Winifred Hodge Rose
“These maids shape / make people’s aldrs (skapa monnum aldr); we call them Norns.” (Gylfaginning in the prose Edda)
“In one day was my aldr shaped, and all my life laid down” (Skirnismal vs. 13, Poetic Edda).
(My translations.)
Bodies in Space and Time
Our physical body is shaped by layers of orlog that influence and are influenced by how we live our lives, as I discuss in my article What Do the Norns Shape? I believe we have another, metaphysical ‘body’ that is even more subject to the shaping of the Norns. I envision that we have something I call a Time-Body that is analogous to our physical body, but exists in time rather than in three-dimensional space. I suggest, further, that this Time-Body is the same thing as our Aldr life-force or life-soul, but for now I’m referring to it as the Time-Body. Let’s start by looking at features of our physical body, then extend that analogously to this Time-Body idea.
Our physical body occupies a certain physical space and has given dimensions: height, depth, width. We fill these dimensions with our body’s shape or form. The space our body occupies is unique: no other physical object can occupy the space that our body occupies unless we ingest or absorb it into the inner spaces of our body like our stomach or lungs. We can move around in space, carrying our own body-occupied space with us, and we interact with all that is around us on physical and other levels.
The shape our body occupies in space defines us each as a unique individual with a multitude of characteristics—characteristics that our body has developed through many different processes: through genetics and epigenetics; through work, exercise and activities; illnesses, injuries and disabilities; body care, nutrition, and non-nutritive substances; training, habits, and customs; the effects of maturation and aging; and many more. In subtle and not so subtle ways, our physical body records and reflects much about the story of our life in the layers of physical substance that it lays down to shape itself.
So, our physical body is three-dimensionally defined by its shape or form that occupies a unique place in space. I suggest that we have another, different kind of body as well: a body in Time rather than Space. What is the defining characteristic of this Time-Body, that makes it analogous to our body-shape in space? What gives our Time-Body its ‘shape’? I see this as continuity: our continuity in time for the duration of our life, our life-span. Our physical body holds its place in space by its three-dimensional shape or form—that’s how we claim the space we occupy. Our Time-Body occupies its place in time through the process of continuity: the continuity of who we are, our life-span, our Werold, our experiences, our sense of self, our life-story, our body itself, all maintained throughout our life. The continuity of who we are holds and shapes our place in time, as our physical body shapes our place in space. The characteristics of our Time-Body change over time and so does our physical body. They both—physical and time bodies—are affected by all our experiences in life as well as by our processes of growth, maturation and aging.
In time-lapse photography and animations, you can see the stretched-out shape of a body that occupies consecutive spaces in rapid succession, like the photograph of a flower unfolding from a bud, a person running, a stream of light from a star moving through the sky or a car’s headlights as it drives. This is the best illustration I can think of to help us envision what the Time-Body might ‘look like,’ with its stretched-through-space feature mimicking continuity in time.
However, I think that ‘what the Time-Body looks like’ is a misleading way to go about understanding the Time-Body. Our physical senses are designed to operate in physical space and tell us things about that space, so when we describe something we use concepts like ‘it looks like this, sounds like this, acts like this, etc.’ Within Time, the abilities analogous to the physical senses are ‘experience’ and ‘memory,’ and the way those two work together. These are what we use to detect, process, and understand aspects of time, as we use our physical senses to detect, process, and understand aspects of space in Midgard. When we communicate along the lines of: ‘yesterday I experienced this, and here is my memory of it,’ we are operating from our Time-Body, working through our physical body to physically communicate something.
Of course, experience and memory depend on what happens in space as well as in time. Space and time are interwoven, and our physical and time bodies interact with each other during every moment of our lives. But it’s useful in our philosophical pursuit of orlog, and Heathen metaphysics generally, to understand something about their distinctions as well as their interactions. To understand the Time-Body a little better, let’s start with the obvious question: what is Time?
Time as Change
In conventional physics, ‘time’ is defined as ‘change;’ time is measured as the interval during which some kind of change occurs. Atomic clocks measure the frequencies of the vibrations that occur when electrons jump back and forth between higher and lower levels of energy: these are very tiny and very rapid changes suitable for extremely accurate scientific observations. At the level of everyday human experience, easily observable changes happen constantly: we move around to different positions in space, engage in different activities, interact with different people, speak words in changing sequences, breathe in and out at different speeds, eat and digest our food, observe children and adults as they change and grow, experience changes in day and night and the seasons; even the thoughts we think are constantly changing.
This is how we perceive time: through different experiences, and our observations and memories of them. Time, for us subjectively, is the flow of changing circumstances throughout our lives along with the physical traces they leave, and the memory with which we keep track of them. We sense time through experience and memory, as we sense our physical surroundings, the space we are in, through our physical senses. In both cases, we depend upon our powers of observation and thought to make sense of all this.
