The coming of the Tuatha Dé Danann

At a Glance

• Central figures: Nuada, king of the Tuatha Dé Danann; the Dagda, warrior and keeper of the great cauldron; the Morrigan, war-goddess; Lugh Lámfada, master of every art; Balor of the Evil Eye, Fomorian king.
• Setting: Ireland, from the northern islands of the world to the plains of Connacht and the field of Mag Tuired, as told in the Irish Mythological Cycle.
• The turn: The Tuatha Dé Danann arrived in Ireland shrouded in dark cloud, burned their ships on the strand, and challenged the Fir Bolg for sovereignty of the island.
• The outcome: The Tuatha Dé Danann won Ireland at the First Battle of Mag Tuired, but Nuada lost his arm and with it his kingship, setting in motion a chain of rule and misrule that would lead to the Second Battle and the defeat of the Fomorians.
• The legacy: The four treasures the Tuatha Dé brought with them - the Stone of Fál, the Spear of Lugh, the Sword of Nuada, and the Cauldron of the Dagda - remained as the sacred hallows of Ireland.

They came from the north. Not from any northern country that a sailor could name, but from four cities that stood at the edge of the world - Falias, Gorias, Finias, and Murias - where they had studied druidry and magic and craft until there was nothing left to learn. The Tuatha Dé Danann, the people of the goddess Danu, crossed to Ireland not in a fleet anyone could count but hidden inside a darkness they brought with them, a cloud that covered the coast for three days and blotted the sun from the sky.

When the cloud lifted, the ships were already burning on the shore. Smoke rose from the strand and the Tuatha Dé stood on Irish soil with no way back. They had burned the boats themselves.

The Four Treasures

From each of the four cities they had carried one thing.

From Falias came the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny, which would cry out beneath the feet of a rightful king. From Gorias came a spear that never missed its mark, later called the Spear of Lugh. From Finias came the Sword of Nuada, from which no one ever escaped once it was drawn. And from Murias came the Dagda’s cauldron, from which no company ever went away unsatisfied.

These were not ornaments. They were the authority of a people who intended to take a country and hold it. The Tuatha Dé set the Stone of Fál at Tara, where it would stand for every king that followed.

Nuada and the Fir Bolg

Ireland was not empty. The Fir Bolg held the island - an older people, sturdy, suspicious of the dark cloud that had rolled over their western coast. Their king, Eochaid mac Eirc, sent a warrior named Sreng to meet the newcomers and learn what they wanted.

The Tuatha Dé sent their own man. The two warriors met on the plain and showed each other their weapons. The Fir Bolg spears were heavy and broad-pointed. The Tuatha Dé spears were light, sharp, elegant. Each man took one of the other’s spears back to his king, and both sides understood what was coming.

Nuada, king of the Tuatha Dé, offered the Fir Bolg half of Ireland. Eochaid refused. The island would be decided at Mag Tuired - the Plain of Pillars, in Connacht.

The First Battle of Mag Tuired

Four days the battle lasted. The Tuatha Dé had sorcery and skill, their weapons finer, their druids raising mists and rains of fire. The Fir Bolg had numbers and weight and a ferocity that did not break easily. On the first day neither side gave ground. On the second the Tuatha Dé pressed forward. On the third the Fir Bolg drove them back.

On the fourth day Sreng, the same warrior who had met the Tuatha Dé envoy on the plain, came face to face with Nuada in the thick of it. His broad-bladed sword took Nuada’s right arm off at the shoulder.

The king fell. But the Tuatha Dé did not. They surged forward, the Dagda at the center of them like a wave breaking over stones, his great club killing nine men with every stroke. The Fir Bolg line collapsed. Eochaid was killed. A hundred thousand of the Fir Bolg died on that plain - or so the stories say, and the stories are not modest about their numbers.

The Tuatha Dé offered the surviving Fir Bolg the province of Connacht, and the Fir Bolg took it. Ireland belonged to the people of Danu.

The Silver Arm and the Lost Throne

But a king of the Tuatha Dé had to be without blemish. That was the law - no man with a physical flaw could sit in the seat of sovereignty. Nuada, one-armed, could no longer rule.

Dian Cécht, the physician of the Tuatha Dé, fashioned him an arm of silver - jointed, functional, bright as water in sunlight. It moved as a living arm moves. They called him Nuada Airgetlám, Nuada of the Silver Arm. But even silver was not flesh. The law held. Nuada stepped down.

In his place they gave the kingship to Bres, a man half Tuatha Dé and half Fomorian - the dark, ancient power from the sea, older than either the Fir Bolg or the people of Danu. The choice was meant to keep peace with both sides. It did not.

Bres and the Shadow of the Fomorians

Bres was beautiful. He was also a miser and a tyrant. Under his rule the Dagda, who had carried armies on his back, was set to digging ditches. The great men of the Tuatha Dé were humiliated, their hospitality stripped bare. No poet was honored in Bres’s hall. No fire was lit in welcome. The chiefs went away from his table unsatisfied - which was a thing the Dagda’s cauldron had never allowed in Murias.

Worse, Bres let the Fomorians lay tribute on the Tuatha Dé. Balor of the Evil Eye, whose single opened eye could kill an army where it stood, sent his tax-collectors across the sea. The Tuatha Dé paid.

It was the poet Cairbre who broke it. He came to Bres’s hall and was given a bare room with no fire and stale bread. In the morning he composed a satire - the first satire ever made in Ireland, the tradition says - and it raised boils on the king’s face. A king with blemished skin. The law held a second time.

Bres was deposed. Nuada, whose silver arm had by then been replaced with one of real flesh by Dian Cécht’s son Miach, took the kingship back. But Bres fled to the Fomorians, and he did not go to make peace. He went to raise an army.

The Shadow Over the Sea

The Fomorians gathered beyond the horizon. Balor cleaned the rust from his great eyelid. Bres stood among them, promising them all of Ireland - the green of it, the cattle, the rivers thick with salmon, the Stone of Fál on its hill.

At Tara a young man appeared at the gate. He told the doorkeeper he was a wright, a smith, a champion, a harper, a poet, a sorcerer, a physician, a cupbearer, a brazier. The doorkeeper said they had all of those. The young man asked whether they had any single person who was all of them at once.

They did not. The gate opened. Lugh Lámfada, grandson of Balor himself, walked into the hall of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the second war began to take shape.

The ships were still ash on the western shore. There was nowhere to go but forward.