Balor of the Evil Eye: The Fomorian With a Killing Gaze

The Fomorian giant whose one destructive eye needed four men to lift its lid, and who died when Lugh turned it on his own army.

Balor is the most famous of the Fomorians in Irish myth. His poisoned eye killed any army that looked into it, and four men had to lift its lid by a polished ring.

Balor is the most famous of the Fomorians, the monstrous race who oppose the Tuatha Dé Danann in Irish myth. His story is told in Cath Maige Tuired, the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, a text preserved in a sixteenth-century manuscript but written centuries earlier. Balor is Lugh's grandfather: his daughter Ethniu is Lugh's mother.

His weapon was an eye. The text says it was opened only on the battlefield, and that "four men would raise the lid of the eye by a polished ring in its lid." If an army looked into it, even many thousands of warriors could not resist. The eye had gained its poison because his father's druids were brewing a charm, and the fumes of the mixture got into it.

At the height of the battle, Balor calls for his eyelid to be raised so he can see the man speaking to him. Lugh hurls a sling stone that "carried the eye through his head," and "it was his own host that looked at it." The eye's gaze falls on the Fomorian army, and many of them die.

Scholars often read Balor as a figure of blight or the scorching sun, and his defeat by the young god Lugh as the victory of a new order. For modern readers the details stand out: a weapon that needs a crew of four and a handle to operate, and is lethal only when opened. Later folklore places Balor on Tory Island off Donegal.