The Fomorians

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There is a tower on an island off the north coast of Ireland, and in the tower a girl who has never seen a man. Her father put her there. A druid had told him he would be killed by his own grandson, and so he reasoned that the way to have no killer was to have no grandson, and the way to have no grandson was to have no child born of his only daughter, Eithne. He shut her up on Tory Island with twelve women to guard her and to keep from her the very knowledge that men existed. The father was Balor, king and champion of the Fomorians, and the precaution was exact, and it failed in the way such precautions always fail in these stories: the child was conceived regardless, and lived, and grew up to put a sling-stone through the one eye that could unmake an army.

That eye, that tower, and the prophecy that the guarded girl would carry are the most concentrated image the tradition has of the Fomorians — the Fomoire, the dark race against whom the bright gods of Ireland fought for the land. They are the powers of the sea and the night, of blight and drought and the failed harvest, the disorder against which order is defined. To know them is to know what the Tuatha Dé Danann were not.

Cian and Balor’s daughter Eithne — Harold Robert Millar’s illustration for Charles Squire’s Celtic Myth and Legend (London, 1905), public domain (US), via Wikimedia Commons

A name out of the sea

The name itself is an argument that has never been settled. The first element of Fomoire is the Old Irish fo, “under” — that much is agreed. The second is disputed, and the dispute is itself informative, because each reading pulls the race toward a different darkness. Some take it from muir, “sea,” yielding the under-sea ones, the things that come from below the waves. Others derive it from mór, “great,” giving the under-giants, the great ones of the deep. The reading that has gathered the strongest scholarly support takes the second element from a buried root meaning a phantom or a specter — so that the Fomoire are the under-demons, the spirits of the nether places below the earth and the sea. Under-sea, under-giant, under-demon: the etymology cannot decide, but every candidate agrees on the fo. Whatever else they are, the Fomorians come from below.

In the oldest stratum they are not pirates or invaders at all but malevolent powers of the deep — spirits of the dark waters and the earth’s lower regions, hostile to the settled world above. The medieval texts that survive give them a more solid and a more terrible body. They are described as deformed, single-membered, hideous: a being with one eye, one arm, and one leg; or with the body of a man and the head of a goat. The singleness is the point. Where a whole creature has its pair of eyes and its two hands, the Fomorian has the one of each, a thing assembled wrong, lacking the symmetry of the made and ordered world. And yet the tradition will not let the picture stay simple. Some of the Fomorians are not monstrous at all but darkly beautiful — chief among them Elatha, a Fomorian prince described as fair-haired and golden, who comes to a woman of the Tuatha Dé in the night and fathers a child on her. The race that is the image of disorder produces, when it chooses, a being of great beauty, and that beauty will be the door through which disorder enters the house of the gods.

A caution belongs at the threshold, and the tradition’s own keepers would not resent it. None of this reaches us from a pagan priest. It reaches us from Christian monks of medieval Ireland, writing centuries after the island’s conversion, who took the old matter of the gods and set it into a learned, half-biblical scheme of history. In the great pseudo-historical compilation the Lebor Gabála Érenn — the “Book of the Taking of Ireland,” compiled in the eleventh century — the peoples of Ireland arrive in successive waves, and the Fomorians are slotted in as a hostile presence harassing each settlement in turn. The two narrative engines of the whole corpus thus run at once. There is the divine register, in which the Fomorians are the cosmic powers of chaos; and there is the euhemerizing register of the clerks, the rationalizing of gods and demons into ancient peoples and pirate-raiders with genealogies and dates. What survives is the second laid over the first. A reader is owed the means to tell the chaos-demons of the myth from the sea-raiders of the monastic chronology, because the monks have written both into the same sentence.

The tribute and the under-kings

Long before the war that breaks them, the Fomorians appear as exactors. The pattern that defines them is tribute — not trade, not war for its own sake, but the periodic taking of what a living people needs to live. The clearest instance falls on an earlier race than the gods. After the death of their leader Nemed, the people called the Muintir Nemid fell under the hand of two Fomorian overlords, Conand son of Faebar, who held a great tower on the island the texts call Tor Inis — Tory Island, the same northern island that will later hold Balor — and his fellow Morc. The tribute they laid on the Nemedians is the most quoted single fact about the Fomorians, and it is brutal in its arithmetic: each Samhain, the turn of the year into the dark, the people were to render up two-thirds of their children, two-thirds of their corn, and two-thirds of their milk. The harvest, the herd, and the next generation — the three things a society is for — taken by two-thirds, every year, at the very feast that marks the death of the year. The Nemedians at last rose against Conand’s Tower; they took it, and Morc’s counterstroke all but destroyed them, so that of the survivors only a single ship’s company is said to have escaped from Ireland.

