Balor of the Evil Eye

Key takeaways: Balor is the Fomorian king whose poisoned eye destroys whole armies; the prophecy, the tower and the grandson drive both the medieval text and the folk cycle; Lugh kills him with a sling-stone at the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, most plausibly Moytirra in Co. Sligo; Tory Island carries his place-names; and nineteenth-century tellers re-read him as a rack-renting absentee landlord.

Who is Balor, and what do his names mean?

Balor (Balor Birugderc in Elizabeth A. Gray’s edition of Cath Maige Tuired, Irish Texts Society, 1982, “Balor of the Piercing Eye”; Balor Béimeann or Balar Bemen in later Early Modern Irish, “Balor of the Mighty Blows”) is the supreme Fomorian champion. The Fomoire (Fomhóraigh) are a pre-divine race associated with the sea, darkness, and blight, hostile to each successive invasion of Ireland. Gray’s CMT §128 gives his genealogy as “Balor son of Dot son of Net”, grandson of Nét, an obscure figure linked to war. In §50 he is also styled “king of the Hebrides,” reflecting sovereignty over the islands rather than Ireland proper. The folk tradition abandons this genealogy and calls him simply king of the Fomoire, his epithet shifting to na Súile Nimhe, “of the poisonous eye.” These two strands, the compressed literary account and the sprawling oral tradition, differ substantially and are treated separately below.

How does Balor’s evil eye work?

CMT (Gray §133) gives the eye’s origin briefly: Balor looked through a window while his father’s druids were brewing magic; the fumes poisoned it. Passive and accidental, neither won nor earned, it “was never opened except on a battlefield”; four men raised the lid by a polished ring through it, and any host that looked was struck down. Whitley Stokes’s translation (Revue Celtique 12, 1891) renders the same passage with equivalent detail. Lady Gregory (Gods and Fighting Men, 1904, “The Coming of Lugh”) describes “a ring of ivory” to lift the lid, and confirms Balor’s seniority: the Fomoire direct Bres to “go to the chief king of the Fomor, Balor of the Evil Eye.”

The folk tradition varies the eye’s physical form irreconcilably. O’Donovan’s 1835 Tory Island version (footnote S in Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 1, 1856) describes one eye in the forehead and a deadly eye at the back of the head. Curtin’s “Balor on Tory Island” (Hero-Tales of Ireland, 1894) covers the eye with nine leather shields. The Dúchas.ie Schools’ Collection entry from St Columb’s, Moville calls it basilisk-like: it would “strike people dead or turn them into stone.” A Mayo variant noted in scholarly commentary describes a single eye covered by seven coverings. These descriptions cannot be reconciled; the folk tradition was not uniform on this point.

What is Balor’s place among the Fomorians?

Balor belongs entirely to the Second Battle of Mag Tuired; he does not appear in the First Battle (Tuatha Dé vs. Fir Bolg, near Cong, Co. Mayo). When the deposed half-Fomorian king Bres seeks allies, both Gray (§50) and Stokes (Revue Celtique 12, §50) record that he is sent to “Balor grandson of Net, king of the Hebrides, and to Indech mac De Domnann, king of the Fomoire,” who then gather forces from Lochlainn westwards to Ireland. Balor and Indech are co-commanders; tradition later elevated Balor to sole kingship. Lady Gregory (Gods and Fighting Men, “The Coming of Lugh”) gives Balor an apocalyptic dimension: he orders the Fomorian army to decapitate Lugh, “tie that island that is called Ireland to the back of your ships, and let the destroying water take its place”, dragging Ireland to the northern ocean, beyond all pursuit.

In Oidheadh Chlainne Tuireann (a 16th/17th-century manuscript tale), Lugh sends his father Cian north to rally warriors before the battle; Cian is murdered en route by the sons of Tuireann, making his death and Lugh’s revenge-quest a subplot running parallel to the conflict with Balor. [The full primary edition was not independently confirmed for this entry; the summary follows Cross and Slover, Ancient Irish Tales, 1936.]

Why did Balor imprison his daughter Eithne?

