Dagda's magic cauldron

At a Glance

Central figures: The Dagda, father-god of the Tuatha Dé Danann, bearer of the great cauldron called the Coire Ansic - the Undry - from which no company ever went away unsatisfied; and the Fomorians, the old enemy, who seized the cauldron before the Second Battle of Mag Tuired.
Setting: Ireland before and during the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, among the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorian occupiers who had taken sovereignty over them.
The turn: The Fomorians, under their king Bres, demanded tribute so heavy it humiliated even the gods, and the Dagda’s cauldron - one of the four treasures brought to Ireland - became a weapon of mockery turned against him.
The outcome: The Dagda endured the Fomorians’ contempt, survived a meal meant to kill or shame him, and carried his knowledge of their camp back to the Tuatha Dé Danann before the battle that broke Fomorian power for good.
The legacy: The cauldron remained one of the four treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann - alongside the Sword of Nuada, the Spear of Lugh, and the Stone of Fál - and passed into the earth with them when they withdrew into the sídhe.

The Dagda owned three things no other god could match: a harp that played the three strains of music - sorrow, joy, and sleep - and came when he called it; a club so heavy it took eight men to carry, that killed with one end and raised the dead with the other; and a cauldron. The cauldron was the thing that mattered most to the Tuatha Dé Danann as a people. It had come with them from Murias, one of the four cities they left behind when they first arrived in Ireland through the smoke of their burning ships. From this cauldron - the Coire Ansic, the Undry - no company ever departed hungry. Fill it for one man or for a thousand, it gave enough.

That was before Bres.

Bres and the Starving of the Gods

Bres mac Elatha had been made king of the Tuatha Dé Danann after Nuada lost his arm at the First Battle of Mag Tuired. He was half-Fomorian by blood and all Fomorian in practice. Under his reign the old enemy walked openly among the Tuatha Dé Danann as tax-collectors and overseers. The Dagda, who had been a lord, was put to digging trenches. Ogma, the champion, was set to carrying firewood. The tribute Bres extracted was not merely heavy - it was designed to degrade.

The cauldron still stood in the Dagda’s hall, but Bres ensured there was little to put in it. The fili Cairbre came to the Dagda’s door one night and was given a plate with three dry cakes on it, no butter, no meat. The poet left and composed a satire so sharp it raised boils on the face of Bres the king. That satire was the beginning of the end. The Tuatha Dé Danann rose, stripped Bres of sovereignty, and restored Nuada - now fitted with the silver arm Dian Cécht had made - to the kingship.

But Bres fled to the Fomorians, and they gathered for war.

The Porridge in the Pit

Before the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, the Fomorians sent word that they wanted a truce-meeting. The Dagda went to their camp alone - a massive figure, dragging his club behind him so it carved a furrow in the earth deep enough to serve as a boundary ditch.

The Fomorians had prepared something for him. They knew the Dagda’s appetite. His cauldron fed thousands, and the man himself could eat what ten men refused. So they dug a hole in the ground the size of a king’s hall and into it they poured porridge - oats, milk, fat, whole goats, sheep, pigs. They stirred it with a ladle big enough to hold a man and woman lying together. The Fomorians stood around the pit and told the Dagda to eat every drop, or they would kill him. They were laughing. This was sport.

The Dagda picked up the ladle and ate. He ate the porridge and the goats and the fat that floated on the surface and the grit that settled at the bottom. He scraped the pit clean with his fingers. When he stood his belly was so swollen it hung past his knees and his tunic would not close over it, and the Fomorians laughed harder.

He walked out of their camp alive. They had meant to humiliate him, or to burst his stomach and be rid of him. He survived both. And he walked slowly enough, dragging his club, to count their tents, to note the positions of their fires, to see where Balor of the Evil Eye kept his lodging and which roads ran in and out of the camp.

The Harp Called Home

The Fomorians had also taken the Dagda’s harp - his Uaithne, the oak of two greens. After the porridge they thought him broken, a figure of fun, too full to fight. But after the Second Battle was joined and Lugh Lámfada had driven his sling-stone through Balor’s evil eye and the Fomorians were broken and running, the Dagda went looking for what they had stolen.

He found the harp hanging on a wall in a Fomorian feasting hall. He called to it by its names - Coir Cethar Chuir and Dá Derga - and it flew from the wall, killing nine men on the way, and settled into his hands. He played the three strains: the strain of sorrow, and the Fomorian women wept; the strain of joy, and the Fomorian children laughed; the strain of sleep, and the entire host lay down and did not wake until the Tuatha Dé Danann were long gone.

The Cauldron After the Battle

With Bres overthrown and the Fomorians shattered, the Dagda brought the Coire Ansic back to its proper use. The Tuatha Dé Danann feasted from it after the battle, and every warrior and every wounded man and every fili who had composed a battle-song ate until he was full, and the cauldron was not empty.

That was its nature. It gave. You could not exhaust it and you could not cheat it. Cairbre the poet had been given three dry cakes under Bres, and the meanness of that gift - a cauldron of plenty in a house of famine - had been enough to topple a king. The cauldron measured generosity. In the hands of the Dagda it was open. In the court of Bres it went dry. The thing did not change. The hands around it did.

Into the Hills

When the Tuatha Dé Danann withdrew from the surface of Ireland and went into the sídhe - the hollow hills, the mounds - they carried the four treasures with them. The Stone of Fál stayed at Tara, where it screamed under the feet of the rightful king. The Sword of Light, the Spear of Lugh, and the Dagda’s cauldron went underground.

The Dagda took his portion of the hills. His brugh was Newgrange - Brú na Bóinne - on the river Boyne. The cauldron went in with him. No one in the later ages saw it again. But the mound is still there, and every winter the sun enters its passage at the solstice, and light fills the chamber where the Dagda kept his hall. The cauldron that fed the gods sits in the dark, and no company has ever gone away from it unsatisfied.