Who Were the Tuatha De Danann? The Gods Who Became the Fairies

Almost everything known is preserved in manuscripts written by Christian monks between the eighth and twelfth centuries, which is both why it survives and why it is complicated. The main source is the Lebor Gabala Erenn, the Book of Invasions, compiled in the eleventh century, which arranges Irish prehistory as a sequence of six settlements and fits them into a biblical chronology, so that the gods become simply an early race of skilled people rather than deities, a process scholars call euhemerisation. Other material sits in the Mythological Cycle, including the tale of the second battle of Mag Tuired, and in the place-name lore that explains how features of the landscape got their names. The monks were preserving a tradition they did not share, editing it into a frame their own faith allowed, and the result is a body of myth in which divinity is visible mainly by inference.

The named members of the group have clear functional identities, which is one of the reasons they are read as gods:

• •The Dagda, the good god, meaning good at everything rather than morally good, who owns a club that kills with one end and revives with the other, a cauldron that never empties and a harp that orders the seasons
• •Lugh, master of every craft, who gains admission to the royal hall only by proving he can do something nobody else can do, namely all of it at once
• •The Morrigan, a figure of war, prophecy and sovereignty who appears as a crow over battlefields and is sometimes three sisters
• •Brigid, associated with poetry, smithcraft and healing, whose attributes and feast day transferred substantially to the Christian saint of the same name
• •Nuada, the first king, who loses a hand in battle and must abdicate because a maimed man cannot rule, then regains the kingship when a silver replacement is made and later replaced with flesh
• •Dian Cecht the physician, Goibniu the smith, Ogma, credited with inventing the ogham alphabet, and Manannan mac Lir, associated with the sea

The narrative spine is two conflicts at the same site. In the first, the newcomers defeat the Fir Bolg, the people already in Ireland, and take the land. In the second, they face the Fomorians, a hostile people usually associated with the sea, chaos and blight, to whom they had become tributary under a half-Fomorian king. The resolution comes through Lugh, who is himself half Fomorian, arrives at the court and is admitted for his skills, leads the army, and kills his own grandfather Balor, a Fomorian whose single eye destroys whatever it looks upon, with a sling stone through the eye. The battle is the central episode in the cycle and reads as a conflict between order, cultivation and craft on one side and disorder and barrenness on the other, with the crucial figure belonging to both sides, which is a structure that appears in a great many mythologies.

Their rule ends with the arrival of the Milesians, presented as the ancestors of the historical Irish, who come from Spain and defeat them. The terms of the settlement are the most interesting part of the tradition: Ireland is divided in two, the Milesians taking everything above ground and the defeated taking everything below, which sends them into the sidhe, the burial mounds and hills. These are real monuments, including Newgrange and the mounds at Brugh na Boinne, which were already thousands of years old when the stories were written, and the tradition assigns individual mounds to individual figures. From that point the group becomes the aos si, the people of the mounds, who live in an otherworld running parallel to the ordinary one, are reached through mounds, caves and lakes, and can be encountered at the boundary times of Samhain and Beltane. The whole later folklore of Irish fairies, including the obligation not to build on a fairy fort, descends directly from this.

The tradition had an unusual second life. The Irish literary revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned to this material deliberately as a source of national identity distinct from English literature, and Yeats, Lady Gregory and AE drew on it heavily, with Lady Gregory's retellings of 1904 bringing the cycle to a wide readership for the first time. Elements passed into modern fantasy through that route, so that a great deal of what appears in contemporary novels and games under Celtic labels traces to these manuscripts by way of Victorian and Edwardian retellings. The festivals persisted more directly, with Samhain underlying Halloween and Brigid's day marked as both a pagan and a Christian occasion. And the beliefs about the mounds outlasted everything: road schemes in Ireland have been redirected around hawthorn trees and ring forts within living memory, which is a remarkable continuity for a religion that formally ended fifteen centuries ago.

The Tuatha De Danann are the pre-Christian gods of Ireland, preserved in manuscripts written by Christian monks who recast them as an early race of unusually skilled settlers. Their stories centre on two battles, the second won by Lugh against the Fomorians, and end with defeat by the Milesians and a division of Ireland in which they take everything below ground, entering the Neolithic burial mounds. From there they become the fairies of later folklore, and the literary revival of the early twentieth century carried the material into modern writing.