Winifred Hodge Rose
Here is my view of Verðandi, one of the three Norns who ward the Well of Wyrd and nourish the great Tree of the Worlds. She rules the domain of Becoming: the very instant of time when a being or a deed ripens from the layers Wyrd has laid and springs forth to lay new layers and respond to Skuld’s tuggings, faint or strong, upon its thread of life.
I think that the domains of the other two Norns, Urðr and Skuld, are both quite complex and multifaceted, but that Verðandi’s is more straightforward. Her name means ‘Becoming / coming into being.’ Hers is the point of the needle, the edge of the knife, the imperceptible moment when something moves from ‘not-being’ into ‘becoming.’
As ‘becoming’ moves into ‘become’ Skuld attaches strands of shild / debt / obligation to that which has become. This is a metaphor for the action of causality, of cause and effect. Skuld’s name comes from a form of the word ‘should,’ and implies that ‘given this thing / event / action / being / situation which has now come into being, this is what ‘should’ result from it.’
Then the deed or event or being rolls over into Urðr’s domain of ‘what-is,’ what has happened, what has been accomplished and completed, entered into Being. It is tethered lightly or strongly to Skuld’s domain of ‘what should be,’ depending on many complex factors, and those tugs from Skuld’s tethering threads create the function of causality. In the meantime, the next instant of Becoming arises and moves on, into the same pattern. That very moment of Becoming is Verðandi’s domain.
I like to picture Verðandi both as a midwife into Being, and as the gatekeeper of the quantum realm! A potentiality arises in the quantum realm and is ‘called to’ or ‘attracted to’ Verðandi. This potentiality could manifest as a deed, a person, a situation, an object, a thing or event of any kind. She then midwifes its birth into the domain of Time and Being as we know them. It’s as though the potentiality of a deed, a situation, a being, a moment of Time itself, is the ‘soul’ of that thing, and she calls this soul into its ‘body,’ which is its reality in this Space-Time where it is enacted into being. It is then given a wyrd—that is, it takes on its role in causality—and is embedded into the solidity of ‘what-is,’ Urðr’s domain. Verðandi remains at the gateway of the quantum realm, midwifing the next births into being.
Below is a poem / song I wrote to honor Verðandi. Here I prefer to call her by the translation of her name into Anglo-Saxon: Werðende. In the imagery of the song I clothe her in red to represent the blood of birth: life coming into being.
Werðende: Song of Becoming
Red the threads of Werðende’s weaving,
Blood of birth and life brings she.
Her needle’s point, a world unfolding:
The endless Now of budding deeds.
The wave of Time moves on unmoving,
Just as a wave moves not the Sea.
All flows past that point of shaping:
What is becoming, what should be.
Pierced with knowledge no words capture,
Thread on which worlds hang like pearls,
The soul is strung, that seeks to venture
Within the Well’s green-shaded furls.
Cupped in moss, the deepest wonder
Of all that is, lies hidden here.
Drops of dew, the Tree’s deed-plunder,
Fall through boughs like sweat and tears.
A mighty maid, come from the East-lands,
Gowned in red sits spinning there,
With sisters two; their threefold shaping
Weaves a web both dark and fair.
And over all, the great Tree arches,
The shape of all that has been won.
Life flows through its limber branches:
Thread that Werðende’s hands do spin.
There’s a little oddity in the last line of this poem, where the rhyme would be better this way: “Thread that Werðende’s hands have spun.” Out of my deep respect for her, I make a gentle vow to Werðende that when I speak to her or about her, I speak only in the present tense, to honor her status as the Norn of the present moment of coming-into-Being. The final line of the poem causes a tiny jerk of attention to Werðende’s foundation in the present moment: never past, never future, never ‘perfected’ in the sense of completed and finished, always budding into the perpetual Now. Thus, Werðende stands as the sacred gatekeeper of the quantum realm, at the imperceptible edge where Might-Be becomes What-Is.