Medieval Irish · 9 min read
Lugh at the Gate of Tara
The man on the gate that night
After Bres, Nuada was king over the Túatha Dé again, and he held a great feast for them at Tara. Two doorkeepers held the gate in those days, Gamal mac Figail and Camall mac Ríagail, and the one on duty was Camall. He saw a strange company coming toward him, a young warrior with a king's diadem at the front of it.
They told the doorkeeper to announce their arrival in Tara. Who is there, he asked, and the answer came back as a lineage, longer than the piece of it printed here. Lugh Lonnansclech is here, the son of Cían son of Dían Cécht.
Then the doorkeeper asked the question his post required. What art do you practise? For no one without an art enters Tara. Not who are you. What can you do. That rule is not his. He did not make it and cannot set it aside.
We have a builder already
Question me, the stranger said. I am a builder. We do not need you, the doorkeeper answered. We have a builder already, Luchta mac Lúachada. That is the shape of every answer that follows. He is not turned away because the hall is shut. He is turned away by a man's name.
Question me, doorkeeper: I am a smith. We have a smith already, Colum Cúaléinech of the three new techniques — and the refusal is gone. Every other answer in the run begins with we do not need you. This one skips it. Somebody in there was known for three new ways of doing a thing, and the man at the door went straight to saying so.
Question me: I am a champion. We do not need you. We have a champion already, Ogma mac Ethlend. I am a harper. We have a harper already, Abcán mac Bicelmois, whom the men of the three gods chose in the síd-mounds. He never says go away, and he never says you are lying. Tara is not being defended. It is being described.
Nine names for one job
It kept going. Warrior, taken. Poet and historian, taken. I am a sorcerer. We do not need you; our druids and our people of power are numerous. That is the one refusal with no name in it. I am a physician. We have Dían Cécht as a physician — the stranger's own grandfather, named in the lineage he gave at the door. The gate was closed on him with a man of his own blood.
I am a cupbearer. We have cupbearers already: Delt and Drúcht and Daithe, Tae and Talom and Trog, Glé and Glan and Glésse. Nine names for a task that needs one pair of hands. I am a good brazier. We have a brazier already, Crédne Cerd.
There is a rule, applied evenly by a man with an excellent memory and no hurry in him. He is not a wall but an inventory with no gaps in it.
The question the rule cannot answer
Then the stranger changed what he was asking for. Ask the king, he said, whether he has one man who possesses all these arts: if he has, I will not be able to enter Tara.
That sentence does not break the rule. It obeys the rule, accepts every refusal as true, and offers to lose. It asks for one thing more, in a form the list has no reply to.
The doorkeeper understood first. He went into the royal hall and told the king everything. A warrior has come before the court, he said, named Samildánach; and all the arts which help your people, he practises them all, so that he is the man of each and every art. The man who had said no all night went inside and made the case for yes.
Thirteen days
The fidchell-boards of Tara were sent for, and he won all the stakes, so that he made what the story calls the cró of Lug. Then it was related to Nuada, over again. Let him into the court, said the king, for a man like that has never before come into this fortress. The doorkeeper let him past, and he sat in the seat of the sage.
Then Ogma, whose name had turned him away, threw the great flagstone out through the side of the hall so that it lay outside against Tara. That was to challenge Lugh. He tossed it back into the centre of the royal hall, then put the piece it had carried away back into the side of the hall, whole again. The last thing to go through that wall that night was put back.
Let a harp be played for us, said the hosts. He played sleep music for the hosts and the king on the first night, and they slept from that hour to the same time the next day. Then sorrowful music, and they wept; then joyful music, and they were merry.
Nuada saw all of it. His people took counsel about the stranger, and the decision the king reached was to give up his own chair. Samildánach went to the king's seat, and the king arose before him until thirteen days had passed. Keep the gate rather than what comes after it: a man who did his work exactly right, every time he was asked, and carried the one question it had no answer for inside himself. The hall is warm, and nobody on the road still needs to be asked who they are.
