The Second Battle of Mag Tuired

At a Glance

• Central figures: Lugh Lámfada, the many-skilled warrior of the Tuatha Dé Danann; Balor of the Evil Eye, king of the Fomorians and Lugh’s own grandfather; Nuada Airgetlám, king of the Tuatha Dé who bore a silver arm; Bres the Beautiful, the half-Fomorian former king whose tyranny provoked the war.
• Setting: The plain of Mag Tuired in the west of Ireland, where the Tuatha Dé Danann faced the Fomorians for dominion over the land.
• The turn: Lugh arrived at the court of Nuada and proved himself Samildánach - skilled in every art - then took command of the war effort against the Fomorians.
• The outcome: Lugh killed Balor by driving a sling-stone through his terrible eye, breaking the Fomorian army and ending their rule over the Tuatha Dé Danann forever.
• The legacy: The Tuatha Dé Danann held Ireland unchallenged until the coming of the Milesians, and the defeated Bres, spared in exchange for knowledge, taught them how to plough and sow and when to reap - the arts of agriculture.

Bres had been king, and the Tuatha Dé Danann hated him for it. He was beautiful - half Tuatha Dé through his mother Ériu, half Fomorian through his father Elatha - and when Nuada lost his arm at the first battle of Mag Tuired and could no longer rule (for no blemished man could hold the kingship), they had given the throne to Bres because his face was without fault. He repaid them with tribute. Under Bres, the Tuatha Dé carried loads and dug ditches for the Fomorians. The Dagda himself was put to building ramparts. The poets received no hospitality, and a poet’s satire was the thing kings feared most. When the poet Cairbre came to Bres’s hall and was given a bare room and dry bread, he composed a satire so sharp that boils rose on the king’s face. A blemished king cannot hold the kingship. Bres fled to his father’s people across the sea.

Nuada’s Silver Arm

While Bres had reigned, the physician Dian Cécht and his son Miach had made Nuada whole. First Dian Cécht fashioned an arm of silver - articulated, working, gleaming like water - and fitted it to the stump. Nuada Airgetlám, they called him after that. Silver-Arm. But Miach went further: he sang the flesh back over the silver, joint by joint, over three days and three nights, until Nuada had a living arm again. Dian Cécht, in jealousy, killed his own son for surpassing him. That is the kind of people the Tuatha Dé Danann were. They healed and they murdered in the same week.

Nuada reclaimed the throne. He called the Tuatha Dé to Tara and began preparing for what everyone knew was coming. Bres would return with the Fomorians behind him - Balor’s host, the deep-sea people, the old dark ones who had held Ireland under tribute for a generation. There would be a second battle on the plain of pillars.

The Stranger at the Gate

A young man came to Tara during the feast. The doorkeeper stopped him - no one entered Tara without a skill the court lacked. The young man said he was a wright. We have a wright, said the doorkeeper. A smith, then. We have a smith. A champion, a harper, a poet, a sorcerer, a physician, a cupbearer, a brazier - we have all of them. Then the young man asked: do you have one person who is all of these things at once?

They did not. The doorkeeper let him in.

He was Lugh, son of Cian of the Tuatha Dé and Ethniu daughter of Balor. The blood of both peoples ran in him. Nuada saw what he was and gave up the throne to him for thirteen days - the time needed to plan the war. Lugh sat in the king’s seat and asked each of the Tuatha Dé what they would bring to the battle. Goibniu the smith said he would make spears that never missed. Dian Cécht said he would heal every wounded man who was not yet dead by bathing him in a well of restoration. The Dagda said he would smash the bones of the Fomorians with his club and that the dead would fall thicker than hailstones on a bog. The Morrigan said she would go among the enemy and break their will with terror.

Lugh accepted each pledge and assigned each craft its place in the battle-plan. No gift was wasted.

The Eye of Balor

The armies met on Mag Tuired. The Fomorians came in their dark ships with Balor at their center - Balor whose single eye, when the lid was lifted by four men with a polished hook, destroyed everything it looked upon. He had gained this power as a boy when he looked through the window of his father’s house while druids brewed a poisonous spell, and the fumes entered his eye and settled there. One eye. It took four men to open it.

The killing was enormous. Nuada fell. The Morrigan shrieked from above the field and the Fomorians stumbled in their lines. Goibniu’s spears flew true and returned to the hands that threw them. Dian Cécht plunged the wounded into his healing well and they stood up and fought again, until the Fomorians sent a spy and saw what was happening and filled the well with stones. After that the dead stayed dead.

Lugh moved through the battle performing each art he possessed - throwing spears, chanting incantations, rallying broken companies. He came at last before Balor. The four attendants gripped the lid-hook and began to haul the great eye open.

Lugh put a stone in his sling.

The eye was half-open when the stone struck it. It drove through the eye and out the back of Balor’s skull, and the ruinous gaze turned backward onto the Fomorian ranks. Twenty-seven of them fell dead in that single look. Balor dropped. The Fomorians broke.

Bres on His Knees

They caught Bres on the field. He begged for his life. Lugh asked why they should spare him. Bres offered one thing and then another - the cattle of Ireland would always be in milk; there would be a harvest in every quarter of the year. The Tuatha Dé refused these as impossible or useless. Then Bres said: spare me and I will tell you when to plough, when to sow, and when to reap.

That knowledge they did not have. They let him live.

The Morrigan stood on the battlefield after the fighting ended and spoke two prophecies. The first was of peace: rivers full of fish, trees heavy with mast, abundance without end. The second was of the world’s last age: a time when summer would give no milk and trees would bear no fruit and the sea would be barren. She spoke them both in the same voice, looking out across the bodies on the plain, and the Tuatha Dé Danann listened and said nothing. They had won Ireland. The plain of pillars was theirs, and the hills, and the dark mounds beneath the hills where in time they would go to live, when newer people came and the old gods shrank to fit inside the earth.