The Dagda (An Dagda; also Eochaid Ollathair, Ruad Rofhessa)

A single furrow once ran the width of an entire province, deep enough to serve as the boundary ditch between one kingdom and the next, and it had been cut by a club too heavy for any one man to lift. The thing rode on a wheel. The giant who owned it hauled it behind him across Ireland, the iron-hard head bumping over stones and scoring the ground the whole way. People called the scar the Track of the Dagda’s Club. The man who made it was the chief of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and he did not look the part.

He was enormous and unkempt. His tunic was grey-brown and far too short, riding up over the swell of his backside; a hood sat on his head, and his feet were shod in crude horsehide sandals with the hair still on them. His belly was as big as the cauldron a great house keeps for feeding a crowd. The Fomorians, the sea-raiders who fought the gods for the soil of Ireland, took one look at him and laughed. This was the god the Irish called good.

The name says so plainly. An Dagda means “the good god,” though the goodness in question was less virtue than competence. He was good at everything. His other titles carry the same weight: Eochaid Ollathair, the All-Father, and Ruad Rofhessa, the lord of great knowledge. King, druid, warrior, and provider all at once, he was the father-figure of a divine race and the steady center it turned around.

Three possessions made him what he was. The first was a cauldron, the coire ansic, the un-dry pot, from which no company ever went away unsatisfied; it was numbered among the four great treasures the Tuatha Dé Danann carried with them into Ireland. The second was the club already dragging its furrow, a weapon that killed nine men with one end and called them back to life with the other. The third was a harp of oak, named Uaithne, that would not sound for anyone but its owner and answered only to its two secret names. When the Dagda played it, the seasons came round in their proper order, and he could draw from it the three strains of music that left a hall weeping, then laughing, then asleep.

On an ordinary night the cauldron sat over the fire and did the single thing it was built to do. Men came and ate, and the pot did not empty, and they went away full. There was no trick to it and no end to it. A god who could feed everyone was worth more to the people of Ireland than one who could only win battles, and they knew it.

The stories do not trouble much with where he came from. He simply is, the elder of the Tuatha Dé Danann, present before the wars and outlasting most of them, credited with a reign of seventy or eighty years over the gods. His appetites were as large as the rest of him, and not only at the table. He loved Boann, the goddess of the river Boyne, who was married to Elcmar and lived at the great mound on its banks. The Dagda sent her husband off on an errand that should have lasted a single day, then held the sun still in the sky for nine months so that the day never seemed to pass. In that stretched-out afternoon Boann bore a son, Aengus, and Elcmar returned none the wiser. Some read the whole episode as the midwinter sun reaching down the long passage into the inner chamber at Newgrange, light entering the dark womb of the mound.

The hardest test of his rule came in the second battle of Mag Tuired, the reckoning between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians. At Samhain, on the threshold of the turning year, he came upon the Mórrígan straddling a river with nine loosened braids in her hair. They lay together there on the bank, and in exchange she pledged him the battle: she would go to the Fomorian king Indech and take from him the blood of his heart and the valour from his kidneys.

The Fomorians tried to break him before the fighting even started. They dug a vast pit and filled it with porridge, with meal and milk and whole goats and sheep and swine boiled down together, and told him to eat every scrap or die. The Dagda ate. He scraped the pit clean with a ladle big enough for a man and a woman to lie in side by side, and by the end his gut hung to the ground and he could scarcely walk. He had swallowed their insult whole, and survived it, then lumbered home dragging the great club, his dignity in worse repair than his stomach.

His power, at bottom, was the power of plenty. He held sway over crops and weather, over life and death, over time itself. The cauldron that never emptied, the club that took life and returned it, the harp that set the year in motion: these were not separate tricks but three faces of one thing, a god who carried the conditions of survival in his own two hands.

Nothing about him was guarded, and that was the price of it. The same hunger that let him empty a pit of porridge left him bloated and easily beaten. The club that could raise the dead had to be carted on a wheel because its owner could not lift it. He was mocked to his face and let it pass. In the end the openness found him out. He died at the mound above the Boyne, long after the great battle, of a lingering wound dealt by Cethlenn, a Fomorian woman, in the fighting at Mag Tuired. The greatest of the gods went slowly, carrying an old injury, in the same green mound by the river where his son had been born.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Dagda?

The Dagda is the father-god and chief of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the divine race of Irish mythology. His name means “the good god,” a reference to his mastery of many skills rather than his moral character. He is also known by the titles Eochaid Ollathair (“the All-Father”) and Ruad Rofhessa (“the lord of great knowledge”).

What are the Dagda’s magical treasures?

The Dagda owns three famous objects. His cauldron, the coire ansic or “un-dry” pot, never runs empty and leaves no company unsatisfied. His enormous club kills nine men with one end and restores the dead to life with the other, and his oak harp, Uaithne, sets the seasons in order and can play music that brings sorrow, joy, or sleep.

What is the Dagda the god of?

The Dagda is associated with fertility, agriculture, abundance, strength, magic, and druidry. He is said to command crops and weather, life and death, and even time and the seasons themselves. Above all he is a provider, a god whose bottomless cauldron feeds everyone who comes to it.

What happened between the Dagda and the Mórrígan?

In the tale of the second battle of Mag Tuired, the Dagda meets the Mórrígan at Samhain as she stands astride a river. They unite, and in return she promises to aid the Tuatha Dé Danann against the Fomorians, vowing to drain the blood and courage from the enemy king Indech. The Mórrígan is also named as the Dagda’s wife.

How did the Dagda die?

The Dagda died at Brú na Bóinne, the great mound on the river Boyne, years after the second battle of Mag Tuired. He finally succumbed to a wound that had been inflicted on him during that battle by Cethlenn, a Fomorian woman. He is said to have reigned over the Tuatha Dé Danann for seventy or eighty years before his death.

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Morrigan, Aengus Óg, Brigid, Nuada, Dian Cécht, Goibniu, Manannán mac Lir, Balor, Fomorian, Fir Bolg, Cú Chulainn