About this telling
The medieval Irish saga Cath Maige Tuired, The Second Battle of Mag Tuired (CELT T300010)
This retelling follows Elizabeth A. Gray's translation of Cath Maige Tuired in CELT, pages 39 to 43 of her edition, and it covers one scene: a man arriving at a gate and being refused. The doorkeeper answers ten crafts in the source. Four are kept whole with the names attached, because the names are the point — builder and Luchta mac Lúachada, smith and Colum Cúaléinech of the three new techniques, champion and Ogma mac Ethlend, harper and Abcán mac Bicelmois. Three more are kept whole further down: sorcery, which is the only answer in the run that names nobody at all, physician, and brazier. Two are compressed to a word each, and the names the source gives for them are dropped rather than reinvented: warrior, answered with Bresal Etarlam mac Echdach Báethláim, and poet and historian, answered with Én mac Ethamain. The nine cupbearers are kept entire, because nine names for one office says what the scene is about better than any sentence of mine could. The gap at the smith is real, and is why the telling stops to notice it: that one answer alone carries no we do not need you in front of it, in Gray, in Whitley Stokes's translation of 1891, and in Gray's edited Irish of the manuscript, where the nít-regam a les that heads every other answer is simply not there. The lineage spoken at the door is longer than the body prints, and the body marks the cut rather than passing a shortened version off as the whole. What is left out of it belongs to the war much later in the text, and a reader would meet those names here with nothing on this page to explain them; the same holds for every figure who arrives only after the thirteen days. That Dían Cécht the physician is the newcomer's own grandfather is in the source and not an invention — the lineage names him two steps up the father's line. Gray leaves it ambiguous who calls for the fidchell-boards, writing only that then he said that they should bring him the boards, while Stokes reads the same sentence as the king; the body uses a passive and does not decide. The cró of Lug is quoted as the source's own phrase and left unglossed, because what a cró is has been argued over for more than a century. The source also reports the arrival twice over — the doorkeeper tells the king, the game is played, and then that was related to Núadu as though for the first time — and the body follows that order without smoothing it. The council before the seat-exchange is kept, because the source is explicit that the king did not decide alone; the king's stated reason for it, whether this man could free his people from the bondage they suffered at the hands of the Fomoire, is left out, because it belongs to the battle. The second battle of Mag Tuired is not told here at all. It follows a year-long secret conference, and it is a different kind of page. No content note is carried, and that is a judgement rather than an oversight. The only physical act in this cut is Ogma's flagstone, thrown as a challenge and ending with the wall made whole again; the killing in Cath Maige Tuired is real and heavy, and every bit of it lies on the far side of the point where this telling stops, so a warning here would point at something that is not on the page. Readers who follow the source link should know that the text it is cut from is not gentle. Gray spells the two figures Lug and Núadu; the site's forms Lugh and Nuada are used instead, except inside the fixed phrase the cró of Lug. Samildánach is not a nickname coined at the gate — the narrator gives it to the reader while the warrior is still on his way to Tara — and both that name and his own Lugh Lonnansclech are kept as they stand.
Version note
First Mythic Dream edition, source-checked 24 August 2026 against the CELT text of Elizabeth A. Gray's translation, Cath Maige Tuired: The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, Irish Texts Society volume 52, Kildare 1982. The CELT file, text ID T300010, represents the odd pages 25 to 73 of that volume, and the doorkeeper scene falls on pages 39 to 43. Its revision history records that the text was captured by scanning and proofed once by Benjamin Hazard on 28 and 29 October 2003, proofed a second time and marked up by Beatrix Färber the following day, converted to XML by Peter Flynn in 2005, and revised in 2009 to integrate bibliography additions suggested by Gray herself. CELT copyrights the hardcopy to Dr Elizabeth A. Gray and makes the electronic edition available with prior consent of the CELT project for academic research and teaching only; only short phrases are quoted here, and the source is linked. Every answer at the gate was checked a second time against Gray's edited Irish text of the manuscript and against Whitley Stokes's independent translation of 1891, ninety-one years older: the crafts, the refusals, the incumbents and the order they come in all hold, though Stokes gives wright for builder, hero for warrior, leech for physician, and in the fairy hills where Gray has in the síd-mounds, and spells the newcomer Lugh Lonnannsclech and the king Nuada. There is one manuscript and no more. CELT lists a single witness, London, British Library, Harleian MS 5280, folios 63a to 70b, catalogued by Robin Flower in 1926, and assigns it no date; where older accounts confidently call it fifteenth- or sixteenth-century, this edition does not, and neither does this note. Say the rest of it plainly. What survives is a Christian monastic redaction and nothing else. This story is legible today only because Christian scribes copied it, which means the sole surviving account of these gods was kept, and shaped, by the institution that replaced them — and the text does not hide the hand. Its opening lines call the Túatha Dé's learning occult lore and secret knowledge and diabolic arts, and say they surpassed the sages of the pagan arts. Further on it pauses to explain that the reason why demons used to speak from weapons then is that weapons used to be worshipped by men. Inside this very scene, at the fidchell-boards, the redactor breaks off in his own voice to date the battle of Mag Tuired against the fall of Troy, fitting an Irish story into the universal chronology of medieval Christian learning. None of that is the tradition's own framing of itself, and it should not be passed off as such. It is the framing of the successor, and there is no independent copy to hold it against.
