Meaning
Ivy climbs and spreads, evergreen, holding on through the winter when other plants have died back. The kenning of its letter is "sweeter than grasses", in Calder's translation, and the Auraicept says: "Greener than pastures is ivy".
Our reading takes loyalty and tenacity from the plant: people born in this month are read as finding a way around obstacles rather than through them, with bonds that hold when conditions are hard. The reading is ours.
Ivy is not a tree at all, and it is not alone in that. The medieval scholars' "trees" for the letters include climbing and low plants, ivy, the vine, broom and fern among them, because a letter was called fid, a word that also means a tree or wood, and every letter was given a plant to match.
The letter
Gort is the second letter of the third group: two strokes across the stemline at a slant. Its Old Irish name gort means a field; it is not a tree name. The Auraicept glosses it as ivy, edenn, but the Ogam Tract glosses it as fir: one of the clearest cases of the medieval scholars disagreeing about a letter's tree. O'Flaherty in 1685 has ivy.
Ivy without a planet
Ivy has no attested Irish month lore. What it has is a tangle of modern correspondences: Paterson gave the Ivy month a hypothetical body as its planet, a website gave it the Moon, and our own old engine copied the Moon, which is the willow's planet in the same lists. We dropped all planets in October 2026.
In Graves' year
Ivy runs from 30 September to 27 October, the same in every list of the tree months. The gemstone, animal and personality title of tree-sign websites are modern, after Paterson (1992) and later lists, and are not used here.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- The Auraicept's explanation
- "Greener than pastures is ivy" (Calder 1917, p. 93) sourced
- The Ogam Tract's gloss
- fir (gíus) (Calder 1917, p. 277) sourced
- O'Flaherty's gloss (1685)
- Gort, commonly Eidhean, the ivy sourced
- How the letter is tied to the tree
- A medieval gloss: the name means something else sourced
- Colour and bird words for the letter (a medieval curiosity)
- Colour: gorm, "blue"; bird: géis, "swan". Words that begin with the letter, like the tract's lists of churches; not the tree's colour or animal sourced
- Our reading
- Evergreen and climbing: loyal and tenacious, finding a way around obstacles, with bonds that hold. our construction
How the schools read it
- The medieval tracts
- The kenning "sweeter than grasses"; the Auraicept glosses the letter ivy (edenn).
- O'Flaherty, 1685
- Gort, commonly Eidhean, the ivy.
- Graves, 1948
- The eleventh month, 30 September to 27 October.
- Ogham scholarship
- gort means field; the tree is a learned gloss.
- Tree-sign websites
- The same dates; a planet, gemstone, animal and personality title, all modern. Not used here.
- EsoTerrier
- Evergreen and climbing: loyal and tenacious, finding a way around obstacles, with bonds that hold.
Claims about it
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The letter name Gort means ivy.
falseWhat the record shows: Gort means a field. Ivy is the medieval gloss; the Ogam Tract glosses the letter as fir.
-
The ivy is ruled by the Moon.
disputedWhat the record shows: Not even Paterson's value, which is a hypothetical body; "Moon" repeats the willow's planet and has no earlier source. We give no planets.
-
The Ivy month belongs to an old Celtic calendar that the Druids kept.
falseWhat the record shows: No ancient or medieval source has a tree calendar or a tree for each birthday. The thirteen months are Robert Graves', set out in 1948.
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The Ivy month has a traditional personality title.
falseWhat the record shows: The thirteen titles come from one website of the 2000s and were copied widely; nothing in Graves, Paterson or the medieval tracts supports them. We never use them.
