No matter their religious or philosophical orientation people are fascinated by fate
I am unlucky because something happened to me or I'm cursed because something continues to happen to me
or I'm fortunate because something good happened to me.
We want to know what's behind it
And why it happened and we often assign some kind of personal agency to the things that happen to us.
This is not untrue in Old Norse myth where there are three beings
three female beings called the Norns who determine fate. Not only the fate of the Cosmos
on a grand scale but also the fate of all the individuals whether human, dwarf or God.
These three Norns are known as Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld
and I've discussed in another video (that I'll link in a card in the top right as well as in the end screen)
In some depth with the role of these beings are so I won't talk too much about that here
but one thing that I've been asked about,
quite a bit, is the meaning of their names.
Of course part of why
people look for meaning in the names and look for some significance
there, is that they're just actually isn't that much written about the Norns in our main sources of Norse myth :
The Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda and certain mythical heroic sagas. And so anything that we can glean
out of the information we do have like their names assumes an extra importance. Unfortunately
the names the Norns are often misrepresented or the meanings of the names of the Norns
are often misrepresented in popular websites and books that talk about Norse Mythology.
So let's get down to the nitty-gritty and talk about what these names mean.
First of all there is a
verb
«verdða» in Old Norse that means to become or to happen and
and Verðandi, the name of one of the norns, is very simply the
form of this verb that is equivalent to an English verb that ends in -ing, right.
This is a present participle, so if you think about an English verb that ends in -ing when you say I am seeing,
you are singing,
she is leaving. That kind of thing. That
-ing form that is equivalent to the -andi ending in Old Norse. So Verðandi
is simply becoming,
happening.
Urðr is formed to the same root as
Verða.
When I say root, I mean something a little bit different from word. Think about an English word like sing
but then there's another word like sang and another sung and another song.
These are all formed to the same root meaning to sing but one means present sense ‘‘sing’’
one means past tense ‘‘sang’’, one means past participle ‘‘sung’’ and one means noun
something that is sung.
So Urðr is in a similar relationship to Verða as
sung or song is to sing
Urðr is not what is happening but what has
happened.
Now this is interesting because
Urðr is the name of the Norn that will be mentioned if none of the others are. Right, it is Urðr
who seems to be the most prominent of the three Norns even though her name is the one associated
most with the past.
So this seems to be, if this implies anything, it seems to imply a sort of karmic sense of the.
Of fate
because what happens to you is often built on what has already happen to you or what you have already done.
Notice that it's her name that appears in the name of the ‘‘Well of the Norns’’, «Urðrbrunnr» Urðr's Well.
It's also her name that appears in Old English and other Old Germanic languages as the word for fate.
Now the cognate of Urðr in Old English is the word
Wyrd. And what I mean by cognate
is that it comes from the same ancestor word in Proto-Germanic the ancestor of both English and Norse.
A Wyrd is not a person in Old English. It is a just a is an impersonal fate.
The same way that I might talk about fate in English today.
If you read Beowulf you'll see the word Wyrd quite a bit. There are some famous quotes about it that are
great testimonials to the attitude toward fate of the Old Germanic peoples' in their literature.
Gæð ā wyrd swā hīo scel.
A Wyrd
always goes as it must or Wyrd oft nereð unfægne eorl. A Wyrd
often saves a
undue man þonne his ellen dēah. If his courage holds .
That's a quote that is memorable used in the movie the 13th warrior.
So, Urðr : it's her name that becomes
the impersonal word for fate in other Germanic languages and it's also the name
that's going to be used if any three of the Norns are named such as in the well of the Norns, the well of Urðr.
The third Norn is Skuld and that name is actually exactly cognate with the English word should
Skuld is what ought to happen
Right, what is owing. And so the
translations you'll often see these names as present Verðandi, past Urðr and future Skuld,
really don't do justice to the actual meaning in Old Norse,
which is more like : what is happening, what has happened and what ought to happen.
Now whether there's actually some kind of specific role for each one of them associated with that, it's not clear because their
daily lives are not discussed for us in any detail
Illr er dómr norna
The Norns decision is bad or evil . That's the last line of the ancient poetry preserved in
the saga of Hedrek and Hervor. And perhaps one of the reasons why the
Norn's judgment seems so evil to us is that as
Urðr name suggests it's just what we've done before coming back at us
For now from the beautiful campus at the University of Colorado in Boulder I'm wishing you all the best