The Ancestral Mother of the Irish Gods

Danu is the mother-goddess after whom the Tuatha De Danann, the People of the goddess Danu, take their name, the ancestral divine mother of the Irish gods. Yet she is a curiously shadowy figure: her name is largely reconstructed from the genitive in that tribal title, and she has almost no myth of her own in the surviving texts, so that her prominence rests more on the collective name of her descendants than on any narrative of her own. She is often connected with, or identified as a form of, the goddess Anu or Ana, tied to the land and its fertility, the pair of hills in Kerry called the Paps of Anu bear that name.

A separate but similarly named figure, Don, is the mother of a divine family in the Welsh Mabinogi. The comparison sometimes drawn with the Vedic river-goddess Danu and with river-names such as the Danube is linguistically suggestive but remains debated; the Irish Danu is best described as an ancestral mother-goddess about whom the sources themselves say very little.