The Tuatha Dé Danann

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A monk bent over a manuscript in an Irish scriptorium, somewhere in the eleventh or twelfth century, had a problem of arithmetic. The world had been created in a fixed number of years; Noah’s sons had peopled it; the descendants of Japheth had spread north and west to the edge of the ocean. Where, in that accounting, did the old gods of his own island belong — the figures still named in poems, still attached to the great green mounds along the river Boyne, still invoked in charms the new faith had not quite scrubbed away? He could not write them as gods. He could write them as a people. So the divine company that pagan Ireland had honored entered the written record demoted: not the powers of the land but a race of skilled and uncanny invaders, the fifth wave to take the island, defeated in their turn and gone into the ground. That demotion is the form in which the Tuatha Dé Danann survive. Everything known of them passes through it.

The name means, on the usual reading, “the people of the goddess Danu” — túath, a tribe or people; dé, of the god or goddess; Danann, the genitive of a mother-figure, Danu or Ana, whose own profile in the surviving texts is faint almost to vanishing. She is the eponym of a pantheon better attested than herself. The phrase is sometimes given simply as Tuath Dé, “the tribe of the gods” — a label the same monastic writers also used, awkwardly, for the Israelites, so that the gods of Ireland and the people of the Bible briefly shared a name on the page.

The fifth taking

The framework that holds the Tuatha Dé Danann is the Lebor Gabála Érenn, “the Book of the Taking of Ireland,” compiled in its earliest form by an anonymous writer in the eleventh century from material older still, and surviving in more than a dozen medieval manuscripts. Its ambition was synthetic and Christian: to give Ireland a pedigree as deep as Israel’s, to run the island’s history from the creation of the world down to the Middle Ages and fit it without remainder into biblical chronology. Modern scholarship classes the result as pseudo-history — myth dressed in the costume of annals — and the costume is the point. It tells the past as a sequence of conquests, six peoples who successively took the island.

In that sequence the Tuatha Dé Danann arrive fifth. Before them came the people of Cessair, then Partholón, then Nemed, then the Fir Bolg. After them would come the Milesians, the human Gaels. The Tuatha Dé are made to descend, like everyone else in the scheme, from Nemed’s line, and so to belong inside the family of Noah — the genealogical price of admission to a Christian history. But the older substrate keeps breaking through the surface. The text concedes, in places, that this fifth people were the dée and an-dée, the gods and the un-gods of Ireland; that they were masters of every art and craft; that they could not be told from divinities except by the chronicler’s insistence that, of course, they were not.

They came, the account says, out of the north, from four cities whose names belong to no map: Falias, Gorias, Findias, and Murias. There they had perfected wisdom, science, and the magical arts under four sages. And they arrived in Ireland not by ship in any ordinary sense but in a cloud of mist or dark fog, landing on a mountain in the west — a manner of coming that marks them, even within the euhemerized story, as something other than a fleet of settlers.

From the four cities they brought four objects, the Four Treasures, one from each, and the catalog of them is among the most stable elements of the whole tradition. From Falias came the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Fál, which would cry out beneath the rightful king who took the sovereignty of Ireland. From Gorias came the spear of Lugh, against which no battle could be sustained. From Findias came the sword of Nuada, from which none escaped once it was drawn from its sheath. From Murias came the cauldron of the Dagda, from which no company went away unsatisfied. A stone of kingship, a spear of war, a sword of death, a cauldron of plenty: sovereignty, victory, slaughter, and abundance, gathered into four things carried out of the north. The medieval listing of them reads less like loot than like an inventory of what a divine people is for.

John Duncan, “Riders of the Sidhe” (1911), McManus Galleries, Dundee — a Celtic-Revival vision of the Tuatha Dé as a procession bearing the Four Treasures. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The company of the gods

Behind the chronicler’s “people” stands a pantheon, and its members carry the shapes of gods even where the prose calls them kings. At its head is the Dagda, the Dagda or “good god” — good not in morals but in competence, the god who is good at things — a vast, earthy, club-bearing father-figure who owns the cauldron of plenty and a harp that orders the seasons. Beside him stands Lugh, called samildánach, “skilled in many arts together,” the radiant young god who is admitted to the royal hall at Tara only when he proves he can do every craft at once; he is also, by a Fomorian grandmother, kin to the enemy. There is Nuada Airgetlám, Nuada of the Silver Hand, the first king of the Tuatha Dé in Ireland. There is the Morrígan, the “great queen” or “phantom queen,” a goddess of battle, fate, and sovereignty who appears as a crow over the slaughter. There is Brigid, associated with poetry, smithcraft, and healing — the fire of the arts.

