The Dagda- Celtic GodDeity"The Good God"

The Good God

The Dagda's name means "The Good God," though not good in any moral sense. Good at everything. He was the chief god of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the divine tribe of Irish mythology, and his other names mapped the range of his power: Eochaid Ollathair, "The Great Father"; Ruad Rofhessa, "Lord of Perfect Knowledge." He was warrior and druid both, and the texts of the Cath Maige Tuired and the Lebor Gabála Érenn describe his body with relentless comic detail.

He was enormously fat. His tunic barely covered his buttocks. His ladle was vast enough that a man and woman could lie together in it. He dragged his immense club behind him on wheels, its bulk carving furrows in the earth deep enough to serve as boundary ditches between provinces. The chief god of Ireland looked like a joke. He was not.

The Harp on the Wall

The Dagda carried three things no other god could match. His club (lorg mór) killed the living with one end and restored the dead to life with the other. His cauldron (coire ansic), brought from the city of Murias before the Tuatha Dé Danann came to Ireland, fed every company that approached it and never emptied.

His harp was called Dur da Bláo, "Oak of Two Blossoms," and also Coir Cethar Chuir, "Four-Angled Music." It played three strains: gentraige, the strain of laughter; goltraige, the strain of weeping; suantraige, the strain of sleep. When the Dagda played, his listeners laughed, wept, or slept according to his will.

After the great battle against the Fomorians, the enemy seized the harp and fled. The Dagda went with Lugh and Ogma to the abandoned Fomorian banqueting hall and found his instrument hanging on the wall. He called to it by both its names. The harp sprang from the wall, killing nine Fomorians in its flight, and returned to his hand. He played the weeping strain, and the Fomorian women wept. He played the laughing strain, and the women and boys laughed. He played the sleeping strain, and the entire host fell into slumber. The three gods walked out untouched.

The Porridge of the Fomorians

Before the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, when the high king Lugh asked each member of the Tuatha Dé Danann what they would contribute, the Dagda said he would do alone everything all the others promised together.

The Fomorians tested that appetite. They dug a crater in the earth and filled it with a porridge of meat and milk until the pit overflowed. They ordered the Dagda to eat every drop or die. He ate. He scraped the bottom clean with his fingers. He staggered away bloated almost to bursting, his belly so distended he could barely walk. A Fomorian woman mocked him. The enemy had tried to shame or destroy the chief god with excess. They had picked the wrong god for that.

The Morrígan at the Ford

On the eve of the same battle, the Dagda found the Morrígan at a river ford, straddling the water with one foot on each bank, washing the equipment of those fated to die. He mated with her there, and the ford on the River Unshin in Connacht was known ever after as "the Bed of the Couple."

In return she pledged her magic to the Tuatha Dé Danann. She would go to the battlefield and drain the blood and courage from the Fomorian king Indech's heart. She would chant incantations to confound the enemy host. The battle that followed shattered the Fomorians and drove them into the sea. Nuada fell to the gaze of Balor of the Evil Eye, and Lugh killed Balor with a sling-stone through that monstrous eye.

The Sun That Stood Still

The Dagda desired Boann, wife of Elcmar. To conceal the affair, he sent Elcmar on a journey to Bres in the north and then worked his greatest feat of druidry: he made the sun stand still. Nine months passed while Elcmar perceived only a single day. In that stolen interval Boann conceived and bore Aengus Óg, and Elcmar returned home none the wiser. The god who commanded the seasons through his harp had bent time itself to hide a child.

Brú na Bóinne

The Dagda's dwelling was Brú na Bóinne, the sacred complex on the River Boyne that includes the passage tombs now called Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth. Its central chamber aligns to the winter solstice, when a shaft of light pierces the passage and illuminates the inner wall.

When the Tuatha Dé Danann were defeated by the Milesians and retreated beneath the earth into the síd mounds, the Dagda distributed the mounds among his people. He kept Brú na Bóinne for himself. Then Aengus Óg came to him and asked for the mound "for a day and a night." The Dagda agreed. Aengus pointed out that all time consists of days and nights, and so claimed the mound permanently. The father who had stopped the sun to conceal his son's birth was undone by his own child's trick of language.

Cethlenn's Wound

At the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, the Fomorian Cethlenn, wife of Balor, struck the Dagda with a wound that would not heal. He ruled as king of the Tuatha Dé Danann for eighty years with that wound festering inside him. It killed him at last at Brú na Bóinne, the mound he had already lost to his son.