The structural core shared by both literary and folk traditions is a druid’s prophecy that Balor will be killed by his own grandson, and his effort to prevent it by imprisoning his daughter Eithne (Ethne/Ethnea). The literary text is strikingly compressed: CMT (Gray §8) gives only “Balor the grandson of Net gave his daughter Ethne to Cian the son of Dian Cecht. And she bore the glorious child, Lug”, no tower, no prophecy stated. The tower episode survives primarily in oral tradition. Gregory (Gods and Fighting Men) fills the gap from O’Donovan: “A Druid foretold one time that it was by his own grandson he would get his death. To prevent this, he shut Ethlinn up in the tower on the island. He put twelve women with her … and he bade them never to let her see a man or hear the name of a man.”

The fullest account is in O’Donovan’s 1835 Tory Island collection from Shane O’Dugan (Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 1, 1856, footnote S): Balor imprisons Eithne in the Tór Mór (“great tower”) guarded by twelve women. He has first stolen the Glas Gaibhnenn (magical milk-cow) from Mac Cinnfhaolaidh (the Cian figure) by appearing as a red-haired boy and tricking Mac Cinnfhaolaidh’s brother into surrendering the cow’s halter. Mac Cinnfhaolaidh enlists a leanan sídhe named Biróg, who transports him magically to the tower-top, where Eithne conceives. She bears triplets; Balor orders all three drowned, but the messenger drops one child in the harbour and Biróg rescues him. The survivor is fostered by Gavida (Goibhniu) the smith and grows to fulfil the prophecy.

The Achill Island version collected by Larminie (West Irish Folk-Tales and Romances, 1893, told by John McGinty, Valley, Achill) names the figures “Balar Beimann” and “Kian, the son of Contje” and gives Manannán mac Lir a prominent role absent from the Tory version. The child is named Dul Dauna, interpreted as a corruption of Ildánach (“master of all crafts,” Lugh’s CMT epithet). The killing is accidental: the boy throws a dart at sea without knowing his victim is his grandfather. This diverges sharply from the literary version and from Curtin’s Tory cycle, where Lugh knowingly confronts Balor. The Achill version lacks the tower-imprisonment episode, substituting a palace-building frame in which Balar hires the Gobaun Seer and then tries to trap him. The cow (“the Gloss”) belongs to “Gavidjeen Go” (a Goibhniu figure). These divergences mark the Larminie text as a substantially independent tradition.

How did Balor die at the Second Battle of Mag Tuired?

The literary climax is brief. Gray’s CMT §§133-135:

“Nuadu Silverhand and Macha the daughter of Ernmas fell at the hands of Balor grandson of Net. […] ‘Lift up my eyelid, lad,’ said Balor, ‘so I may see the talkative fellow who is conversing with me.’ The lid was raised from Balor’s eye. Then Lug cast a sling stone at him which carried the eye through his head, and it was his own host that looked at it. He fell on top of the Fomorian host so that twenty-seven of them died under his side.”

Arrogance is the mechanism of ruin: Balor’s contempt for “the babbler” causes him to expose the eye, and Lugh’s sling-stone turns it inward on the Fomorian army. Stokes (Revue Celtique 12, 1891) gives “thrice nine died beside it”, numerically equivalent to Gray’s twenty-seven. Both translations confirm the weapon as líg telma (sling-stone). Before dying, Balor first kills Nuada Silverhand, king of the Tuatha Dé (Gray §133; Stokes confirms), giving the duel its full weight of royal sacrifice.

The folk tradition varies the killing weapon: a red-hot iron staff in Curtin; a thrown dart in Larminie; “Lugh’s Sword of Light” in the Dúchas Schools’ Collection. These accounts are irreconcilable with each other and with the medieval text. The sling-stone is the only version attested in both independent medieval translations and is the textually primary form.

Where was Mag Tuired: Mayo or Sligo?