Around these move a wider company: Dian Cécht the physician, whose craft will matter at the turning of the kingship; Goibniu the smith, who forges the weapons that always kill; Manannán mac Lir, lord of the sea and of the otherworld across it; Aengus, the young god of Brug na Bóinne, associated with love. And behind them all, named more than described, the goddess Danu herself, the mother whose people they are. It is a pantheon of skill and sovereignty and fertility rather than of cosmic abstraction — gods of the forge, the harp, the cauldron, the battlefield, the king’s stone, the green mound by the river.

A word of caution belongs here, and the tradition’s own scholars have insisted on it. These figures are not a surviving pagan scripture. No Irish text sets out a theology of the Tuatha Dé as a believer would have held it. What survives is the work of Christian literati writing centuries after the conversion, salvaging, ordering, and reshaping the old material for their own ends — antiquarian, dynastic, devotional. The gods reach the page already filtered. To read the Lebor Gabála or the battle-tales as straight transcripts of what pagan Ireland believed is to mistake the salvage for the cargo.

The two battles of Mag Tuired

The defining event of the Tuatha Dé is war — two wars, both fought on the plain called Mag Tuired, and the second of them preserved in a tale, Cath Maige Tuired, “the Battle of Mag Tuired,” which scholars read as a composite work assembled in the twelfth century from ninth-century material and surviving in a sixteenth-century copy. Through that long transmission it carries what looks like a genuine mythological scaffold.

In the first battle, the Tuatha Dé Danann meet the people already holding Ireland, the Fir Bolg, the fourth of the takings. The Tuatha Dé win, and Ireland is theirs — but at a cost written into the body of their king. Nuada loses his hand or arm to the Fir Bolg champion Sreng. And among this people no man with a blemish may hold the kingship; a maimed king is no king. So Nuada must step down, his sovereignty forfeit to a wound.

Into the gap steps Bres, “the beautiful,” got by the union of Ériu, a woman of the Tuatha Dé, with Elatha, a prince of the Fomorians — the dark sea-people who stand, across Irish myth, as the powers of blight, chaos, and exaction. Bres is fair to look at and ruinous to live under. He starves the gods of hospitality, sets the great ones to menial labor — the Dagda made to dig earthworks, Ogma to haul firewood — and bleeds the country with Fomorian tribute. A king who does not give is a king who has failed the first duty of a king. When the poet Cairbre comes to Bres’s court and is housed without fire, bed, or food, he composes against him the first satire made in Ireland, and under its blistering the king’s reputation breaks. Bres is driven out, and he goes to his father’s people, the Fomorians, to raise war.

Meanwhile Nuada’s hand is restored. The physician Dian Cécht fashions him a working hand of silver — hence Airgetlám, Silver-Hand — and later Dian Cécht’s son Miach goes further and grows the king a hand of living flesh, joint by joint, three days and nights of healing. (For this surpassing of his father Miach is killed by Dian Cécht in jealousy, and from his grave rise the herbs of all healing — a darkness folded inside the cure.) Made whole, Nuada is king again, but he knows the coming war is beyond him.

It is then that Lugh arrives at the gate of Tara and asks to be let in. The doorkeeper turns him away: the hall already has a wright, a smith, a champion, a harper, a poet, a sorcerer, a physician, a cup-bearer. Lugh answers each trade by claiming it — and then asks whether they have any one man who holds all of these together. They do not. He is admitted as the samildánach, the master of every art, and Nuada yields him the ordering of the battle.

The second battle is the war against the Fomorians, and it is the foundational conflict of Irish myth: the gods of skill and cultivation against the powers of blight and the grudging sea. Its crisis is a single throw. The Fomorian king is Balor of the baleful eye, whose gaze, when its lid is heaved up, destroys whole hosts — and Balor is Lugh’s own grandfather, for it was foretold that his grandson would kill him, and he had locked his daughter away to prevent it. In the fighting Balor kills Nuada. Then Lugh comes against him, and as the terrible eye is being raised he drives a sling-stone (in some tellings a spear) through it, smashing the eye back out through Balor’s skull so that its destroying glance falls on the Fomorians behind him. The chief power of chaos is undone by his own foretold heir. After the slaughter the Dagda and Ogma recover the harp Uaithne from the fleeing Fomorians, and the Dagda plays the three strains — laughter, weeping, and sleep — that set the world’s moods back in order.

Whether the war should be read, as some twentieth-century interpreters proposed, as a clean cosmic allegory — the bright gods of order against the dark gods of chaos, in the manner of other Indo-European myths — is a matter of debate; the kinship that binds Lugh and Bres to the very enemy they fight cuts against any tidy dualism. What is not in doubt is that Mag Tuired is where the Tuatha Dé become, in the surviving imagination, the gods who won Ireland against the forces that would have left it barren.

