Winifred Hodge Rose
The Missing Word in Gothic
When I was researching the linguistics of the word ‘orlog’ I noticed something very curious to me in the Gothic Bible. I was looking for examples of the words and concepts of ‘orlog’ and of ‘wyrd’ to see how they were used in this oldest literary record we have of a Germanic language (not counting runic inscriptions). I did not find either word in any form that was similar to later usage of these words in other Germanic languages. In my article “The Fateful Roots of Orlog” I explained my thoughts about how the meaning of ‘orlog’ might have evolved from the Gothic form of the word, uslagjan, ‘to lay upon, lay hands upon.’ Though not used in the context of ‘fate,’ there is still the indication of ‘layers laid’ here, as well as the idea of ‘grasping, laying hands upon us’ as Fate tends to do. The use of Gothic uslagjan makes it clear that ‘orlog’ did exist as a word in Gothic, but it had not developed into the meaning of orlog that appears later in the other old Germanic languages.
But I looked in vain for any mention of wyrd, other than forms of the root-word it comes from, wairþan, ‘to become, to happen’ which of course are frequently used. Since the Gothic Bible was translated from a Greek-language text, I looked to see whether the word with equivalent meaning in Greek, μοίρα or moira, ‘fate,’ appeared in the original text. Since it does not appear there, that might explain the absence of any Gothic word for wyrd in the translation: there was no word in the Greek original that would be translated as ‘wyrd’ in the Gothic version.
As my next step in pursuing this mystery, I looked at how the term / concept of ‘predestination’ was translated from Greek into Gothic, as a concept similar to wyrd. Perhaps that would offer some clues. I found one instance in the Gothic Bible, which in English reads, “He predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:5). The Gothic word used for predestination in this passage is faura-garairoþ meaning ‘a fore-speaking, a foretelling, a prophecy.’ It is used to translate Greek προορίσας, pro-orisas, translated as ‘predestination’ in English. The root Greek word is ὁρίζω, horizō: meaning ‘to ordain, determine, lay down, define, appoint.’ The latter words sound very much like activities that the Norns undertake, and the prefix ‘pro’ means doing those things in advance, beforehand—ordaining, determining, laying down what will happen in the future.
What I find odd is that apparently the only way to express the biblical God’s power of predestination in Gothic was to call it ‘foretelling,’ faura-ga-rairoþ or fore-speaking, ‘fore-rede.’ This implies that their God knows what will happen, but it does not necessarily imply that he causes it to happen, as the word in Greek does imply: he fore-ordains what will happen. It’s the reverse of what we see with Odin’s abilities: he and other Deities can order the placement and paths of the Sun and Moon in the sky and shape a World from the body of Ymir: these are God-powers, certainly. But if Odin wants a really accurate prophecy he doesn’t try to do this himself, he goes to a seeress. (See the Völuspá, and Baldr’s Dreams, in the Poetic Edda.)
In effect, when it comes to the power of predestination this biblical God as presented in Gothic is acting as a prophet or a seer by foretelling the future, rather than acting as a Deity who controls what will happen in the future. Unless, of course, we liken his action to that of the Norns, who bring about orlog and wyrd by ‘speaking it’ and thus laying it into the Well.
I think that this peculiar—to me anyway—translation from Greek ‘fore-ordain, determine, predestine’ to Gothic ‘foretell’ offers clues to Germanic ideas about how the power of Wyrd matches the role and power of Deities. In this particular event in the Gothic Gospels, the Christian God is acting as a prophet or seer, using powers similar to the way Wyrd’s powers and the Norns’ powers were conceived in other Germanic cultures.
Admittedly, none of these obscure threads of evidence gives us anything solid about Gothic beliefs about wyrd and beings who deal with wyrd. Did they in fact have the concept of Wyrd as understood in other Germanic cultures, and it just didn’t make it into the Gothic Bible because the original Greek version did not refer to that concept? Or did they, in fact, not have that concept at all? There’s no way for us to know for sure, since the Gothic Bible, which is not complete, is the only extensive document we have that’s written in the Gothic language.
The Old Saxon Heliand, a retelling of the Christian Gospels, is littered with references to orlag and wurt / wurð / wyrd, but that is a looser, more interpretive retelling of the material while the Gothic Bible is a stricter translation. And, significantly, the Heliand was written around half a millennium later than the Gothic Bible—time during which the concepts of orlog and wyrd may have developed and become established in the Germanic cultures.
This half-millennium of time for word-development seems a likely explanation for the missing word-meanings, and I speculate that at least when it comes to orlog this is what happened. And yet…clues about concepts of ‘fate’ and beings who control or influence fate are present in so many early Germanic cultures, as well as other related Indo-European cultures, that I find it difficult to believe that this concept never occurred to the Goths. And if it did, presumably they had a word for it.
