The Norns, Shapers of Fate

The seeress, dredging up the oldest things she knows, comes to a moment before the world was fully made and finds three women already at work. The great ash still stands green over the white water of Urd’s well, and up from a dwelling beneath the tree come three maidens, mighty in wisdom. They cut marks into wood. They lay down laws. And they allot to the sons of men their lives and set their fates. That is the whole of it in the poem, said almost without pause: three figures rise from under the world-tree and hand out the destinies of every one of the sons of men who will ever live. They are named Urd, Verdande and Skuld.

Three from the dwelling beneath the tree

Snorri, gathering the older verse into order, gives them an address. Yggdrasil has three roots, and the third runs up into heaven; beneath it lies the holiest of all wells, the well of Urd, and it is here the gods hold their court. Every day they ride to it over Bifröst, the trembling rainbow bridge, to give their judgements, and out of a fair hall beside the water come three maids whose names are Urd, Verdande and Skuld.

These maids, Snorri says plainly, shape the lives of men, and we call them norns. So the powers who fix fate do not sit apart in some remote place. They keep house at the exact spot where the gods themselves gather to be judged, which tells you something about who is answerable to whom.

What the names are made to carry

The three names have long been read as a tidy scheme of time. Urd is taken from the past tense of the verb to become, and stands close to the old word wyrd, that which has come to pass; Verdande is the present participle of the same verb, the becoming that is happening now; Skuld belongs with the word for shall and for debt, the thing that is still owed and must come. Past, present, and future, in a line.

It is an elegant reading and a very old one, but it is worth being honest that it is a reading. The verse itself only names the three; it does not gloss them. The temporal scheme is drawn out by the translators and editors from the shapes of the words, not stated in the Eddic lines, and it is best carried as an interpretation the names invite rather than a doctrine the poem asserts.

Water and white clay on the ash

Their work is not only decree. The norns who live by Urd’s well are also the gardeners of the world-tree, and the task is daily and physical. Every day they take water from the well, and the white clay that lies around it, and they sprinkle the great ash so that its limbs will not wither and rot. The water is holy past ordinary holiness: everything dipped into it comes out as white as the film inside an eggshell.

Two birds are fed there, the parents of all the swans that swim; the dew that falls from the tree onto the valleys below is called honey-fall, and the bees live on it. The image is worth holding against the popular one. These are not distant spinners drawing a thread; they are keepers of a spring, stooping each morning with water and pale mud to keep a rotting tree alive, and fixing fate as they go.

Of many births, nowise of one race

There is a second answer to the question of how many norns there are, and it does not quite agree with the first. When Sigurth asks the dying dragon Fáfnir who the norns are that come to women in childbed, Fáfnir tells him they are of many births and nowise of one race: some are of the gods, some of the elves, and some are the daughters of Dvalin, of the dwarf-kin. Not three, then, but a countless class of birth-spirits, one crowd of them attending every cradle.

Snorri holds both pictures at once and reasons about the difference: good norns of good descent shape good lives, he says, and when a man is weighed down with misfortune, it is the evil norns that are the cause. It is his own attempt to explain why fate falls so unevenly, and it is a gloss rather than old verse, but it draws its logic straight from Fáfnir’s line: if the norns are of unequal kinds, then the lots they deal will be unequal too.

The doom no fool escapes

Whatever their number, the weight of what they set is the same. Fáfnir warns Sigurth that the fate of the Norns waits for every fool before the headland; row against the wind and you drown, and all danger stands near to death. Their decrees are not advice but the shape of the end, and one name among them reaches past the well.

Snorri lists Skuld, the youngest of the three, a second time in another chapter, and there she rides out with the valkyries to choose who falls in battle, so that the norn who owes the future and the war-maid who collects the dead are, in his telling, one figure wearing two offices. Even the runesThe ancient letters of the Germanic futharks, believed to carry magic power when carved. of power keep her sisters’ mark: when the wise catalogue the strange surfaces the runes of wisdom were shaved and cut into, a bear’s paw, an eagle’s beak, a wolf’s claws, they name among them the nails of the Norns. The marks that bind the world are carved even onto the hands that carve.

Then there came three maidens, mighty in wisdom, / Up from the dwelling below the tree; / Laws they made there, and life allotted / To the sons of men, and set their fates. (Völuspá 20, trans. Bellows)