Tuatha de Danann

The Gentry

They are the earliest fairies, in other word, the origin of the fairy race. Their goddess was Dana.

The fairy warriors had come from enchanted islands at the top of the world, traveling to this green and pleasant land in the dark cloud that had settled around Conmaicne Réin. They were called by humans Tuatha Dé Danann, which meant 'the people of the goddess Danu' - a fertility goddess. (The title may have come to them because of their elfin power over the growth of crops.) They were famed, in the words of an early scribe, as

'the most handsome and delightful company, the fairiest of form,
the most distinguished in their equipment and apparel,
and their skill in music and playing,
the most gifted in mind and temperament that ever came to Ireland.'

Their power was great, for they possessed magic talismans: a spear and sword no enemy could survive, and a cauldron that was never empty of food.

How long the Tuatha reigned nobody knows. But some time in an antiquity older than the granite of the Irish mountains, they were conquered, despite their talismans, by new and mortal invaders, ancestors of the Gaels, who were to rule the island. The Tuatha took refuge in invisiblity. Some built kingdoms within the hollow hills or beneath the lakes of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and some made their homes on islands far across the western seas. They hid their kingdoms with walls that were invisible except to themselves and impenetrable to most mortals.

That was the beginning of the retreat of the Tuatha and the time when they gained the name Daoine Side. But their final disappearance would not come for hundreds and hundreds of years. Meanwhile, these heroic beings pursued their wars and loves, generally unseen by the humans who had conquered them.

During those centuries, fairy and mortal - though separated - were bound in a network of needs and desires. Linked by the world of stream and sea, of leaf and tree and field, the two races reached out to each other, in defiance or their alien natures. Again and again, in the comradeship of arms or in the bright fires of love, the beings of Faerie ventured into the mortal world. Again and again, mortals set out on journeys that carried them unknowing across the boundaries of Faerie, and their adventures were curious indeed.