There is an additional way we learn to sense time as we mature: through an understanding of cause and effect—the understanding that under normal circumstances events or effects are caused by ‘something,’ and that ‘something’ occurred before the event that it caused. The cause happens first, followed by its effect, which may in turn be the cause of some new effect, and so on. Whole complex networks of interweaving causes and effects are common in human experience as well as in nature, and link us back to the complexities of orlog and the Norns. It’s often very difficult to fully understand all the causes of some complex event, but we can still operate on the assumption that things are caused by other things, and whatever caused that thing to happen occurred before the event, not after it. Cause comes first, effect follows.
These are ordered sequences of changes through time, and they shape our human perception of what time is. They are also how our Time-Body understands and makes sense of the world it lives in, the world of Time: it understands Time through sequences of changing events, through continuity of awareness and experience, and the memory that ties these things together. Just as our physical bodies can become injured or ill and malfunction as a result, so can our Time-Body when we experience problems with memory and awareness, which in turn affects our experience of our life and the shape of our Werold.
Causality and the Time-Body
In my article Norns, Causality, and Determinism, I suggested that one of the vital roles the Norns fulfill as great Powers is by ordering the processes of causality. Our Time-Bodies sense this work of the Norns and strive to understand how we humans fit into that process, which leads to our efforts to understand matters of free will, determinism, and predestination. Causality, determinism, and predestination are matters of importance to our Time-Body because they fundamentally have to do with our relationship to Time.
Causality is based upon sequences of changing events through time and how those events relate to each other.
Determinism, on a personal level, presents us with the questions: “how did I get to this point in time, what will I do now that I am here, and why will I do it? To what extent is my next step, ‘the future,’ already determined by the past, and to what extent am I free to make a choice, to deviate from the influences of the past?”
Predestination implies that there is a force or a being which has the power to control my Time-Body’s trajectory through time so that I arrive at a predetermined ‘destination’ per schedule. This destination is set for me long before I ever get there, maybe before I even conceive of it being in my future.
Causality, determinism, and predestination are all phenomena that lie beyond the sphere of full human control. Free will is human; it is within our own individual reach to decide and act upon. How these phenomena—causality, determinism, predestination, and free will—interact with each other in our individual lives involves our relationships with the Norns and orlog, with the Deities, and with all the complexities of Midgard life. I discuss more about predestination and its ambiguous relationship with Time in my article Norns, Foresight, and Predestination.
Time as Relationship
‘Time as change’ is not the only way that Time may be perceived. Winterbourne, and scholars whom he draws upon including Bauschatz, see the old Germanic idea of time as, in fact, not a temporal concept at all, but a relational one:
“…in place of any abstract chronology, Norse mythology presents us with time as genealogy. This is an idea that assists us in understanding how it is possible that in Germanic mythology the past becomes more powerful through the flow of time; it does not recede in significance, because the past is, paradoxically, fullest now, in the present.”(Winterbourne, p. 49).
This is a feature, I would say, of a great many pre-literate societies as well as the Norse and Germanic. Their histories are contained in memorized lists of genealogies; time periods are designated by the reigns of kings, by battles and other significant events that happened during them rather than by numbering the years. Winterbourne notes that time in the Poetic Edda poem Völuspá, for example, is not presented as an ordered series of events related to each other in time, but rather time is designated by names indicating what happened during them, such as an ‘axe age,’ or ‘the first war in the world.’ What relates those different periods of time to each other is not a regular, organized time-sequence, but rather how the significance of events that occurred then relates to the significance of other events in the tale. Significance and interrelationship, rather than linear sequence, are the important factors, as I discuss also in my article Time, Tense, and the Norns.
Bauschatz contrasts the realm of the Tree, the representative of actualized, three-dimensional physical reality, with that of the Well as the container of what is abstract, conceptual, and not fully known.
“Within the well, the interrelations among actions rather than actions themselves are of paramount importance; here within the realm of the well, are the motives and reasons for and the final causes of the acts that occur within the realm of the tree” (Bauschatz p. 125).
Time as a Container of Meaning
This leads us to Bauschatz’s very extensive examination of old Germanic ideas of time and space, discussed especially in his Chapter IV on “Action, Space, and Time.” He describes time as a ‘container for events,’ symbolized by Urð’s Well. All events of significance that occur in the Worlds fall into this Well and constitute the past.
