The Tuath De Danaan and the Fairyland
The kings and heroes of the Milesian race now fill the
foreground of the stage in Irish legendary history. But, as we have
indicated, the Danaan divinities are by no means forgotten. The
fairyland in which they dwell is ordinarily inaccessible to mortals,
yet it is ever near at hand; the invisible barriers may be, and often
are, crossed by mortal men, and the Danaans themselves frequently
come forth from them; mortals may win brides of Faëry who
mysteriously leave them after a while, and women bear glorious
children of supernatural fatherhood. Yet whatever the Danaans may
have been in the original pre-Christian conceptions of the Celtic
Irish, it would be a mistake to suppose that they figure in the
legends, as these have now come down to us, in the light of gods as
we understand this term. They are for the most part radiantly
beautiful, they are immortal (with limitations), and they wield
mysterious powers of sorcery and enchantment. But no sort of moral
governance of the world is ever for a moment ascribed to them, nor
(in the bardic literature) is any act of worship paid to them. They
do not die naturally, but they can be slain both by each other and by
mortals, and on the whole the mortal race is the stronger. Their
strength when they come into conflict (as frequently happens) with
men lies in stratagem and illusion; when the issue can be fairly knit
between the rival powers it is the human that conquers. The early
kings and heroes of the Milesian race are, indeed, often represented
as so mightily endowed with supernatural power that it is impossible
to draw a clear distinction between them and the People of Dana in
this respect. The Danaans are much nobler and more exalted beings, as
they figure in the bardic literature, than the fairies into which
they ultimately degenerated in the popular imagination; they may be
said to hold a position intermediate between these and the Greek
deities as portrayed in Homer. But the true worship of the Celts, in
Ireland as elsewhere, seems to have been paid, not to these poetical
personifications of their ideals of power and beauty, but rather to
elemental forces represented by actual natural phenomena—rocks,
rivers, the sun, the wind, the sea. The most binding of oaths was to
swear by the Wind and Sun, or to invoke some other power of nature;
no name of any Danaan divinity occurs in an Irish oath formula. When,
however, in the later stages of the bardic literature, and still more
in the popular conceptions, the Danaan deities had begun to sink into
fairies, we find rising into prominence a character probably older
than that ascribed to them in the literature, and, in a way, more
august. In the literature it is evident that they were originally
representatives of science and poetry—the intellectual powers of
man. But in the popular mind they represented, probably at all times
and certainly in later Christian times, not intellectual powers, but
those associated with the fecundity of earth. They were, as a passage
in the Book of Armagh names them, dei terreni,
earth-gods, and were, and are still, invoked by the peasantry to
yield increase and fertility. The literary conception of them is
plainly Druidic in origin, the other popular; and the popular and
doubtless older conception has proved the more enduring.
Druids, Celts, Tuath De Danaan, Faeries, Fairyland,
earth gods,
The fairyland in which they dwell is ordinarily
inaccessible to mortals
