The Second Battle of Mag Tuired

Key takeaways: Cath Maige Tuired is the defining war-myth of the Mythological Cycle; Bres falls to the first satire ever made in Ireland; Lugh wins entry to Tara as master of every art; Balor’s evil eye is turned on his own host; the Morrígan ends the tale with peace and doom prophesied in one breath; and the battle-plain is Moytirra, beside Lough Arrow in County Sligo.

Bres and the first satire

The war that broke the Fomorians’ grip on Ireland began not with a spear but with a poem.

The story opens in the aftermath of the First Battle of Mag Tuired. Nuada, king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, lost his sword-arm to Sreng of the Fir Bolg. [The silver arm episode appears in both this text and the First Battle tradition, suggesting it circulated as a separable unit before being embedded here.] The law of the Tuatha Dé held that no imperfect man could reign, so Nuada was set aside and the kingship given to Bres mac Elatha, beautiful, half-Fomorian, son of the goddess Ériu and the sea-king Elatha. The hope was that his dual lineage would bind the Fomorian alliance. It proved catastrophically mistaken.

Bres’s reign violated every royal virtue. The Fomorian lords Indech, Elatha, and Tethra imposed tribute on all Ireland. Champions were put to menial labour: Ogma carried firewood from the Islands of Mod [Insi Mod, rendered by Stokes as “the Clew Bay islands”, off the Mayo coast], so hungry the sea stripped two-thirds of his bundle each day; the Dagda dug ditches and built Rath Brese half-starved. Bres kept no open table, visiting chiefs left with no grease on their knives and no ale on their breath. No poet, harper, or fool performed in his hall.

[The Cridenbél episode is regarded by scholars as a likely interpolation, but it is woven tightly into the narrative fabric.] The blind lampoonist Cridenbél demanded the three finest pieces of the Dagda’s meagre ration each night; the Dagda wasted away. His son Mac Óc gave him three gold coins to conceal in Cridenbél’s portions; the gold killed the lampoonist. Bres ordered the Dagda executed, but the opened belly revealed the coins and the Dagda was cleared.

The crisis came when Corpre mac Étaíne, poet of the gods, visited Bres seeking hospitality. He was lodged in a narrow, dark cabin without fire or furnishing, given three dry cakes on a mean dish. Leaving without thanks, he spoke the verse that became the first satire ever made in Ireland: Without food quickly on a dish; without a cow’s milk whereon a calf grows; without a man’s abode under the gloom of night; without paying a company of story-tellers, let that be Bres’s condition. From that hour Bres’s prosperity decayed without stop.

The healing of Nuada

The Tuatha Dé demanded their kingship back. Bres gave it up unwillingly and used the breathing-space to seek Fomorian military support, travelling to his father Elatha and to Balor of the Evil Eye, assembling a host so vast, it was said, that the ships made a single bridge of vessels from the Foreigners’ Isles to Ireland.

Meanwhile Nuada was healed. Dian Cécht had already fitted him with a silver arm articulated at every joint. [The text says “with the motion of every hand therein”, a remarkable feat even of divine craft.] But Miach, Dian Cécht’s son, went further: he retrieved the severed arm, held it to the stump, and chanted “joint to joint of it and sinew to sinew” over nine days until Nuada’s own flesh was whole. Dian Cécht, consumed by jealousy, struck Miach four times, Miach healed the first three blows; the fourth destroyed his brain. [This act of divine infanticide reads as a composite intrusion, it explains why herb-lore was never perfected.] From Miach’s grave grew 365 healing herbs; his sister Airmed sorted them on her cloak by their properties, but Dian Cécht scattered them so their virtues were lost. With Nuada restored, the Tuatha Dé removed Bres and reinstated their king.

