Brigid (Old Irish Brigit) is a major goddess of the Tuatha De Danann in Irish tradition, a daughter of the Dagda, associated with poetry, healing and smithcraft, three high arts often described as three sisters bearing the same name, so that Brigid is at once a single goddess and a triple one. The medieval glossary of Cormac describes her as a goddess whom poets venerated, and her name has been connected with an Indo-European root meaning the exalted one. She belongs to the learned and creative side of the Irish divine world rather than to war or kingship, presiding over the crafts of word, cure and fire.
A closely related goddess, Brigantia, is directly attested in Roman Britain: inscriptions dedicated to her survive from sites including Birrens in southern Scotland, associated with the Brigantes, a powerful British tribal confederation whose very name, meaning the high or exalted ones, shares Brigid's own root. Brigantia was worshipped there in a fully Romanised visual form, shown with the attributes of Minerva and sometimes Victory, evidence that a goddess of this name and character was venerated across the wider Celtic-speaking world of Britain and Gaul, not only in Ireland, long before the Irish literary sources that now preserve most of what is known of Brigid herself were written down.