This saga and the whole story of the Tuatha De Danann contending with the Fomorians, who are in one place in the saga actually called _sidhe_, or spirits, is all obviously mythological, and has usually been explained, by D'Arbois de Jubainville and others, as the struggle between the gods or good spirits and the evil deities.
The following episode also shows the wild mythological character of the whole.
"Dagda," says the saga, "had a habitation at Glenn-Etin in the north. He had arranged to meet a woman at Glenn-Etin on the day of Samhan [November day] just a year, day for day, before the battle of Moytura. The Unius, a river of Connacht, flows close beside Glenn-Etin, to the south. Dagda saw the woman bathe herself in the Unius at [Kesh] Coran. One of the woman's feet in the water touched Allod Eche, that is to say Echumech to the south, the other foot also in the water touched Lescuin in the north. Nine tresses floated loose around her head. Dagda approached and accosted her. From thenceforth the place has been named the Couple's Bed. The woman was the goddess Mór-rígu"--
the goddess of war, of whom we shall hear more in connection with Cuchulain.
As for the Dagda himself, his character appears somewhat contradictory. Just as the most opposite accounts of Zeus are met with in Greek mythology, some glorifying him as throning in Olympus supreme over gods and men, others as playing low and indecent tricks disguised as a cuckoo or a bull; so we find the Dagda--his real name was Eochaidh the Ollamh--at one time a king of the De Danann race and organiser of victory, but at another in a less dignified but more clearly mythological position. He is sent by Lugh to the Fomorian camp to put them off with talk and cause them to lose time until the De Danann armaments should be more fully ready. The following account exhibits him, like Zeus at times, in a very unprepossessing character:--
"When the Dagda had come to the camp of the Fomorians he demanded a truce, and he obtained it. The Fomorians prepared a porridge for him; it was to ridicule him they did this, for he greatly loved porridge. They filled for him the king's cauldron which was five handbreadths in depth. They threw into it eighty pots of milk and a proportionate quantity of meal and fat, with goats and sheep and swine which they got cooked along with the rest. Then they poured the broth into a hole dug in the ground. 'Unless you eat all that's there,' said Indech to him, 'you shall be put to death; we do not want you to be reproaching us, and we must satisfy you.' The Dagda took the spoon; it was so great that in the hollow of it a man and a woman might be contained. The pieces that went into that spoon were halves of salted pigs and quarters of bacon. The Dagda said, 'Here is good eating, if the broth be as good as its odour,' and as he carried the spoonful to his mouth, he said, 'The proverb is true that good cooking is not spoiled by a bad pot.'[12]