Dagda

The Dagda, the name means the Good God, in the sense of good at everything rather than morally good, is a father-figure and great chieftain of the Irish Tuatha De Danann, the divine race of Irish myth, and a deity of wisdom, abundance, magic and power. He is drawn in the medieval Irish literature as a figure of enormous, sometimes comic, appetite and capacity, a rustic and powerful patriarch. His attributes are treasures of plenty and of life and death. He wields a mighty club so great that it must be dragged on wheels: one end of it kills the living with a blow, and the other end restores the dead to life, so that he holds the power over both in a single weapon. He owns a cauldron, the Undry, from which no company ever goes away unsatisfied, an inexhaustible vessel of abundance, one of the four great treasures the Tuatha De Danann brought to Ireland.

Medieval tradition locates the Dagda's dwelling at Bru na Boinne, the great Neolithic passage-tomb complex on the River Boyne known today as Newgrange, binding the god to one of Ireland's most visible ancient monuments centuries before archaeology could date it. In Cath Maige Tuired, the tale of the second battle against the Fomorians, the Dagda recovers his harp, named Daur Da Bhlao, from the defeated enemy and plays it to summon in turn sorrow, joy and sleep upon the assembly, a harp bound so that it answers only his own call, one of the clearest instances in Irish myth of music itself wielded as a weapon and a comfort in the god's own hand.

The Dagda's third great possession is a living harp, Uaithne, richly ornamented, which only he can play and which has power over both emotion and time. With it he can sound the three noble strains of music, the strain of sorrow that brings weeping, the strain of joy that brings laughter, and the strain of sleep that brings rest, and, crucially, he plays the harp to keep the seasons in their proper order, calling them forth each in its turn. In one memorable episode the harp is stolen by the enemies of his people, the Fomorians, and the Dagda must recover it, summoning it out of their hall by name so that it flies to his hand.

The Dagda is also remembered for his robust humour: a much-loved passage of the Second Battle of Mag Tuired has him forced by his enemies to eat a colossal quantity of porridge from a hole in the ground, which he devours to the last, dragging his belly comically behind him. His unions with the goddesses Boann, associated with the River Boyne, and the Morrigan are important in the mythology. In the Dagda the Irish imagined the divine father as a figure of overflowing abundance, of power over life and death, and of the music that orders the turning year.