Balor of the Evil Eye (Balor)

The Fomorian king whose single eye destroyed whatever it looked at, and who was killed by the grandson he tried to prevent.

Balor is the nearest thing Irish mythology has to a final enemy, and his story is the oldest shape there is: a man told how he will die, doing everything possible to prevent it, and bringing it about by the doing.

His eye is the thing everyone remembers. One account has him as a boy looking in on his father's druids brewing spells, and the fumes settling in one eye so that whatever it looked on was destroyed. It was kept shut. Opening it took four men with a polished handle through the lid, and it was opened only on a battlefield.

A druid told him he would be killed by his own grandson. He had one daughter, Eithne, so he shut her in a tower on Tory Island with twelve women to keep her and no knowledge that men existed. It failed in the usual way. Cian of the Tuatha Dé reached her, by trickery or by magic depending on the telling, and she bore three sons. Balor had them thrown into the sea. One was rescued, and that one was Lugh.

At the second battle of Mag Tuired, Balor killed Nuadha, the king of the Tuatha Dé. Then Lugh came at him, and the eye was being levered open, and Lugh put a sling stone through it with such force that the eye was driven out the back of his head, where it destroyed the Fomorian army behind him.

Place-names in Donegal still carry him. Dún Bhalair on Tory is his fort.