The taking of the world below

Their reign does not last. The Lebor Gabála gives the Tuatha Dé Danann a rule of some hundred and fifty years before the sixth and final taking, and that taking ends their visible sovereignty. The Milesians come — the Sons of Míl Espáine, “the soldier of Hispania,” a wholly human people sailing from Iberia, the legendary ancestors of the Gaelic Irish themselves. They land to avenge a kinsman, Íth, killed by the Tuatha Dé. As their ships approach, the gods raise a druidic wind to drive them off the coast, and it is broken by the Milesians’ own poet, Amergin, who calms the storm by reciting a great incantatory verse claiming kinship with every element of the land — a poem that reads as the Gaels singing themselves into possession of Ireland.

The Milesians win the country above. But the Tuatha Dé are not destroyed, only displaced, and the resolution is a division rather than an extermination. Ireland is split between the two peoples: the Gaels take the surface, the bright upper world of farms and forts; the Tuatha Dé take the world below, the síde — the great prehistoric burial mounds and the otherworld within and beneath them, apportioned among the gods, the chief mounds along the Boyne assigned to the Dagda and his kin. In some tellings Manannán mac Lir, god of the sea and the otherworld, raises over them the féth fíada, the veil of invisibility, so that the two peoples may share one island and never meet. The defeated gods do not leave the land. They go down into it.

The carved entrance kerbstone and roof-box of the Newgrange passage tomb in the Boyne Valley, a Neolithic monument far older than the myth. In the later tradition such mounds were the síde into which the Tuatha Dé withdrew. Photo: nick macneill, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The mounds were real, and far older than any of this. Newgrange and its neighbors on the Boyne are Neolithic passage tombs raised some five thousand years ago, a thousand years before the Great Pyramid, by people the Irish stories knew nothing of. The myth did not build them; it inherited them, found them already ancient and unexplained in the landscape, and gave them tenants. That the Tuatha Dé dwell in such tombs is the tradition’s own claim, and a profound one — the gods housed in the works of a vanished antiquity. That any given mound was the home of a named god is the storytellers’ attribution, layered onto monuments whose builders left no name behind.

God to king to fairy

So the Tuatha Dé Danann pass through three diminishments, and the third is the longest-lived. They begin as gods. The medieval scribes make them kings — a magical conquering dynasty fitted into a Christian chronicle, gods reduced to men with uncanny gifts, their divinity euhemerized into mere antiquity. And the folk tradition makes them fairies. The people of the síde become the aos sí — “the people of the mounds” — the fairy host of later Irish belief, the Good People one does not name directly, who live inside the green hills and the old forts, who steal and bless and must be placated, who ride out on certain nights of the year. The gods of Mag Tuired dwindle, over a millennium, into the small uncanny powers a farmer leaves a saucer of milk for.

The reduction was never total. Brigid is the sharpest case: a goddess of fire, poetry, smithcraft, and healing whose attributes pass — by a continuity that scholars debate and cannot fully resolve — into Saint Brigid of Kildare, the great female saint of Christian Ireland, with her perpetual fire and her feast at the start of February where the old festival of Imbolc had stood. Whether the saint absorbed the goddess, or a real abbess merely shared an old and holy name, is genuinely contested; what is not is that the figure crossed the line between the pantheon and the calendar of saints and kept much of her freight. The gods did not vanish at the conversion. They went sideways — into saints, into the fairy hills, into the names of places and the shapes of stories.

Then, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were recovered. The manuscripts were edited and the tales translated; the Celtic past became, for a generation of Irish writers, a usable inheritance. Lady Augusta Gregory retold the Lebor Gabála matter in Gods and Fighting Men (1904); W. B. Yeats, George Russell (“AE”), and the circle of the Celtic Twilight drew the Tuatha Dé out of the antiquarian footnotes and into a living literature, sometimes braided with Theosophy and the period’s occult enthusiasms. The painter John Duncan gave them their most famous image, the Riders of the Sidhe of 1911, a procession of grave luminous figures bearing the treasures out of the hills. In this recovery the fairies were made gods again — the aos sí read back up the chain of demotions to the pantheon they had descended from. That recovery is itself an interpretation, a modern act of reading, as much a reception of the Tuatha Dé as the monks’ euhemerism had been. It is also why a divine race known only through the manuscripts of the people who had stopped worshipping them rides, a thousand years on, in the imagination of a nation that calls them its own.

It is fitting that they kept their place underground. A people defeated and exiled usually leaves the country; these were given the country’s oldest interior, the chambered dark inside its most ancient stones, and told to keep it. The Gaels above could plow Ireland and rule it. The gods below already were it.

→ Related: The Dagda · Lugh · Nuada · The Morrigan · Brigid Goddess · The Fomorians · Tara Hill · Newgrange · Uisneach · Emain Macha · The Celts · Druids · The Norse · The Egyptians · Reincarnation · Immortality · Soul