“The past, as collector of events, is clearly the most dominant, controlling portion of all time. Man’s world stands at the juncture of this past and the non-past, that is, at that point, the present, in which events are in the process of becoming ‘past.’ The past is experienced, known, laid down, accomplished, sure, realized. The present, to the contrary, is in flux and confusion, mixed with irrelevant and significant details. What we nowadays call ‘the future’ is, within the structure of this Germanic system, just more of the nonpast, more flux, more confusion.” (Bauschatz pp. 138-9)
Time, in this view, is not related directly to cause and effect, or to the orderly passage of days and years, or to change. Instead, time is the ‘space,’ or the container wherein humans, Deities, other beings, and their deeds of significance form interrelationships. This is time as ‘duration,’ and as ‘what endures.’ Spaces and places—especially sacred or otherwise significant spaces such as a temple or a battlefield—provide context and depth of meaning to the actions that take place in them. So, also, does time, especially sacred or significant times: holy tides, festivals, commemorative days or events.
Within the containers of time and space, the interrelationships of beings and their actions take place which shape the course of events in all the Worlds and give them meaning. Time itself is given meaning because it provides the ‘container’ within which those relationships are formed and fixed in place. In the form of orlog they are collected and kept in Time, maintaining their existence and influence. As Bauschatz discusses in depth, the World-Tree provides the structure of space, which is constantly growing and expanding because it is nourished by time and orlog from the Well. Together they encompass the cosmos.
Time, contained within the Well, provides the opportunity for significant events and relationships to build and grow, accumulate, play out, be experienced and remembered, and to influence what is now coming into being. The more ‘past’ that flows into the Well, the more there is for us to work with, on personal, cultural, historical, and spiritual levels. This provides the context for our Time-Body’s experiences and memories. As our physical body engages in actions and relationships in Space, our Time-Body experiences and remembers them in Time.
Time-Body / Aldr Soul and Werold
Here we’ve looked at several quite different concepts of time, all of them valid and relevant to our pursuit of understanding orlog: time as change, time as the context for causality, time as genealogical relationships, time as a container or a field within which actions and events occur and interact with one another in complex ways. Time as a container ‘stores’ those actions and events that are of true significance, and these contents of the ‘container of the past’ in turn feed into the significance and power of new actions and events taking place in the ‘non-past’—the state of flux that constitutes the ‘present’ and ‘future.’
This is the context within which our Time-Body or Aldr soul has its being and creates its Werold or personal world, our own personal container of time that encompasses the span of our life. Within our Werold we weave our networks of relationship and significance, we lay down layers of orlog as our life-span progresses. Our Aldr soul gives us the capacity to sense Time itself, to understand and work with it, at least on a practical and everyday level. It enables us to view our own life-time as a whole: as a weaving that extends through time, where we can look backwards, and to some extent make projections forward in time, in our quest to understand and shape our Werold.
Our physical body and our Werold can both be seen as expressions of orlog-substance, shaped from layers of substances and experiences we have consumed and metabolized within the space-time container of Midgard. We ourselves are woven into the larger constructs of the Well and the Tree by the Norns, first when we are born and placed into our initial life-contexts, and then by the direct and indirect influences of the Norns, other Deities and beings including humans, our own deeds, and the influence of all that goes on around us during our lifetime.
In a way, we can think of our Aldr soul as an agent for the Norns in Midgard, with respect to our own personal life and life-span. Our Aldr life-force nourishes and strengthens our living being and extends it through time, just as the Norns nourish and strengthen the World-Tree with the sacred white mud of the Well, supporting its life in time. Aldr takes the meaningful experiences of our lives and weaves our Werold out of them, just as the Norns gather the significant events of the Worlds and lay them into the container of the Well to shape the orlog there. Our Werold is the shape of our personal orlog: the orlog that comes to us from outside sources, past and present, and the orlog that we lay for ourselves. The quotations I gave at the beginning of this chapter talk about the Norns shaping people’s Aldrs, as our Aldr shapes our Werold out of the totality of our life-experience and governs the length of our life on behalf of the Norns. I see the Aldr or Time-Body as a soul closely associated with the Norns and orlog: shaped by them, connected to them, and working with them during our life in Midgard.
Notes: This article is included in my book Orlog Yesterday and Today: The Shapings of the Norns. Related articles on this website include “What Do the Norns Shape?”, “Aldr and Orlay: Weaving a World,” and “Norns, Foresight, and Predestination.”
Book-Hoard
Bauschatz, Paul C. The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture. The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
Jonsson, Finnur, ed. Edda Snorra Sturlusonar. Udgivnet efter Handskrifterne af Kommissionen for det Arnamagnaeanske Legat. København: Gyldendalske Boghandel – Nordisk Forlag, 1931.
Jonsson, Finnur, ed. De Gamle Eddadigte. København: G.E.C. Gads Forlag, 1932.
Larrington, Carolyne, transl. The Poetic Edda, revised edition. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Sturluson, Snorri, transl. Anthony Faulkes. Edda. Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1995.
Winterbourne, Anthony. When the Norns have Spoken: Time and Fate in Germanic Paganism. Associated University Presses, 2004.