The Tuatha Dé Danann are the divine tribe of medieval Irish tradition, the people of the goddess Danu who ruled Ireland before the Milesians came. Danu herself is barely a presence in the tales — a name the whole tribe carries and a mother nobody meets — so the tree organises itself around fathers and foster-fathers instead. Chief among them is the Dagda, Eochaid Ollathair, the All-Father with club, cauldron and harp, whose appetite for food, work and women seeds most of the branches on the diagram.
The Dagda's line is built from concealment. He meets the Morrígan at the Unshin shortly before Samhain, prophetic and unbindable; his son Aengus Óg is conceived on Bóand — Elcmar's wife in the conception tale, Nechtan's in the dindshenchas — and hidden by making nine months pass as a single day, then fostered out to Midir. The Dagda later acknowledges Aengus, who dispossesses Elcmar of the Brú na Bóinne using a trick his father taught him. Other children fare worse: Cermait Milbél is killed by Lugh over adultery and revived by his father's staff, Aed Minbhrec dies in a similar quarrel, and Bodb Derg takes the kingship by election, over Lir's furious objection.
The tribe's wars are also marriages. Ériu bore Bres to the Fomorian prince Elatha, and when Nuada Airgetlám lost an arm at Mag Tuired a blemished king could not rule, so the half-Fomorian Bres took the throne and bled the tribe with tribute. Brigid, daughter of the Dagda, bore him Ruadán, and raised Ireland's first keening cry over the boy after the assembled Fomorians sent him to kill the smith Goibniu. The mirror case is Lugh Lámfada: son of Cian and Balor's daughter Ethniu, whose imprisonment in a tower against prophecy is later folklore; fostered by Tailtiu and Manannán, he kills his grandfather Balor with a sling stone. Alongside them Dian Cécht murders his son Miach for regrowing Nuada's arm in flesh and scatters the herbs Airmed had sorted.
The tree follows the Lebor Gabála Érenn, an eleventh-century compilation transmitted in later recensions, and Cath Maige Tuired, which preserves much older material in a far later manuscript. Tochmarc Étaíne, with its early stratum and late-eleventh-century reworking, supplies Midir and Étaín; the Children of Lir is a later Early Modern Irish romance; and Cú Chulainn's conception by Deichtine and his healing in the Táin belong to the Ulster Cycle. Bile appears in the genealogies as father of Míl, ancestor of the invading Milesians, which turns the conquest of Ireland into a family quarrel. That is the tradition's lasting move: gods retired into the hollow hills as ancestors, so that Irish history could be told as genealogy.
Open & edit this family tree →