The Mythological Cycle

Key takeaways: the Mythological Cycle is the literature of the Tuatha Dé Danann, Ireland’s old gods rewritten by monastic scribes as a race of invaders; its framework is Lebor Gabála Érenn and its tales lie scattered across Lebor na hUidre, the Book of Leinster and later vellums; its great subjects are sovereignty, invasion and transformation; and the west of Ireland holds two of its battlefields.

Who were the Tuatha Dé Danann?

The Tuatha Dé Danann, the people of the goddess Danu, were the gods of pre-Christian Ireland. The monks who wrote their stories down could not present them as gods, so they made them something stranger: a brilliant, magical race who arrived in dark clouds, brought four treasures from four cities, won Ireland in battle, ruled it, and finally lost it to the ancestors of the Irish themselves. Lugh of the long arm, the Dagda with his club and cauldron, Brigid, Manannán of the sea, the Morrígan: the figures of this cycle are the closest thing Ireland has to a pantheon, half-euhemerised but never quite mortal. When the sons of Míl defeated them, the tradition says, they went underground into the síd-mounds and became the hidden people, the aos sí of the later folk record.

What is the Mythological Cycle, and when were its tales written down?

The “Mythological Cycle” is a modern scholarly label, not a medieval one, for the tales whose chief actors are the Tuatha Dé Danann and the earlier legendary settlers of Ireland. The stories were the work of centuries. Linguistic evidence places the cores of several tales in the ninth century or earlier, but the books that preserve them are later: Lebor na hUidre, the Book of the Dun Cow, written at Clonmacnoise around 1106, and the twelfth-century Book of Leinster carry early copies, while other key texts survive only in much later manuscripts. Cath Maige Tuired, the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, comes down to us in a single sixteenth-century copy of a far older text. The Wooing of Étaín had to be pieced together from Lebor na hUidre and the Yellow Book of Lecan. The Children of Lir, one of the Three Sorrows of Storytelling, survives only in early modern copies, centuries younger than the story’s medieval roots.

What is Lebor Gabála Érenn?

The cycle’s spine is Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of the Taking of Ireland, an eleventh- to twelfth-century compilation that arranges Irish prehistory as a sequence of invasions: Cessair, Partholón, Nemed, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha Dé Danann, and finally the sons of Míl, the Gaels. It is pseudo-history rather than scripture, a learned attempt to give Ireland a past compatible with the Bible, and it should be read that way. But it is also the text that fixes the Tuatha Dé Danann’s place in the national story, names their treasures and their dead, and sends Ériu, Banba and Fódla out to meet the invaders and bargain for the island’s name.

What are the cycle’s major figures and themes?

Sovereignty runs through everything: who has the right to rule, what a king’s body and conduct must be, how the land itself, personified as a goddess, grants or withholds legitimacy. Nuada loses his arm at the First Battle of Mag Tuired and with it the kingship; the unjust Bres loses the kingship by failing in hospitality. Invasion and displacement structure the whole cycle, ending with the gods themselves displaced underground. And transformation is its signature wonder: Étaín reborn as a fly and a woman, the children of Lir as swans for nine hundred years, Fintan mac Bóchra surviving the ages in salmon, eagle and hawk form.

Where should you start?

• The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, the cycle’s central tale: Lugh against Balor, the Morrígan’s prophecies, the fall of Bres.
• The First Battle of Mag Tuired, fought near Cong, where Nuada loses his arm and the Fir Bolg lose Ireland.
• The Children of Lir, the swan-children’s nine hundred years of exile, ending on the Mayo coast at Inishglora.
• The Wooing of Étaín, reincarnation, jealousy and the chess game for a wife.
• Lugh, the many-skilled god whose festival, Lughnasadh, still marks the Irish summer.
• The Dagda, the club-carrying, cauldron-keeping father figure of the Tuatha Dé.
• The Morrígan, sovereignty, battle and prophecy in one shape-shifting figure.
• Brú na Bóinne / Newgrange, the monument the tradition gives to the Dagda and Aengus Óg.

How does the Mythological Cycle connect to the other cycles?

The gods never really leave the literature. The Morrígan and Lugh intervene in the Ulster Cycle’s Táin Bó Cúailnge; Aillén of the Tuatha Dé burns Tara until Fionn stops him in the Fenian Cycle; kings in the Cycle of the Kings meet Otherworld women who are sovereignty herself. And when the manuscripts fall silent, folklore carries on: the Tuatha Dé Danann diminished into the aos sí, the fairy people of the forts and hollow hills, still respected in the living tradition of the west.