Lugh (Old Irish Lug), called Lamfada, of the Long Arm, and Samildanach, skilled in many arts, is one of the foremost gods of the Irish Tuatha De Danann, a youthful, radiant figure of sovereignty, skill and victory. His by-name Samildanach is enacted in a celebrated scene: arriving at the court of Tara, he is refused entry until he can name a craft the household lacks, and when each single skill he offers is found to be already held by someone within, he asks whether they have any one man who possesses them all, and so is admitted, as master of every art at once.
Continental Gaulish inscriptions add a further wrinkle to Lugh's deep antiquity: dedications from what is now Switzerland and Spain address a plural form, the Lugoves, suggesting that on the continent the god behind Lugh's name may sometimes have been venerated as a group of three related deities rather than as a single figure, a pattern of tripling found elsewhere in Celtic religion. Julius Caesar, writing of Gaulish religion in the first century BCE, describes a god he calls Mercury as the most honoured deity among the Gauls, inventor of all the arts, a description many scholars believe points to Lugus behind the Roman name, given how closely it matches Lugh's own later Irish reputation as master of every skill.