Danu and Anu

Worth knowing: Danu and Anu are the names attached to the ancestral mother-goddess of the Tuatha Dé Danann; Anu is the firmly attested form, named in a ninth-century glossary as the mother of the gods of Ireland and tied to the Paps of Anu in Kerry; the subject form Danu appears in no medieval Irish text and is a modern reconstruction from a possessive case; the Book of the Taking of Ireland braids Danann, Anand and the Morrígan together in a way most scholars read as confusion rather than original identity; and the popular river-goddess link to the Danube is possible but not proven.

The problem of the name

No figure in Irish mythology is at once so often named and so seldom present as the mother-goddess of the Tuatha Dé Danann. The very name of that supernatural race, the people of the goddess Danann, promises a great ancestral goddess at its root, yet when scholars look for her in the medieval manuscripts she is almost nowhere to be found. The reason lies in the grammar. The form Danann is a possessive case in Old Irish; the subject form, the name she would have been called by, would be Danu or Dana, but that form appears in no medieval Irish text. It is a reconstruction, an inference: if Danann means of Danu, then there must logically have been a goddess Danu. But no surviving Irish text addresses, invokes, or describes her by that name. The scholarly consensus, set out by Eric Hamp, by Mark Williams in Ireland’s Immortals, and by the standard etymological dictionaries, is that the subject form is unattested, and that the Danu of popular handbooks is largely a Victorian and modern construction, a reasonable guess from a group name rather than a figure with her own medieval story.

Anu: the attested form

Against this absence, the goddess Anu, also written Ana, Anann and Anand, stands on firmer ground. The ninth-century Sanas Cormaic, Cormac’s Glossary, compiled by or attributed to Cormac mac Cuilennáin, bishop-king of Cashel, and one of the oldest such works in any European vernacular, names her the mother of the gods of Ireland. The entry, in Whitley Stokes’s edition, says that she nursed the gods well, links her name to an Old Irish word meaning plenty, and anchors her to the Two Paps of Anu west of Luachair in Kerry. The entry does three things at once: it calls her mother of the Irish gods, ties her name to wealth and abundance, and fixes her to a real landscape feature. The Fitness of Names, a glossary of the eleventh or twelfth century, reinforces this by ascribing Munster’s prosperity to the goddess Ána and naming the Two Paps over Luachair Deaghaidh for her. This places Anu as a Munster prosperity-goddess embodied in the land, regional and earth-bound, rather than a pan-Irish cosmic creator.

The Paps of Anu: landscape as goddess

The Dá Chích Anann, the Two Paps of Anu, are a pair of perfectly breast-shaped hills near Killarney in County Kerry, the highest points of the Derrynasaggart Mountains. A prehistoric cairn sits on each summit, perhaps a small passage grave, perhaps a cist-burial, which from the valley below appears as a stone nipple on the goddess’s breast, and a line of stones called Na Fiacla, the Teeth, joins the two and is thought to have served as a processional route. An archaeological survey by Frank Coyne in 2001 found collapsed entranceways in the cairns and judged them probably prehistoric, likely of the Bronze Age or earlier, concluding that there was little doubt the summits were used for ritual in prehistory. To the north-east lies the circular enclosure of Cathair Crobh Dearg, the Red Claw Fort, locally called The City, which appears to have had a sightline to the Paps and may have been the precinct from which the mountain-goddess was venerated. It holds an ogham stone, a holy well, an earthen mound and a cross-inscribed altar, the whole layering of Irish sacred landscape from the Neolithic through the Christian centuries, and local memory recorded by the folklorist Dan Cronin preserved fertility and purification rites there into the early twentieth century. These hills are the fullest surviving expression of the Irish earth-mother idea: the body of the goddess as the land itself, her breasts as hills, her abundance as the fertility of the ground beneath.

