reading

In modern divinatory ogham, Muin is the letter of the voice, of expression and of the harvest: saying what must be said, gathering the fruit of one’s work. Handbooks often add a nuance of frankness, even the giddiness of speaking out. This reading comes from twentieth-century authors and from Robert Graves’s calendar (1948), whose historical foundation is disputed.

It can serve as a mirror: what have I not yet said, and what have I already gathered without noticing? Nothing is promised in it.

A reflection exercise

Choose something you take for granted in your life (a skill, a relationship, a place). Write down how it came to be, then one sentence of thanks you could say to someone who contributed to it. Draw or choose the letter Muin and send or say that sentence within the week. The exercise is one of gratitude.