On The Name

My name is Ewan. In Scotland this is pronounced YOO-in, not ee-WAN, and the distinction matters enough that I mention it every time it becomes relevant, which is often. The spelling is the anglicisation of Eòghann – the Scottish Gaelic form, two syllables, with an accent over the o to mark the broad vowel quality. Before that, Old Irish Éogan. The usual Welsh counterpart is Owain, or Owen, and the Old French Yvain of the Arthurian cycles descends from that Welsh name rather than from the Gaelic one. Names like these have been moving between the Celtic languages for a long time.

Where it comes from is where it gets interesting. The standard explanation of the Irish name is that it is a compound meaning "yew-born": Proto-Celtic *Iwogenos, from *iwos, "yew", and *genos, "born". The evidence is Ogham. Inscriptions attest the genitive IVAGENI, which corresponds to Primitive Irish *Ivagenas and then Old Irish Éogan. The yew word inside the name is éo, which regularly descends from that same *iwos.

That is not the word most Gaelic speakers would reach for today. Scottish Gaelic iubhar and Modern Irish iúr come from Old Irish ibar, which has a different root. The name sits beside the common word for the tree rather than inside it, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

I should be honest that this is not universally settled. A Latin origin, Eugenius, "well-born", has been proposed, mostly for the Welsh Owain, and medieval writers routinely Latinised Éogan as Eugenius, which is probably where the equation comes from. That is not proof of origin. Owain is itself disputed – Eugenius, "sheep-born" and a Gaulish *Esugenos have all been argued – so I am not claiming Owen as a cognate from the yew root. I cannot say that most Celtic scholars favour the yew reading. I can say it is the standard philological explanation for the Irish name. I have personal reasons to prefer it, which I will get to.

What the Yew Is

Taxus baccata. Evergreen, extraordinarily slow-growing, extraordinarily long-lived – the Woodland Trust calls it the longest-living native species in the UK. The Fortingall Yew, in the churchyard at the foot of Glen Lyon in Perthshire, is usually put at between two and three thousand years old, with some estimates closer to five thousand and fringe claims as high as nine. The heartwood has rotted away, so nobody can date it reliably. Even on the conservative figures it is as old as, or older than, the earliest written records of Scotland. There is a church around it now. There is always a church around them now.

The Yew is almost entirely toxic. The seeds, the bark, the leaves – all of it. The only exception is the red aril around the seed, which birds eat, which is how the tree spreads. The wood is dense and elastic, and it was the preferred material for longbows, much of the best of it imported from continental Europe. Taxol, the chemotherapy drug, was first isolated from the bark of a relative, the Pacific yew, and European yew later became a source for making it semi-synthetically. A genus associated across millennia with death and the Otherworld turned out to help fight cancer. The irony is not lost on anyone who pays attention to these things.

It is evergreen. That matters. In a landscape where almost everything else dies visibly each autumn, the Yew stays green. Pre-Christian Celtic tradition was not slow to notice this. A tree that does not die, planted in or near burial grounds, growing for thousands of years in the same spot – that is not neutral. That is a statement about the relationship between death and continuity.

The Sacred Tree

In Irish tradition the great trees – the bile – were sacred. Not decoratively sacred. Legally, ritually, politically sacred. Damage to a sacred tree, a fidnemed, carried a much higher penalty than damage to an ordinary one, and felling a rival's was an act of war. Kings were inaugurated beneath them, and they served as places of assembly. The dindshenchas names five great trees: Eó Mugna, an oak in County Kildare; Eó Rossa, a yew at Old Leighlin in County Carlow; and Bile Tortan, Craeb Uisnig and Bile Dathí, all ashes. Only one of the five was a yew.

The yew's place in early Irish law is real, but it is a shared one. The eighth-century law text Bretha Comaithchesa ranks twenty-eight trees and shrubs in four classes of seven. The top class, the airig fedo, "nobles of the wood" (Fergus Kelly renders it "lords of the wood"), contains oak, hazel, holly, yew, ash, Scots pine and wild apple. The yew shares that rank with six others, and the ranking is economic: a ninth-century commentary values the yew for domestic vessels such as bowls and mugs.

The Yew's association with the Otherworld is consistent across the traditions that document it. It appears at boundaries – physical boundaries, temporal ones, the threshold between the living and the dead. Its red arils ripen between August and October, so they are usually still on the tree at Samhain, when the boundary is said to thin. I found no source that connects the two. I do not know if that is meaningful or coincidental. I notice it regardless.

In the Ogham alphabet – the inscriptional script used in early medieval Ireland and Britain, its letters named for trees – the Yew is Idad (ᚔ), the last of the original twenty letters. Five later additions, the forfeda, follow it. The yew meaning comes from medieval glosses, and the University of Glasgow's OG(H)AM project notes that the original name may not have meant yew at all. The tree alphabet is itself a medieval learned construction, and not every letter name is a tree. Still, in the tradition as it was handed down, the Yew holds the last place of the core: death, or more precisely, the threshold that makes rebirth possible. The cycle does not end at the Yew – it turns there.

What the Word Remembers

Yew words are preserved in place names across Ireland in a way that maps where the tree was once abundant and considered significant enough to name land after. Newry is An tIúr, "the yew tree", short for Iúr Cinn Trá, "yew at the head of the strand". Youghal in County Cork is Eochaill, "yew wood", and that one is built on éo, the same word that sits inside Éogan. The landscape has been holding the word in place long after most of the trees and most of the people who named them in that language are gone.

I am learning Scottish Gaelic. Slowly and imperfectly, through SpeakGaelic, at the pace permitted by a brain that finds new phonology effortful. The Education (Scotland) Act 1872 left Gaelic out of schools, and children were belted for speaking it into the twentieth century, within living memory of some people's grandparents. Scotland's 2022 census counted 69,701 people able to speak it, a rise driven largely by learners. Glasgow was a Lowland, Scots-speaking burgh, though from the nineteenth century it also held one of the largest Gaelic-speaking communities outside the Highlands. My own heritage is Glaswegian and Lowland, so I am not going to claim the language as mine by descent. What I can say is that my name comes from it, that the words for the tree live in it, and that this seems like sufficient reason to learn it.

The Coincidence That Isn't

I am a Hellenic-Celtic Pagan. The Celtic part of that is cultural and ancestral rather than devotional – I observe the Wheel of the Year, a modern cycle of eight festivals, I take the land and the seasons seriously, and I am working back toward a language and a tradition that were systematically severed from my family line by historical forces I had no part in. A tree at the centre of that tradition – the Otherworld tree, the death-and-rebirth tree, the tree of endings that make beginnings possible – is the one embedded in my name before I was born.

I did not name myself. My parents named me Ewan because they liked it and as a tribute to my Glaswegian grandfather. They were not thinking about Proto-Celtic roots or Ogham sequences or the sacred trees of early medieval Ireland. They just liked the name. And yet here I am: a Pagan whose ancestral connection to Celtic tradition runs through a Scottish Gaelic name that most likely means "yew-born" – a tree that represents in Celtic tradition exactly the threshold between death and continued existence that I find most theologically compelling.

Whether that is meaningful or simply an accumulation of coincidences that pattern-seeking brains are good at noticing, I cannot say with certainty. What I can say is that when I learned the etymology, it did not feel like new information. It felt like finally having the right vocabulary for something I already knew.

The Yew does not die visibly. It simply keeps going. That is, in the end, a fairly accurate description of what I am trying to do with the traditions I practise and the language I am learning – keep going, past the point where it would have been easier to let them stop.

My name has been doing that for considerably longer than I have.