Something is a Virtue

Question: Dear JSR: Please change the Tuatha Virtue from Intellect to Vengeance. They were all about holding grudges.

We'll take it under consideration!

We've had a lot of conversations about the Tuatha Virtues and whether or not they need tweaking, actually. We're cool with Piety - if there's one thing the Tuatha believe in, it's the awesomeness of the Tuatha and their right to invade wherever the hell they feel like as a pantheon - and Expression and Courage are no-brainers, but Intellect's a more complicated choice. We're not entirely sure it fits; sure, Irish mythology respects brains, but it respects physical badassness and honorable insanity more, and they definitely don't fit into the same model of Intellect as, say, the Devas. But at the same time, the Tuatha love cunning and cleverness, and when they succeed, they succeed big-time, such as when Aengus wins his divine estate from his father with the badass Power of Motherfucking Grammar. So we're unsure.

There definitely is a theme of vengeance running through some of the stories of the Tuatha, but we're similarly unsure about it. When it appears, it's insanely violent, but there are also Tuatha figures for which it seems entirely absent, so we're not sure if it's really a Tuatha-wide thing. Cu Chulainn refuses to sleep with the Morrigan and she's like "I will kill everything you love," and Lugh manages to pull off the greatest revenge-caper in anyone's history on his father's murderers, but when the Fomorians threaten and then mock the living shit out of the Dagda he just sort of sad-Eeyores his way back home, and when Sreng lops off Nuada's arm, he's just like, "Well, damn, that's inconvenient, you guys want to just live in Connacht and we'll call it even?"

We're still thinking about it. Feel free to weigh in in the comments if you have strong feelings one way or the other!