By the Gods!

Balor

The Irish Cyclops Balor was a one-eyed god of death, and the most formidable of the Fomorii––you remember them, right? The violent and monstrous sea gods who ruled Ireland before the arrival of the Tuatha De Danann, the “nicer” gods and goddesses. 

So dreadful was the one eye of Balor that he destroyed whoever he looked upon, and his eyelid had to be levered up by four servants. It was prophesied that he would be slain by his own grandson, as is often the case with gods and their inconvenient yet inexorable prophecies. He stowed his daughter Ethlinn in a crystal tower on Tory Island, but a determined young god named Cian made it up to provide her with some bonafide lovin’. 

Balor found out that his daughter had popped out three sons, and ordered them drowned. The servants wrapped the boys up in a sheet, but on the way to the whirlpool, one of the boys fell out, unnoticed. That boy was Lugh, the sun-god-to-be. He was taken to Manannan Mac Lir, the god of the sea, and fostered. Once he was grown, Mac Lir took him to a major battle against the Fomorii. Balor wreaked havoc on the Tuatha De Danann with his lethal gaze, but eventually Lugh crept near him with a magic slingshot, taking advantage of Balor’s weariness in a moment when his eye was closed. As soon as that ugly eyeball opened up again, Lugh fired a shot into it, and it hit so hard that Balor’s eye was blown backward through his head, and all the Fomorii behind him suffered the power of its stare. The Fomorii, in losing this battle, were driven from Ireland forever.