Indeed, there is a clue to the existence of ‘beings of fate’ in the Gothic culture. The following account is given in Jordanes’ 6th century CE Origins and Deeds of the Goths, telling of the Haliurunnae, the ‘witches,’ who are here claimed to be the ancestresses of the Huns. Jordanes writes that Gothic king Filimer:
“…found among his people certain witches, whom he called in his native tongue Haliurunnae. Suspecting these women, he expelled them from the midst of his race and compelled them to wander in solitary exile afar from his army. There the unclean spirits, who beheld them as they wandered through the wilderness, bestowed their embraces upon them and begat this savage race… Such was the descent of the Huns who came to the country of the Goths.” (Jordanes, Ch. XXIV.)
To put this tale into historical context, the Goths first encountered the Huns around 372 CE, when they were living in what is now Ukraine. So according to the logic of this tale, the Gothic Haliurunnae must have been cast out of their tribe sometime considerably earlier than the late 4th century CE, if they were the supposed ancestresses of the multitude of Huns who attacked the Goths in 372.
Grimm mentions an instance that may refer to the same Haliurunnae, though perhaps in a different place: “Attila at the passage of the Lech is said to have been scared away by a rune-maiden calling out three times ‘back, Attila!’ (vol. 1, p. 404, note.)
Dowden notes that “Women and divination are frequent partners. Gothic women, the haliurunnae or ‘Hell-runers’ (where runes are still magical song and not yet a writing system), communed with the world of the dead.” (p. 253; parenthetical text is his.) Generally speaking, seers and diviners communed with the dead in order to receive prophecies, like Odin calling up the dead völva of the Völuspa. Prophecies involve wyrd, fate, that is spoken of in words; surely Gothic had some native, historic term for this phenomenon since they reportedly had women who worked with it.
There are many other accounts of prophetesses and seeresses influencing the actions of armies in old Germanic lore from the time of the Roman empire and later. Dowden relates that:
“In 58 BC Caesar was puzzled that Ariovistus, King of the Suebi, would not engage in battle until he discovered the following from prisoners: ‘Among the Germans there was a custom that their matres familia [the wives of the heads of household] declared on the basis of lots and prophecies whether battle might usefully be joined or not; and they had said that it was not fated for the Germans to win if they joined battle before the new moon.’ Caesar, Gallic war, 1.50.” (quoted in Dowden p. 253, brackets his.)
Gothic is not the only language where the word haliurunnae appears. The Old High German word Hellirune is listed in an old glossary, translated into Latin as necromantia or necromancy. DeVries states that it comes from halja = Hel, and runa = mysteries. “The Hellirunen are therefore women who search out the mysteries of the dead.” (deVries 1935, p. 264.)
The word appears in Anglo-Saxon, too, as helruna. In old vocabulary lists this word is equated with wælcyrige (valkyrie), hægtesse (often translated as ‘witch’), pythonissa (oracle, seeress, prophetess), and parcae (the Latin name for the Fates). (Cited in Damico p. 212 note 50, referring to Wright’s Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies.) Without knowing for sure what the Gothic haliurunnae were involved with, it seems a reasonable assumption that it did include forays into the realms of wyrd and fate.
Seeresses, prophetesses, wise-women, Matronae, Disir, Idisi: women playing such roles showed up widely across the times and places occupied by Germanic tribes and cultures. Foresight and divination—understanding wyrd—were among their major roles. It seems unlikely to me that the Goths—a very large group of peoples spread across regions from what are now Ukraine, Romania, the Balkans into Italy, Spain, and southern France, and influential in the Byzantine and Roman Empires—had no concept of anything like ‘wyrd,’ even if that word does not show up in the Gothic texts we have. Their neighbors, allies, and opponents certainly had such concepts, and the Goths were far from isolated. My conclusion is that they must have had some word like ‘wyrd’ and that it simply was not used in their translation of the Bible.
For modern Heathen usage, ‘wyrd’ has been reconstructed as *waurþs (feminine noun) in Gothic. (Himma Daga English to Gothic Dictionary).
Note: This article is included in my book Orlog Yesterday and Today: The Shapings of the Norns.
Book-Hoard
Damico, Helen. Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.
deVries, Jan. Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, Einleitung: Die Vorgeschichtliche Zeit. Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1935.
deVries, Jan. Altnordisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. E.J. Brill, 1961.
Dowden, Ken. European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Routledge, 1999.
Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology, Vol. 1. Transl. James Stephen Stalleybrass. London: George Bell and Sons, 1882.
Heliand: https://www.hieronymus.us.com/latinweb/Mediaevum/Heliand.htm#top
Himma Daga: https://airushimmadaga.wordpress.com/dictionary-english-gothic/
Jordanes: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14809/pg14809-images.html
Larrington, Carolyne, transl. The Poetic Edda, revised edition. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Wulfila Gothic Bible: https://www.wulfila.be/gothic/browse/