Oral Tradition, 7/1 (1992):143-149 The Combat of Lug and Balor: Discourses of Power in Irish Myth and Folktale

• Main Author: Joan N. Radner
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: High Rock; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.552.8620; http://journal.oraltradition.org/files/articles/7i/10_radner.pdf

If you stand on the northwestern coast of Ireland’s County Donegal and look out across the North Atlantic on a clear day, you will see like “a castellated mirage on the horizon”—Tory Island, one of the world’s most barren inhabited islands. Two and one-half miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide, Tory is windswept and has no trees. Its two tiny towns and their surrounding fields and bog are dwarfed by gigantic rock formations and dramatic ocean inlets, just as the names of Tory’s towns—East Town and West Town—fade to cartographic blandness next to the vivid, evocative names of its natural crags and harbors. Like so many other environments of potent oral cultures throughout the world, Tory’s named landscape is the visible and significant record of its layers of oral history. Among the stories told by and among these rocks is a very ancient one. Dún Baloir, Balor’s Castle, the high rock at the eastern end of the island, is the legendary home of King Balor, a monstrous oppressor whose single, poisonous eye is said to have withered permanently