Samildánach at Tara

Nuada held a feast at Tara. A young warrior arrived with a king’s bearing. The doorkeeper’s rule: no one without an art may enter. The stranger named himself Lugh Lámhfhada, son of Cian and of Ethne daughter of Balor, blood of both peoples. He offered himself in turn as wright, smith, champion, harper, hero, poet, historian, sorcerer, physician, cupbearer, and brazier; for each art the doorkeeper named the incumbent. Then Lugh asked: did Tara hold any one man who possessed all these arts? Silence. He was called Samildánach, the Many-Skilled, and admitted. Ogma hurled the great flagstone through the hall as a challenge; Lugh cast it back and sealed the breach. He played the harp’s three strains, sleep, wail, smile, and the assembly fell each time into slumber, grief, and laughter. Nuada ceded the king’s seat to Lugh for thirteen days.

The pledges of the gods

Then Lugh assembled the craftsmen, druids, brehons, and warriors at Grellach Dollaid for a year of secret council, afterwards called the Whisper of the Men of Dea. Each was asked what power they would bring to the war. The sorcerer Mathgen: to hurl the twelve chief mountains of Ireland, including Cruachán Aigle (Croagh Patrick, Co. Mayo), against the Fomorians. The cupbearer: to hide Ireland’s loughs and rivers from them. Figol the druid: three showers of fire on Fomorian faces, their urine bound in their own bodies. Goibniu the Smith: every broken weapon replaced before next dawn, every spear of his forging fatal. Dian Cécht: every wound healed short of decapitation. Credne and Luchta: rivets, shields, and spearshafts without pause. Ogma: to repel the Fomorian king and thrice-nine of his companions, and capture a third of the battalion [Stokes: “repelling the king and repelling three enneads of his friends”; renderings that have Ogma pledge to “kill” the king follow other readings]. The Morrígan: to pursue, destroy, cut down. The Dagda, crowning all: Their bones under my club will be as many as hailstones under the feet of herds of horses. [The pledges section is treated by scholars such as John Carey as a deliberate mythographic set-piece, a paradigm of how a well-ordered society marshals every art in defence of sovereignty. Note: the text actually divides the pledges between two scenes, Nuada questions Mathgen, the cupbearer, and Figol at the Grellach Dollaid council, while Lugh questions Goibniu, Dian Cécht, Credne, Luchta, Ogma, the Morrígan, and the Dagda in a second muster on the eve of battle; they are merged here for narrative economy.]

The Dagda in the Fomorian camp

Lugh then sent the Dagda alone to the Fomorian camp to spy and delay. The Fomorians prepared a mockery: a cauldron pit filled with fourscore gallons of milk, meal, fat, and boiled livestock, enough for an army, threatening him with death unless he ate every drop. He ate it all with an enormous ladle, scraped the pit with his curved finger, and fell into a stupefied sleep, his belly dwarfing a house-cauldron. He lurched away trailing his club, its track a provincial boundary-ditch. [This episode is broadly comic; many scholars read it as burlesque, the Dagda temporarily diminished so Lugh can shine as protagonist. Some treat it as a later interpolation; others see deliberate grotesque satire of Fomorian mockery of divine power.]

The tryst at the Unius

A week before Samhain the Dagda met the Morrígan at the river Unius of Connacht. [In the text’s own order this meeting precedes the porridge embassy above: the Dagda keeps his tryst at Glenn Etin/the Unius, and only afterwards is sent by Lugh to the Fomorian camp.] She stood in the ford washing herself, one foot on each bank, nine loose tresses on her head. [The Unius is sometimes identified with the river Unshin in Co. Sligo, near the battlefield.] They lay together, the place was afterwards called the Bed of the Couple. She told him the Fomorians would land at Mag Scétne; she would deprive Indech of the blood of his heart and the kidneys of his valour, and give two handfuls of that blood to the host at the Ford of Uinius, the Ford of Destruction thereafter. [This is one of the Morrígan’s most important sovereignty manifestations, coupling with the Dagda at Samhain to secure the battle’s outcome, simultaneously a ritual and a strategic briefing.]

