The Dagda, the name means the Good God, in the sense of good at everything rather than morally good, is a father-figure and great chieftain of the Irish Tuatha De Danann, the divine race of Irish myth, and a deity of wisdom, abundance, magic and power. He is drawn in the medieval Irish literature as a figure of enormous, sometimes comic, appetite and capacity, a rustic and powerful patriarch. His attributes are treasures of plenty and of life and death. He wields a mighty club so great that it must be dragged on wheels: one end of it kills the living with a blow, and the other end restores the dead to life, so that he holds the power over both in a single weapon. He owns a cauldron, the Undry, from which no company ever goes away unsatisfied, an inexhaustible vessel of abundance, one of the four great treasures the Tuatha De Danann brought to Ireland.
Medieval tradition locates the Dagda's dwelling at Bru na Boinne, the great Neolithic passage-tomb complex on the River Boyne known today as Newgrange, binding the god to one of Ireland's most visible ancient monuments centuries before archaeology could date it. In Cath Maige Tuired, the tale of the second battle against the Fomorians, the Dagda recovers his harp, named Daur Da Bhlao, from the defeated enemy and plays it to summon in turn sorrow, joy and sleep upon the assembly, a harp bound so that it answers only his own call, one of the clearest instances in Irish myth of music itself wielded as a weapon and a comfort in the god's own hand.