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1 - The Nature of the Fomoiri: The Dark Other in the Medieval Irish Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2021

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Summary

Abstract

Scholars undertaking to reconstruct the mythology of the ancient Celts often point to the Túatha Dé Danann and Fomoiri of Irish legend as representing earlier gods of light opposed to gods of darkness and chaos; the hostilities between them are regarded as the Irish reflex of an Indo-European ‘War of the Gods’. The prevalence of this polarized model is largely due to two influential texts, Cath Maige Tuired and Lebor Gabála Érenn: elsewhere in the tradition, in sources of all periods, the connotations of the two terms overlap repeatedly, and the nature of their relationship is profoundly ambiguous. This contribution undertakes to survey the evidence – arguing that, for the Irish, darkness was by no means incompatible with divinity.

Keywords: Irish mythology, dualism, giants, Book of Invasions, Battle of Mag Tuired

In his pioneering study of the medieval Irish evidence for Celtic mythology, published in 1884, Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville wrote that ‘in the divine world of Ireland, we find two groups knit together by the closest ties of relationship, and yet at war one with the other’: these are, on the one hand, the Túatha Dé Donann (‘Tribes of the Goddess Donann’) or Túatha Dé (‘Tribes of the Gods’), the medieval reflections of the deities of the pre-Christian Irish; and, on the other, a race of beings called Fomoiri (singular Fomoir), whom Arbois de Jubainville described as ‘a mythical group corresponding to the Indian Asura and the Greek Titans’. The latter are ‘gods of Death, of Evil, and of Night’, in contrast to the Túatha Dé, whom he called ‘gods of Day, of Righteousness, and of Life’. In 1940, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt reaffirmed this view, likening the Fomoiri to ‘the forces of chaos: eternally “latent”, and enemies of all Cosmos’; and essentially the same idea is apparent in Proinsias Mac Cana's Celtic Mythology three decades later, where the Fomoiri are described as a ‘race of demonic beings’, and as ‘demonic powers’ who ‘wage a continual struggle against the gods’.

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Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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