The same logic of unkingly taking returns, transformed, in the central catastrophe of the gods. When Nuada, king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, lost his arm in the first battle for Ireland, he lost with it his kingship — for the tradition holds that a maimed man may not rule a whole people, that the king’s body must be unblemished as the land must be whole. (His story is told under Nuada.) In his place the Tuatha Dé set Bres — Eochu Bres, “the beautiful” — the very child that the fair Fomorian Elatha had fathered on Ériu of the gods. A half-Fomorian now sat on the throne of the bright race, and the seam between order and chaos ran straight through the king.

Bres ruled as a Fomorian rules. He let the Fomorians bind their tribute upon Ireland, so that — in the text’s own measure of total subjection — there was not a smoke rising from a roof in the land that was not under tax to them. He set the noblest of the Tuatha Dé to menial labor: the Dagda, the great father-god, made to dig raths and build forts; another god set to carrying firewood. And he failed at the one thing a king exists to do. The sacred duty of an Irish king was generosity — the open hall, the full cup, the guest sent away satisfied — and Bres was mean. The complaint the tradition preserves is domestic and devastating: that the nobles of the Tuatha Dé came away from the king’s house with their knives ungreased and their breath not smelling of ale. No feast, no fat, no drink. A king who does not feed his people is not a king, whatever the throne says.

It is a poet who ends him, not a warrior — and this is one of the tradition’s deep convictions about the nature of rule. The satirist Cairbre, son of Étaín, came to Bres’s court and was lodged in a small dark cabin without fire, without bed, without food, given three dry cakes on a little plate. In the morning he rose and spoke against the king the first satire ever made in Ireland, a verse so sharp that, the tale says, it raised three blotches on the face of Bres. A blemished king cannot reign. The satire that scarred his face did to Bres exactly what the lost arm had done to Nuada: it marked him, and the mark unmade his kingship. Bres was driven out. He went to his father Elatha among the Fomorians to raise an army and take back by force the throne that his meanness had cost him, and the war that the gods had been waiting for came on.

The north shore of Tory Island, County Donegal — the headland is named in local tradition for Balor’s fort. Photo by Kay Atherton, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The eye that unmakes the world

The Fomorian host that answers Bres is led by the most terrible figure the Irish imagination produced: Balor, called in the early literature Birugderc, “of the piercing eye,” and Béimnech, “the smiter,” and in the later tradition simply Balor of the Evil Eye. He is grandfather to half the divine line, king or champion of the Fomorians, and he carries in his face a weapon that needs no arm to wield.

Balor has one eye that destroys what it looks upon. The tradition explains its making: as a boy he passed the window of a house where his father’s druids were brewing a sorcerous concoction, and the venomous fume of it settled into his eye and stayed, so that ever after its gaze carried poison. The eye is so deadly that it cannot be left open. Its lid is vast and heavy, and it takes four men to raise it, hauling on a ring or a hook set through the lid; only when the great cover is lifted does the gaze come free, and where it falls it kills. Whole companies are unmade by being looked at. An army can be destroyed not by a blow but by the opening of an eyelid. There is no defense in armor against a thing that works by sight, and no closing the distance with a sword against a king who need only be turned to face the enemy and have his servants pull the cover up. Balor is the Fomorian principle made into a single organ: the destroying power of the dark, lidded and held back until it is loosed, and loosed without effort or mercy.

Against him stands the prophecy he could not outrun. The grandson born in the guarded tower was Lugh — Samildánach, the master of every art, son of Cian of the Tuatha Dé and of Balor’s own daughter Eithne, the one being who carries the blood of both peoples and so can close the circuit between them. The full account of the war and of Lugh’s coming to the door of Tara is given under his name. Here the Fomorian side of it is what matters: that Balor, who had spent a daughter’s whole life trying to ensure he would have no grandson, faced on the plain of Mag Tuired the grandson the precaution had failed to prevent.

The Second Battle of Mag Tuired — Cath Maige Tuired, the great mythic war of the corpus — is the reckoning. Through it move all the powers of the gods: the Morrigan prophesying over the field, the Dagda with his club and cauldron, the smith and the leech and the sorcerers each turning a single craft to the war. Balor came onto the field and the killing eye began to rise; in some tellings he had already slain Nuada with it. As the four servants hauled the great lid up, Lugh was waiting, and as the gaze came free he cast — a sling-stone, in the oldest version, driven into the eye with such force that it punched the eye back through Balor’s skull and out the rear of his head, so that the destroying gaze now fell on the Fomorians ranked behind their king and unmade them. Balor fell. The grandson had killed the grandfather; the prophecy that had built a tower and guarded a girl closed over the king on the field. With Balor dead the Fomorian host broke, and the power of the under-race over Ireland was broken with it, finally and for the world’s whole age to come.