Mag Tuired (“plain of pillars”) names two distinct Connacht sites. The First Battle (Cath Maighe Tuireadh Cunga) was fought near Cong, Co. Mayo, against the Fir Bolg; Balor does not appear there. The Second Battle (Cath Maighe Tuireadh Thuaidh), in which Balor is killed, is most plausibly identified with Moytirra near Lough Arrow, Co. Sligo. No source supports a Mayo death-site for Balor. The genuine Connacht connection is indirect: the First Battle at Cong begins the chain, the wounding of Nuada, Bres’s illegitimate kingship, his appeal to the Fomoire, that makes Balor’s intervention at the Second Battle necessary. A folk death-site tradition also places Balor’s eye at Loch na Súil / Lough Nasool, near Ballindoon, Co. Sligo, where the dripping eye is said to have formed the lake; Carn Uí Néit (Mizen Head, Co. Cork) preserves a rival burial tradition.

What does Tory Island remember of Balor?

Tory Island holds the densest landscape memory of Balor: Dún Baloir (“Balor’s Fort”) at the eastern end, Túr Bhalair (“Balor’s Tower”), Port na Glaise (“Harbour of the Grey Cow”) commemorating the Glas Gaibhnenn theft, and the rock formation Tór Mór identified with Eithne’s prison. These place-names are attested in Joan N. Radner, “The Combat of Lug and Balor,” Oral Tradition 7/1 (1992). O’Donovan’s 1835 collection from Shane O’Dugan was highly influential, Lady Gregory drew on it directly, but, as Henry Morris noted, it risks giving the impression that “Tory has almost a monopoly of Balor traditions.” O’Donovan himself recorded that Balor was remembered throughout Ireland; the cow-theft cycle was collected plentifully south of Ulster.

How did the folk tradition reinterpret Balor?

The Dúchas Schools’ Collection (St Columb’s, Moville, 1930s) describes Balor infesting “Lough Swilly, Lough Foyle and indeed the entire Northern coast” and reads him as embodying “the Powers of Darkness in contrast with his grandson Lugh”, a summary that reflects the long interpretive tradition aligning the Balor-Lugh conflict with light-versus-darkness or summer-versus-winter solar mythology.

Radner (Oral Tradition, 1992) offers a more historically grounded reading: in nineteenth-century oral tradition Balor functions as an absentee landlord who demands impossible rents, sends bailiffs to the mainland, and steals his tenants’ subsistence (the Glas Gaibhnenn). His blighting eye withers crops, trees, and wells. This colonial-oppressor reading gained renewed force during the Land League era and helps explain the cycle’s vitality on the western seaboard through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Larminie Achill version, where Balar hires and then tries to trap the Gobaun Seer, is particularly expressive of this register and grounds a Balor tradition directly in Co. Mayo.

Where do the sources contradict each other?

The principal irreconcilable conflicts across sources:

Lugh’s weapon: sling-stone (Gray and Stokes, both independent medieval translations); red-hot iron staff (Curtin); thrown dart (Larminie); spear or Sword of Light (popular retellings and Dúchas). The sling-stone is the only form confirmed by primary medieval sources.

The tower episode: absent from CMT as transmitted; central to O’Donovan/Tory and Gregory. Whether it belonged to a lost portion of the medieval text or circulated only in oral form is unresolved. Gregory’s conflation of folk and literary material is creative synthesis, not translation of a single source.

Genealogy: Gray §128 makes Balor grandson of Nét (“son of Dot son of Net”); folk tradition ignores this.

Death-count: twenty-seven (Gray); “thrice nine” (Stokes, identical numerically); other variants exist.

Death and burial location: Lough Nasool, Co. Sligo (the eye drips to form the lake); Carn Uí Néit / Mizen Head, Co. Cork; Errigal Mountain, Co. Donegal: local traditions that cannot be reconciled and reflect regional appropriation of the myth.

Solar-myth readings (the destroying eye as blasting summer sun), Indo-European comparisons with one-eyed figures in other traditions, and Dumézilian trifunctional analyses have all been applied to Balor; these are scholarly interpretations layered onto the sources, not source content. [Comparative claims noted in secondary literature; primary comparative texts not verified for this entry.] Radner (1992) remains the most careful modern treatment of the folk cycle.