Danu

Also Known As: a modern nominative rebuilt from the Old Irish genitive Danann, also written Danand, Donand and Donann; the figure in the medieval texts is Danand; often merged with Anu or Ana
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Irish Mythology, Celtic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Danu has no recorded deeds, weapons or domain, and her one sure attribute is that the divine people of Ireland, the Tuatha Dé Danann, carry her name.
Role in Mythos: She is the presumed mother or ancestor behind the Tuatha Dé Danann, known in the medieval texts only as Danand, a woman of that people and mother of three sons called gods.
Relation to Humans: No medieval source shows her dealing with mortals, receiving a prayer or owning a shrine. Her standing as a great mother goddess was built up by writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is now held warmly by many modern pagans.

A scribe bends over a sheet of calfskin in an Irish monastery some time in the eleventh century, the page cold under his hand and smelling faintly of the animal it came from. He is copying out the story of the peoples who took Ireland before the Irish did, and he has reached the fourth of them, the ones who arrived in dark clouds and blotted out the sun for three days. Older writers called them simply the Túath Dé, the god-folk. He writes three words where they wrote two. Tuatha Dé Danann. With that third word a goddess comes into the record, and she comes in sideways, in the possessive case.

That is the whole difficulty with Danu. Her name as most people know it appears in no medieval Irish manuscript at all. What the scribes wrote was Danann, or Danand, or Donand, a form that means “of” somebody. Later scholars looked at that ending, worked out what the plain form of the name ought to have been, and wrote it down as Danu. The asterisk that linguists put in front of a word they have rebuilt has been dropping off it ever since.

Why the extra word was added at all is a question with a rather dry answer. John Carey, in a short paper in the journal Éigse in 1981, pointed out that Irish monks used Túath Dé for another group entirely: the Israelites, the people of God. Two famous peoples under one name was awkward for men who wrote about both. Mark Williams, in Ireland’s Immortals, follows him, and adds that the change did something else useful for Christian authors. A god-folk is hard to explain away. The folk of one particular goddess sounds more like a family.

The medieval texts do put a woman behind the word. The Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of the Taking of Ireland, names Danand as a daughter of Delbáeth among the god-folk. By her own father she has three sons, Brian, Iuchar and Iucharba, and the book says that these three were called the gods of Danand and that the whole people took their name from them. It does not say why those three should be the gods, or what their mother did besides bear them. She has a pedigree and no story.

Her sons have one, and it is grim. In the tale of their deaths, where their father goes by the name Tuireann, the three brothers meet an old enemy named Cian crossing a plain. He turns himself into a pig and hides among a herd. They flush him out, let him take his own shape again at his asking, and then kill him with stones because no weapon of theirs will do it cleanly. They dig a grave and the ground throws the body back. They bury him again. It takes seven tries before the earth keeps him. Cian’s son is Lugh, and the price he sets for the killing sends the brothers round the world and brings them home to die. Their mother is nowhere in it.

A second name crowds in beside hers. Around the year 900 the glossary credited to Cormac, king and bishop of Cashel, has an entry for Ana, mother of the gods of Ireland, and says she fed them well. It points to two hills in the west of Munster as her breasts. They are still there in County Kerry, round and green against the grey weather, each topped by a cairn of stones, and they are still called the Paps of Anu. The Lebor Gabála muddies things further by giving Anand as one of the three daughters of Ernmas, beside Badb and Macha, and by tying the same two hills to her. Ana and Danand trade places from one manuscript to the next. Nobody can say whether there were once two goddesses, or one goddess under two names, or a real goddess called Ana and a second one who grew out of a spelling.

There is a sharper possibility still. The old texts know a group called the three gods of skill, and the Irish word for skill, dán, looks very like the start of Danann. Some scholars suspect that the three gods of skill were read by later scribes as the three gods of a woman, and that the woman was then given a father and a family tree. If that is right, Danu is the child of a misreading.

Other scholars have looked much further afield. The name has been set beside the Danube and several other old river names of Europe, and beside a Danu in the hymns of the Rig Veda, the mother of the serpent Vritra, who is struck down beside her son. On that reading she is a very old river mother carried west by the Celts. John Koch’s encyclopedia of Celtic culture records the idea and treats it with caution. Eric Hamp, in 2002, rejected it and proposed a root meaning something like noble or good. In Wales there is Dôn, the mother of Gwydion, Arianrhod and the smith Gofannon, whose name and brood look like a cousin of the Irish figure, and whose smith son matches the Irish smith Goibniu. That match is the best evidence that something real stands behind the name.

Her fame came late. Victorian and Edwardian writers, Charles Squire among them in his Celtic Myth and Legend of 1905, wanted the Irish gods to have a great mother of the kind the Greeks and Romans had, and they made Danu into one: goddess of the earth, of rivers, of plenty. None of it is in the manuscripts. It was a guess, and it stuck.

What power she has is the power of a name. A whole race of gods, the Dagda and Lugh and Nuada of the silver hand, march under it, and every later reader has taken it as a statement about where they came from. Her limits are the limits of grammar. She cannot act, because no sentence in the old language has her as its subject. She never speaks, never fights, never blesses a field or curses a king. The god-folk went into the hollow hills when their day was done, and the stories followed them there. Their mother had already gone, or had never quite arrived. Wind still crosses the two cairns in Kerry, and the hills still carry the other name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Danu in Irish mythology?

Danu is the presumed mother goddess behind the Tuatha Dé Danann, the divine people of Irish mythology. Her name is a modern reconstruction from the Old Irish form Danann, and no medieval text tells a story about her. The Lebor Gabála Érenn names a woman called Danand as a daughter of Delbáeth and the mother of three sons.

Is Danu a real ancient Irish goddess?

The name Danu does not appear in any medieval Irish manuscript. Scholars rebuilt it from Danann, the form used in the name Tuatha Dé Danann. John Carey and Mark Williams argue that the word Danann was added to the older name Túath Dé so that the Irish gods would not be confused with the Israelites, who were also called the people of God.

Are Danu and Anu the same goddess?

The medieval texts do not settle whether Danu and Anu are the same. Cormac’s Glossary, from around 900, calls Ana the mother of the gods of Ireland and links her to the Paps of Anu, two hills in County Kerry. The names Ana and Danand swap places in the manuscripts, so they may be one goddess under two names or two figures who were blended.

Who are the children of Danu?

The Lebor Gabála Érenn says Danand bore three sons to her father Delbáeth: Brian, Iuchar and Iucharba. They were called the three gods of Danand. In a later tale these brothers kill Cian, the father of Lugh, and die completing the quests Lugh sets as payment.

Is the Irish Danu related to the Hindu Danu or the Welsh Dôn?

A link between the Irish Danu and the Danu of the Rig Veda, mother of the serpent Vritra, has been proposed through an old word for flowing water, but scholars do not agree on it and Eric Hamp rejected it in 2002. The Welsh Dôn, mother of Gwydion, Arianrhod and Gofannon, is a closer match. Her smith son Gofannon corresponds to the Irish smith Goibniu.