Lugh and Balor

At a Glance

• Central figures: Lugh Lámfada, the many-skilled grandson of Balor, champion of the Tuatha Dé Danann; Balor of the Evil Eye, king of the Fomorians, whose single opened eye could kill an army.
• Setting: Ireland at the time of the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, when the Tuatha Dé Danann rose against the Fomorian oppressors who had laid tribute on them.
• The turn: Lugh arrived at the court of Nuada at Tara and proved himself Samildánach - skilled in every art - then took command of the war against the Fomorians, knowing the prophecy that bound him to his grandfather’s death.
• The outcome: Lugh killed Balor on the plain of Mag Tuired by driving a sling-stone through his terrible eye, breaking the Fomorian host and ending their dominion over Ireland.
• The legacy: The festival of Lughnasadh, held at the beginning of August, bears Lugh’s name and marks the first harvest; his victory established the Tuatha Dé Danann as the sovereign people of Ireland until the coming of the Milesians.

Balor had been told by his own druids that his grandson would kill him. So he locked his daughter Ethniu in a tower on Tory Island, a place of grey rock and shrieking wind off the north coast, where no man could reach her. He thought a woman who never saw a man could never bear a son. He was wrong. Cian of the Tuatha Dé Danann reached her - the details shift depending on who tells it, but reach her he did - and Ethniu bore three children. Balor found them and had them thrown into the sea. Two drowned. One survived. A woman of the sídhe pulled the child from the water, or Manannán mac Lir took him, or Cian’s own people hid him. The story fractures here, as stories do when they are very old. What matters is that the boy lived, and that his name was Lugh.

The Gate at Tara

Nuada Airgetlám sat as king of the Tuatha Dé Danann at Tara, but his people were under the Fomorian yoke. Bres the Beautiful, half-Fomorian himself, had ruled them badly before Nuada took the kingship back, and the tribute the Fomorians demanded was crushing. Into this came a young man to the gate of Tara during a feast.

The doorkeeper stopped him. No one entered Tara without a skill to offer the king.

I am a smith, Lugh said.

We have a smith, the doorkeeper answered. Colum Cualleinnech serves us already.

I am a champion and a swordsman.

We have one. Ogma.

I am a harper.

We have one.

I am a poet and a historian. I am a sorcerer. I am a craftsman. I am a physician. I am a cupbearer. I am a brazier.

To each the doorkeeper said: we have one.

Then Lugh asked a single question.

Do you have anyone who is all of these things at once?

The doorkeeper went to Nuada. Nuada set up a fidchell board - the great strategy game of the Irish - and had it brought to the gate. Lugh played it and won. Nuada opened the gate and gave Lugh the seat of the ollam, the seat reserved for the one who was master of all arts. They called him Samildánach - the many-skilled - and within days Nuada had placed the war against the Fomorians in Lugh’s hands.

The Gathering of Weapons

Lugh did not rush to battle. He spent time - seven years, in some tellings - preparing the Tuatha Dé Danann for the fight. He went to every skilled person among his people and asked them what they could bring to the war. The smith Goibniu said he would make spear-heads that never missed. The physician Dian Cécht said every wounded warrior placed in his healing well would rise whole the next day. The druid Mathgen said he would hurl the mountains of Ireland onto the Fomorians. The cupbearer said he would hide every lake and river from the enemy so they would find no water. The sorcerers said they would bind the Fomorian fighters so they could not pass urine until the battle was lost.

Lugh listened to each one. He took what they offered and fitted it into a single plan. This was his gift - not that he could do every art better than the masters, but that he could see how all the arts worked together, as a charioteer sees the ground and the horses and the enemy at once.

The Eye of Balor

The battle at Mag Tuired was vast and terrible. The Tuatha Dé Danann met the Fomorians on the great plain, and the killing began at first light. Nuada fell. Balor’s eye did that. The eye was so heavy with poison that four men had to lift the lid with a polished handle, and when it opened it struck down whatever it looked upon. The king of the Tuatha Dé Danann looked at that eye and died.

Lugh moved through the fighting. Some accounts say he circled the battlefield on one foot with one eye closed, chanting a battle-spell - the corrguinecht, the crane-magic of war. Others say he fought in the thick of it with his spear, the Sleg that Assal had made, which never needed a second throw. However he moved, he reached Balor.

His grandfather.

Balor’s men were lifting the lid. The massive eye was opening, the pupil in it like a well of dark water. Lugh fitted a stone into his sling. Some versions say it was a tathlum - a ball made from the hardite lime and the brains of an enemy, a projectile of appalling craft. He let it fly.

The stone struck Balor’s eye and drove it backward through his skull. The eye burst open out the back of Balor’s head, and its killing gaze fell upon the Fomorian ranks behind him. Their own weapon turned on them. Rows of Fomorian warriors dropped where they stood.

Balor fell. The prophecy his druids had spoken before Lugh was even conceived closed like a circle around his body on the grass.

After the Plain

The Fomorians broke and fled to the sea. The Tuatha Dé Danann held the field. But victory did not come clean. Nuada was dead. The Morrigan stood on the battlefield afterward and spoke two prophecies - one of peace and plenty, one of a world’s ending - and both were true. The dead of Mag Tuired were counted, and the count was long.

Lugh lived on as king. He held the sovereignty of Ireland for the Tuatha Dé Danann for forty years, and when the harvest came in each August, the festival bore his name. Lughnasadh - the assembly of Lugh. The first fruits, the games, the gathering. He had founded it, they said, in honor of his foster-mother Tailtiu, who had cleared the plains of Ireland for agriculture and died of the labor.

The Tuatha Dé Danann would not rule forever. The Milesians came, and the old gods went into the hills, into the sídhe, into the mounds and lakes and rivers where they remain. But on the first of August the name stayed. Lugh’s name. The harvest, the light at summer’s turning, the stone that flew true.