Two figures or one: the confusion in the Book of the Taking of Ireland

When we move from Cormac’s Glossary to the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of the Taking of Ireland, compiled in its major form in the twelfth century from older materials, the picture grows more tangled. At least two passages have fed the Danu and Anu conflation. A verse catalogue of the principal women of the Tuatha Dé lists Ériu, Banba, Fódla and Fea, Neman, and Danann, mother of the gods, where Danann again appears as a possessive alongside the sovereignty-goddesses and the war-goddess Neman; this is the closest the text comes to naming a goddess Danu, and even here the form is Danann, not a subject form. A separate genealogical passage names the three daughters of Ernmas the she-farmer as Badb, Macha and the Morrígan, whose name was Anand, and attributes the Paps of Anu to that Anand. So in this strand Anand is the Morrígan, and the Paps belong to a war-goddess rather than a nurturing earth-mother. Separately again, the text names a goddess Danand, daughter of Delbáeth, as mother of Brian, Iuchar and Iucharba, the three gods of the Tuatha Dé, though elsewhere these same three are called sons of the Morrígan, and elsewhere again sons of Brigit, a genuine contradiction within the manuscript tradition. The medievalist Mary Jones argued that Danu is a reconstruction from the possessive Danann and that the braiding of Anand, Danand and the Morrígan is a textual muddle rather than a mythological original, and Mark Williams goes further, treating Danu as a constructed figure unrelated to the genuine Anu of the glossary.

The river-goddess hypothesis and its limits

Since the nineteenth century scholars have proposed that Danu, even with no attested Irish subject form, preserves a Proto-Indo-European river-goddess whose name underlies the Vedic Dānu, a Scythian word for river, and the names of the Don, the Dnieper, the Dniester and the Danube. On this reading the ancestors of the Tuatha Dé carried the name of a great river-mother from their continental origins, and it survived only inside the possessive of the tribe’s title. The hypothesis is coherent and has drawn real interest, but it faces serious objections. The reconstructed Celtic form behind the Danube name does not straightforwardly yield Old Irish Danann, so the derivation is not clean; the river-name may in any case be a loanword into Celtic rather than an inheritance. Eric Hamp, in a close study of 2002, rejected the flowing-water etymology altogether and proposed a root meaning good, yielding a sense of aristocrat or noble, which would make the Tuatha Dé Danann the noble divine tribe and dissolve the river-goddess reading entirely. Sharon Paice MacLeod offered a different alternative, linking the name to the Old Irish word for gift or skill and reading the gods of Danu as the people of skill, the craftsman and artist gods. The honest position, as the scholarship frames it, is the Scottish verdict: not proven.

Anand and the Morrígan: a darker thread

In the Book of the Taking of Ireland the figure most clearly named Anand is the Morrígan herself, the great battle-queen, daughter of Ernmas and sister of Badb and Macha, and in that strand the Paps of Anu are attributed to a war-goddess rather than an earth-mother. This looks contradictory, but it may reflect an archaic logic in which sovereignty, fertility and battle-fury were aspects of a single divine presence in the land, so that the queen who drove men to slaughter also embodied the nourishing earth beneath them. The Banshenchas, the lore of women, lists Nemain, Danand, Badb and Macha, and the Morrígan who brings victory, with Danand and the Morrígan appearing as distinct figures in the same line. Robert Graves promoted a triple-goddess reading in which Ana, Badb and Macha formed the Morrígna, but this has no clear basis in the primary texts; Graves was harmonising contradictions the manuscripts preserve in irresolvable tension.

Folklore survivals and Christian absorption

The cult of Anu was absorbed early into Christian frameworks. A goddess whose name meant plenty was a natural candidate for assimilation to Saint Anne, the grandmother of Jesus, whose many holy wells across Ireland may carry traces of older veneration, and in Scotland a comparable figure was softened into Gentle Annie, the same instinct that turned the fairies into the Good People, suggesting a wider Gaelic tradition of a powerful maternal presence bound to weather and the fertility of the land. The Paps of Anu retain living cultural memory: winter-solstice charity walks are made to the summits and offerings are still left at the cairns, a documented present-day practice. The place has never quite lost its sacred character across the passage from Bronze Age ritual through early Christian holy-well devotion to the present day.