Fomorians

The tribute came in the cold months, when the grain was already low. Two thirds of the children born that year, two thirds of the corn, two thirds of the milk, carried off to a tower on a northern island while the people who had grown it went hungry. Anyone who came up short on the appointed day at Mag Cétne had his nose cut off. This was what it meant to live under the Fomorians, and for a long stretch of Ireland’s mythic age, almost everyone did.

They came from the sea, or from under it, or from beneath the earth. The name itself seems to hold the idea: something below, something to do with deep water. The oldest tellings make them less a nation than a force, the part of the world that wants the crops to fail and the sun to go out. They are winter given hands. They are the blight on the stalk and the drought in the well, the drowning tide and the sickness that empties a settlement in a season. When the medieval scribes tried to fit them into a history of invasions, they wrote them in as the first hostile thing the island ever had to face, already waiting when the earliest peoples arrived.

Their shapes refuse to settle. One eleventh-century manuscript describes Fomorians with a single eye, a single arm, and a single leg apiece, hopping and lopsided, built wrong on purpose. Others give them the body of a man under the head of a goat. The earliest of them, Cichol Gricenchos, came to Ireland with a host of such half-made creatures and lived two hundred years on fish and seabirds before the first proper settlers landed. But the picture is not consistent, and it was never meant to be, because the Fomorians who matter most to the stories are the ones who do not look monstrous at all. Elatha, a Fomorian prince, was remembered as a man of golden hair who arrived over the waves in a silver boat, lovely enough that a woman of the Tuatha Dé Danann lay with him on the shore without hesitation.

That night produced Bres, and Bres is where the trouble turns intimate. When Nuada, king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, lost his arm in battle against the Fir Bolg, a blemished man could no longer hold the kingship, and the half-Fomorian Bres was given the throne in his place. He was beautiful and he was a disaster. Under him the gods themselves were set to labor, the Dagda forced to dig ditches, Ogma made to haul firewood, and the Fomorian overlords took their tribute without resistance. Bres was finally driven out for his meanness, and he went straight to his father’s people to raise an army. The peace had never been more than skin-deep.

Their king in those days was Balor, and Balor is the reason the Fomorians are remembered with dread rather than pity. He had a single enormous eye that was kept shut, its lid so heavy it took several men with a polished ring and a hook to raise it. When it opened, whatever it looked upon was destroyed, an army withered where it stood, a hillside scorched bare. A prophecy told him he would be killed by his own grandson, so he locked his daughter Ethniu in a tower of glass on Tory Island to keep her from ever bearing a child. The precaution failed, as such precautions do in these stories. The child she bore was Lugh, raised in secret, and he grew into exactly the doom his grandfather had tried to outrun.

The reckoning came at the Second Battle of Mag Tuired. The Tuatha Dé Danann had taken their kingship back and refused the tribute, and the Fomorians crossed the sea in force to put them under the yoke again. The fighting was long and the dead did not always stay dead, since Dian Cécht and his children had a well that healed the slain overnight. Then Balor came forward and his terrible eye began to lift. Lugh was waiting. He put a sling-stone through the eye with such force that it drove the whole thing out the back of Balor’s skull, so that the killing gaze fell on the Fomorian ranks behind him. The army broke. The sea took the survivors back, and they never again ruled in Ireland.

What they could do was simple and total: spoil. They commanded the weather that ruins a harvest, the murrain that kills a herd, the cold that does not lift. Balor’s eye is only the sharpest point of a more general power, the capacity to make the living world stop working. Their weaknesses are the other half of the same coin. They could be bound by oaths and by the blood-ties they kept making with their enemies, so that their own grandchildren rose against them. The eye that destroyed everything had to be opened by hand, and in the one moment it took to lift, it could be turned. A race that lived by taking tribute could be refused. For all their monstrous strength, the Fomorians were beaten the way the long winter is beaten, not killed outright so much as turned back, season by season, until the ordered world held.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Fomorians in Irish mythology?

The Fomorians were a supernatural race in Irish mythology, portrayed as hostile, often monstrous beings who came from the sea and embodied the destructive forces of nature such as blight, drought, plague, and winter. They were the chief adversaries of Ireland’s early settlers and of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the island’s divine race.

What did the Fomorians look like?

Fomorians were often described as grotesque and misshapen, with some accounts giving them a single eye, a single arm, and a single leg, and others a man’s body with a goat’s head. However, their noble figures such as the prince Elatha were remembered as darkly beautiful, with golden hair, which is why the two races so often intermarried.

How were the Fomorians defeated?

The Fomorians were defeated by the Tuatha Dé Danann at the Second Battle of Mag Tuired. Their king Balor, whose single eye destroyed everything it looked upon, was killed when his grandson Lugh drove a sling-stone through it, turning the deadly gaze back onto the Fomorian army and breaking their rule over Ireland.

Who was Balor of the Fomorians?

Balor was the one-eyed king of the Fomorians, whose enormous eye withered armies and scorched the land whenever its heavy lid was raised. A prophecy said he would die at the hands of his own grandson, so he imprisoned his daughter Ethniu, but she bore Lugh in secret, and Lugh fulfilled the prophecy at Mag Tuired.

What is the connection between the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danann?

The Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danann were enemies, yet members of the two races repeatedly had children together. The half-Fomorian Bres became king of the Tuatha Dé Danann before being overthrown, and Lugh, the hero who killed the Fomorian king Balor, was Balor’s own grandson through his Fomorian mother Ethniu.

Related Entries

Balor, Lug, Nuada, Dagda, Morrigan, Brigid, Dian Cécht, Goibniu, Aengus Óg, Manannán mac Lir, Fir Bolg, Cú Chulainn, Giant, Cyclops