Bres survived the rout and was taken alive. The gods spared him — but the ransom they set is the perfect close to a story about a king who would not feed his people. They let Bres live in exchange for the knowledge of agriculture: that he tell them the right days to plough, to sow, and to reap. The half-Fomorian who had starved the land is made to give up the secret of feeding it. The race of blight surrenders the calendar of the harvest, and the order it had fought to keep down is left holding the very art of abundance.

What the Fomorians are for

The shape of the whole thing has long invited a reading larger than the story, and the reading is among the most durable in the study of Irish myth: that the Fomorians are the personification of the destructive forces of nature, and the Tuatha Dé Danann of the productive ones. On this account the war at Mag Tuired is not a war between two tribes but between two principles. The Fomorians are winter, blight, drought, the storm at sea, the failed crop, the dark of the year — the forces that take. The Tuatha Dé are agriculture, craft, healing, sovereignty, light — the powers that make and keep. Balor’s withering eye is the sun in its killing aspect, or the drought, or the lightning; the two-thirds tribute taken at Samhain is the annual death of the year demanding its portion; Lugh, whose name some link to brightness and who founds the harvest feast of Lughnasadh, is the productive sun that at last masters the destroying one. The pattern is not unique to Ireland. Across the Indo-European world the same structure recurs — gods of order against an elder, chthonic, disordered host: the Olympians against the Titans, the Aesir against the giants of frost and the Norse world’s edge, the Vedic devas against the asuras, the Iranian ordering spirit against Angra Mainyu and the lie. The Fomorians take their place in that company as Ireland’s powers of chaos, and the Babylonian sea-mother Tiamat, slain so that the ordered cosmos can be built from her body, is their distant cousin in the logic of the thing.

This reading is a reading, and it belongs to the second register, the contested one. It was pressed by scholars of the early twentieth century — T. F. O’Rahilly set the conflict within a wider scheme of Irish mythic history, and Marie-Louise Sjoestedt gave the formulation that is still quoted, that the Fomorians “never lay down their arms” and are “like the powers of Chaos, ever latent and hostile to cosmic order.” But Sjoestedt herself, having offered the picture, immediately distrusted its neatness. The two peoples, she observed, are bound together by a whole series of intermarriages: Elatha fathers Bres on a goddess, Balor’s daughter bears Lugh, the line of the gods and the line of the demons keep crossing. A war of pure opposed principles does not arrange marriages across the front. The order-versus-chaos frame catches something real in the myth and overstates it at the same time; the texts give a messier thing, two kindred and intermarried races whose war is also a family quarrel, and the clean cosmic diagram is partly the work of modern interpreters drawing a straight line through a crooked tale.

The euhemerizing clerks pulled in the other direction entirely. For them the Fomorians were no principle at all but a people — sea-rovers and pirates who had troubled Ireland from the deep, given a place in the genealogies of the world’s nations descending from Noah, their monstrousness softened into the savagery of a hostile tribe. Between the modern mythographers who made them cosmic and the medieval chroniclers who made them historical, the Fomorians of the actual texts sit in the middle, never quite either: too strange and too symbolic to be only pirates, too tangled in marriage and descent to be only the dark abstract.

Afterlife in the dark

The Fomorians did not survive into worship; they were never the kind of beings one worshipped. What survived was the word and the shape. In later Irish folklore fomóir drifted into a general name for a monster or a giant, a hostile and misshapen being out of the old time, the specific cosmic enemies of the gods worn down into ogres of the kind a hero meets and kills. Balor in particular outlived the rest. His one destroying eye, his fort on the cliffs of Tory Island, his prophesied death at the hand of a grandson he tried to prevent — these stayed alive in oral tradition along the Donegal coast, attached to named rocks and headlands, told and retold long after the Lebor Gabála was a closed book. The northern landscape kept him when the manuscripts could only record him.

When the Irish literary revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned back to the old cycles in search of a national mythology, the Fomorians came up out of the manuscripts with the rest. Lady Augusta Gregory retold the war of Mag Tuired in her Gods and Fighting Men (1904); the popular compendia of the period, Charles Squire’s among them, supplied the illustrations of Cian at the tower and the spear that killed Balor that fixed the images in the modern eye. In the twentieth century the destroying-eyed king became a stock figure of fantasy and comics, his single venomous eye lent to a long line of dark lords. The cosmic enemy of the gods of Ireland has had a strange and busy afterlife as a monster — which is, in its way, a return to the oldest stratum of all, where the Fomoire were never kings or pirates but simply the things that come from under the sea and the earth, hostile to the bright world above, and never finally at rest.

The deepest thing the tradition holds about them is the marriage at the center of the war. Ireland’s order had to be won not against an alien enemy but against its own dark kin, and the hero who won it carried the enemy’s blood in his veins. Balor built a tower to keep the future out, and the future was already inside it. That is the Fomorian shape, and the texts that a Christian monastery copied out, centuries after the gods had stopped being prayed to, set it down with a care that suggests its makers knew exactly how good a story they were keeping alive.

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