Sources
Sources guide the factual spine of each retelling. The prose is original to Mythic Dream.
- Cath Maige Tuired: The Second Battle of Mag Tuired — Anonymous; translated by Elizabeth A. Gray, CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts, University College Cork (text ID T300010), from the Irish Texts Society edition of 1982
The primary text, followed throughout, with the printed page numbers of Gray's edition marked in place. Pages 39 to 43 supply everything in the body: Núadu once more in the kingship after Bres and his feast at Tara, the warrior already named Samildánach while still on his way there, the two doorkeepers Gamal mac Figail and Camall mac Ríagail with the latter on duty, the young warrior with a king's diadem at the front of the band, the lineage given in answer to who is there, the rule that no one without an art enters Tara, all ten craft offers and all ten answers — nine naming the man or men Tara already has, and the tenth, sorcery, naming nobody — the nine cupbearers, the question about one man who possesses all these arts, the doorkeeper's report to the king, the fidchell-boards and the cró of Lug, Núadu's let him into the court, the seat of the sage, Ogma's flagstone thrown so that it lay outside against Tara as a challenge and the wall made whole again, the three musics of the harp on the first night, the council held about the warrior, and the king rising before Samildánach until thirteen days had passed. The smith's answer is the only one in the run with no we do not need you in front of it. The file's header also carries the manuscript line and the copyright and access terms quoted in the version note.
- The Second Battle of Moytura — Anonymous; translated by Whitley Stokes, CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts, University College Cork (text ID T300011), from Revue Celtique 12 (1891) 52–130
An independent translation of the same manuscript, ninety-one years older than Gray's, read in full and used as a check that this scene is not the artefact of one translator. It has the same doorkeepers, the same ten crafts, the same incumbents in the same order, and the same missing refusal at the smith. Where the two differ the body follows Gray: Stokes gives wright, hero and leech for builder, warrior and physician, in the fairy hills for in the síd-mounds, and the spellings Lugh Lonnannsclech, Nuada, Luchtae son of Luachaid, Colum Cualléinech of the three new processes, Ogma son of Ethliu, Abhcán son of Bicelmos and Credne Cerd. He also resolves the ambiguity Gray leaves in the fidchell sentence, reading it as the king who orders the boards fetched.
- Cath Maige Tuired (Irish text) — Anonymous; edited by Elizabeth A. Gray, CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts, University College Cork (text ID G300010)
Gray's edited Irish text of Harleian 5280, with line and folio numbering, used to check the wording behind both translations. The doorkeeper is in dorsaid; the refusal formula is nít-regam a les, spelled a different way almost every time it recurs, and it is absent from the smith's answer alone; the newcomer's repeated request is atom-athcomairc, one verb with the pronoun infixed, written atum-, atom- and adum- at different points in the litany, and the first of the ten not that verb at all but déne mo athcomarc. It confirms the spellings Luchtai mac Lúachadhae, Colum Cúaolléinech téorae núagrés and Auhcán mac Bicelmois, shows the fir trí ndéa, the men of the three gods, in the harper's answer, and gives the winning phrase as an cró Logo.
- Transcriptions of MS Harleian 5280 (Cath Maige Tuired), Coll-98/3/1/38 — Scribe unidentified; in the collection of Professor Donald Mackinnon (1839–1914), Professor of Celtic, University of Edinburgh Library Heritage Collections, Centre for Research Collections, ArchivesSpace
An institutional archival record, cited only to corroborate that Harleian 5280 is the Cath Maige Tuired manuscript and is held at the British Library, to which the record links directly. It describes one notebook of transcriptions from that manuscript, in as close a rendering as possible to the original including its typeface, with notes in English alongside many of them; it dates the notebook to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and states plainly that it is not clear when or by whom it was written. It also hedges its own identification of the contents, saying they may specifically refer to the Cath Maighe Tuireadh on the evidence of annotations on the front cover, and that hedge is repeated here rather than dropped.