The forge and the well

The skirmishing wore on. The Fomorians grew alarmed: their weapons stayed broken, their dead did not return. The Tuatha Dé’s weapons were repaired nightly at Goibniu’s forge, and the well of Sláine healed every mortally wounded man, Dian Cécht, Airmed, and his sons chanted spells over it [the text names Miach among the healers here, though Miach was killed earlier, an interpolated inconsistency]. Bres sent his son Ruadán, also grandson of the Dagda through his mother Bríg, to spy on the forge and kill Goibniu. Ruadán obtained a spear from the smith himself, turned and drove it into him. Goibniu pulled the spear free and hurled it back through Ruadán, who died before his father’s assembly. Then Bríg came and keened over him, she shrieked first, then cried. The text records this as the first shrieking and crying ever heard in Ireland; Bríg also invented the whistle for night-signalling. [This aetiological moment has been connected by scholars to Brigit as triple patroness of smithcraft, poetry, and healing.] Goibniu stepped into the well of Sláine and was made whole. The Fomorian champion Octriallach then had each of his men cast a stone of the River Drowes into the well, sealing it as Octriallach’s Cairn.

The eye of Balor

The great battle came on the plain near Lough Arrow. The Fomorians were arrayed hauberk to heel, “striking them was striking a head against a cliff, a hand in a serpent’s nest, a face up to fire.” Lugh slipped his nine fosterers, who had held him back fearing his loss, and placed himself at the army’s head, circling on one foot with one eye closed [a ritual warrior posture that mirrors Balor’s own single deadly gaze], chanting the battle-cry Arotroi cath comartan. Nuada Silverhand and Macha daughter of Ernmass fell to Balor grandson of Nét. Balor’s eye, poisoned when he peered over the window as his father’s druids brewed venom-spells [the “in childhood” detail found in some retellings is not in Stokes], required four men with a handle through its lid to open it; one glance, it was said, could undo a thousand warriors. When Lugh and Balor met, Balor called for his lid to be raised. The instant it opened, Lugh’s sling-stone drove the eye clean through Balor’s skull, and the gaze fell instead on the Fomorian host; thrice nine died and their crowns struck Indech’s breast. One stone, and the battle turned. The Morrígan heartened the Tuatha Dé with her battle-cry; the Fomorians were driven to the sea; Ogma and Indech fell by each other’s hands.

The sparing of Bres

Lugh found Bres unguarded. Bres bargained for his life: he offered perpetual milk from Ireland’s kine, rejected, as he had no power over the cattle’s lifespan. He offered a harvest every quarter, rejected; seasons already provide that. Finally he offered the knowledge of when to plough (Tuesday), when to sow (Tuesday), when to reap (Tuesday). That esoteric agricultural wisdom was enough. Bres was spared.

The harp recovered

After the battle, Lugh, the Dagda, and Ogma pursued the Fomorians, who had carried off the Dagda’s harper, Uaitne; in the Fomorian banqueting-hall where Bres and Elatha sat, they found the harp hanging on the wall, Durdabla (“Oak of Two Greens”) and Coir-cetharchuir (“Four-Angled Music”) were its two names. The Dagda called it: Come Durdabla! Come summer, come winter! The harp leapt from the wall, killing nine men on its way to his hands, then played wail, smile, and sleep in sequence. Under the sleep-strain the whole Fomorian host fell senseless, and the three gods walked free.

Peace and doom

When the dead were cleared, the Morrígan proclaimed the victory to every royal height and river-mouth in Ireland. Asked whether she had any tale, she gave the Peace Prophecy: Peace up to heaven, / Heaven down to earth, / Earth under heaven, / Strength in everyone. Then at once she prophesied the world’s end: I shall not see a world that will be dear to me. / Summer without flowers, / Kine will be without milk, / Women without modesty, / Men without valour, / Wrong judgments of old men, / False precedents of brehons, / Every man a betrayer, / Every boy a reaver. / Son will enter his father’s bed, / An evil time! [Scholars note that all three of the Morrígan’s CMT prophecies, battle-cry, peace-prophecy, doom-prophecy, are in archaic rosc metre, likely considerably older than the surrounding prose and pre-dating the 9th-century narrative composition; they are the text’s most archaic stratum, encoding a cyclical cosmology of abundance and decay.]

With those words the tale closes: victory absolute, dissolution already spoken into the world.