Mythology
The Invasion Myths
arriving in Ireland via Scandinavia and Scotland. The Tuatha De Danann occupy a peculiar place in this legendary history of Ireland, for while being they are treated in one way as ordinary human beings, fighting and winning or loosing, they are also supernatural beings, and story tellers ( known as shanachies ) were deliberely ambigouos about them, no doubt shifting the emphasis depending on the audience.
They bought the Stone of Destiny ( the Lia Fail - alleged to be the Stone of Scone, part of the throne on which British Monarchs are still crowned) which they set up at Tara, to be the ancient capital of Ireland. They defeated the Firbolgs in battle, the defeated Firblogs being allowed to retain Connaught, though many fled the country, ending up in Scotland, In particular the Scottish Islands. During the fighting the King of the Tuatha lost his right hand, and because a monarch had to be without a physical blemish he was obliged to abdicate in favour of Bres, the son os a Femorian father and a Tuatha mother. Bres was harsh, inposing severe taxation, and despite dynastic marriages to establish a staus quo he was satirised to such effect by the principal bard of the Tuatha that he came out in boils and so he was forced to abdicate, which led to a war between the Femorians and the Tuatha with an armoury of magical weapons, a war which the Tuatha won, the Femorians being almost wiped out. For many years the Tuatha regime prospered and was unchallenged, and became the Gods of the Irish Celts, eventually retirering, ready to be of service at some future date, to the prehistoric burial mounds, or fairy mounds, of the country. One of the most important was at New Grange, on the North Bank of the River Boyne. It is a large knoll 280 feet across and forty-four feet high, but states 'The Annals of the Four Masters' it was plundered by the invading Danes in 861 AD though curious engraved stones survived. One of the most beautiful of all Irish Legends concerns a deity of Tuatha, Lir, the father of the sea god Mananan who occurs frequently in Irish Legend. He had married in succession two sisters, the second of whom was named Aoife ( pronounced Eefa ). By an earlier wife Lir had four children, whom he loved, which aroused such jelousy in Aoife that she resolved to put them to death. She journeyed to a neighbouring King, Bov the Red, taking the childeren with her to a lonely lake she ordered her attendants to kill them. They refused and rebuked her, so that instead of killing them she used magic to turn them into four white swans, and laid a curse upon them. 300 years they would spend on the lake, 300 years they spend on the Straits of Moyle ( between Ireland and Scotland) and 300 years on the Atlantic Ocean. After that the long evil spell is lifted, but only when "the woman of the South is mated with the man of the North".
When Aoife arrived at the palace of Bov the Red without the children, her guilt was apparent, and Bov turned wer into a demon of the air. She fled shreiking and no more was heard of her. Lir and Bov sought out the swan children, and found out that not only had they human speech but made wonderful music. People from all over Ireland visited the swans, and for three hundred years the swans enjoyed great peace and tranquility. The time came for the second part of the curse, three hundred years in the Straits of Moyle. Forbidden to land, battered and driven apart by the wind, their feathers frozen in the cold, the three youngest were saved by the eldest daughter, who wrapped her feathers around them to protect them. For the third part of their trial they took flight to the western shores of Mayo, and suffered much hardship, but a new wave of invaders had arrived, the Milesians, from who the future nobles and kings claimed descent, and the swan children were befriended by a Milesian farmer, Evric, to whom they told their story and who supposedly handed it down. They flew to Armagh to seek thier father but found only green mounds, bushes and nettles. The palace of their father was there, but they could not see it. There was a higher destiny awaiting these seemingly doomed creatures. They heard for the first time a Christian bell, the sounds coming from the chapel of a hermit, which terrified the swans until reassured by the hermit who indoctrinated them into the ways of Christianity.
Deoca, a princess of Munster, the woman of the South in the spell put upon the swan children, was betrothed to a prince from Connaught, the man of the North, and begged to have the famous four swans as a wedding gift. The hermit, who had linked the swans by silver chains, refused to give them up, but the prince dragged them off. The curse had reached the peak. the woman of the South had met the man of the North. The swan plumage fell off, they were no longer lovely swans but four white haired withered and terrible looking hags. The prince flew in horror from these apparitions, and as the old women clearly had little time to live, the hermet came and prepared to baptise them. Fionuala requested that they be buried in one grave, laid in the position in which she had protected the younger children during the years in the straits. This was done and they went to heaven. The hermit sorrowed for them until the end of his days.
Unquestionably it is one of the most tender and moving Irish myths, and introduces the new race, the Milesians. The Milesians are particularly interesting as they are represented in much of Irish legend as wholly human. And the Tuatha are not trully defeated, because by thier magic arts they confer invisability on themselves, which they can put on or off as they please. Henceforth there are two Irelands, the spiritual and the earthly. Some commentators offer the theory that the Milesians were " evolved"