Winifred Hodge Rose
Any effort to understand orlog and the Norns requires a consideration of the nature of ‘Time’ and how it is perceived and experienced by humans. Generic images of ‘The Fates,’ influenced by Classical mythology, often represent them as ‘past, present, and future.’ This makes sense to our modern minds, which are shaped to understand Time as consisting of a linear arrangement of ‘past, present, future.’ We stand in the present, influenced by the past, moving toward the future. This is so obvious to us that it might not occur to us to view the influence or action of Time in any other way.
This is not exactly how the people who spoke the old Germanic languages viewed time, and actions in time. The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture, by Paul Bauschatz, is a brilliant and profound book, one that has greatly influenced my thoughts and those of many other modern Heathens. His whole book is based on the philosophical implications of Germanic linguistics, resulting in “the binary opposition inherent in the Germanic tense system between past and present, or, better, between past and nonpast events. This particular opposition of action presents events in a way that is significantly different from our own, and from other Indo-European peoples.” (p. xvii)
The Names
Bauschatz’s linguistic and grammatical analysis of the Norns’ names, fleshed out with reference to Eddic poetry, Beowulf, and other sources, shows that they are not related in a linear fashion to any clear-cut perception of past-present-future. The names Verðandi and Urð both stem from Proto-Indo-European *uert or *wert, denoting the motion of twisting, spinning, rotating, which leads to words for ‘becoming’ in many Indo-European languages (p. 13). “When Verthandi and Urth are semantically related, Verthandi becomes that which is in process of ‘turning’ or ‘becoming,’ and Urth would be that which has ‘turned’ or ‘become.’ …Verthandi clearly reflects the actually occurring process of all that Urth eventually expresses” (p. 14).
Here we see ‘past’ and ‘present’ or non-past in close relationship with each other: the present, moment by moment, ‘turning into’ or becoming the shaped fabric of the past, while the past is, moment by moment, ‘turning into’ or ‘becoming’ the shaping conditions of the present. When we use the simile of rotation or turning, this close mutual interaction between past and present in old Germanic thought becomes clearer. It is imagery worth meditating upon!
Here is another description of the process: “…orlog is spoken continually and layers of action are accomplished upon layers of action…everything is growing, and in the process of its growth, connected with its origins. To speak the orlog, then, is to take account of all that happens with respect to all that has happened already.” (Bauschatz p. 7)
The past has clearly happened; the present is clearly happening. We can testify to this from our own living experience. We cannot do so with ‘the future.’ By definition it does not exist in our living experience; it has not happened already, it is not happening now. The Norn Skuld does not reflect the idea of ‘the future.’ Her name comes from skulu, meaning ‘should, shall,’ but in Old Norse this is not consistently used as the auxiliary of the future tense, such as “I shall go to work tomorrow.” Instead, “Skulu occurs most frequently in contexts that express a generalized, universal present…general statements about what happens continually” (Bauschatz p. 12).
Bauschatz gives the example of how Thor shall / must wade through the rivers Kormt, Ormt, and the Kerlaugs when he goes to meet with the other Gods at the doomstead at Yggdrasil every day: ‘þaer scal þorr vada hverian dag’ (Grimnismal 29). This statement indicates an ongoing daily event, not simply something he intends to do in the future. Thor must do this because, unlike the other Gods, he is too heavy to walk upon Bifrost, the rainbow bridge, and must instead wade through the rivers that lie below it. The phrasing does imply that he shall wade tomorrow as well, but it is not specifically the future tense, it is a statement about an ongoing situation, the ‘everlasting present.’
Likewise, skulu appears frequently in the Havamal, but in the context of ‘what someone should do or ought to do,’ not necessarily what they ‘will do’ as a statement of the future. “All occurrences (of skulu) express constraint, obligation, necessary continual action…Such obligations imply a continuous ‘present,’ which logically extends into the ‘future,’ but skulu does not directly denote such temporal conditions” (Bauschatz p. 13).
There is a well-known phrase from Beowulf that says: gaeð a wyrd swa hio scel, (l. 455). Literally, the translation is “Wyrd goes ever as she shall,” showing how the same word, scel or sceal, is used in Anglo-Saxon, just as it is used in the quotation from Grimnismal above about “Thor shall (scal) wade…” The Beowulf phrase, “Wyrd goes ever as she shall,” sounds like a tautology if we read ‘shall’ as we do in modern English, as a way of denoting a future action. What the phrase means is “Wyrd goes ever as she must,” as it is necessary for her or it to go. It’s talking about a continuous present, an ‘ever-time,’ not only about what she will do tomorrow.
A being such as Skuld does not appear in Anglo-Saxon lore, but with this phrase emphasizing ‘what Wyrd scel do,’ using the same word as skulu in Old Norse, the root of Skuld’s name, we can see that Anglo-Saxon Wyrd includes Skuld’s function within her own domains of action. If we wanted to liken Wyrd to the Norns, we could even regard this phrase as implying ‘Wyrd / Urðr goes ever as Skuld indicates she must.’ Bauschatz notes that Skuld “seems to make reference to actions felt as somehow obliged or known to occur; that is, the necessity of their ‘becoming’ is so strongly felt or clearly known that they present themselves as available to be incorporated into the realms of Verthandi and Urth” (p. 14). This description invites careful thought and meditation on how it differs from ‘the future.’
Note that the phrase quoted above is not ‘Wyrd goes ever as she will,’ which would be another way of forming the future tense in modern English. Using ‘will’ would have a different connotation in an ancient context, implying that it is her own will she follows, rather than necessity. If the phrase were simply talking about what she would do in the future, either ‘shall’ or ‘will’ could be used interchangeably in modern English. Instead, both ‘shall = I must’ and ‘will = my own intention’ have very specific, and different, meanings in the old writings.
Past versus Non-Past
If you look closely at the Völuspa from the Poetic Edda, a poem which deals with events of the past, present, and future, you will see that it shifts around unexpectedly among the tenses of past, present, and future—not necessarily applying them in any kind of temporal order to discuss the events of the Worlds. The same is even more true in the much longer, more complex Beowulf poem. The author frequently shifts into some tale from the past, right in the middle of some present action taking place, in ways that we might find very confusing. To his original listeners, though, it made sense: there was, to them, an obvious connection between these events occurring during widely separated time periods.
Bauschatz considers that it makes sense to categorize Time, in the old Heathen mindset, as ‘past’ and ‘non-past’ rather than past-present-future.
“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)
In the midst of all the flux and confusion of present and future, for the forebears it was logical to rest their tales, their intentions, and even their philosophy, on the solid ground of the past. This was the place to start from and the place to continually check back in with, in order to really make sense of what was happening in the present and what was about to happen in the future.
Passing the Strands
Here I offer a rather poetic description of the roles of the three Norns with respect to arrangement in Time. Urð represents What-has-Become, what is completed and fulfilled, what we consider to be ‘the past.’ But she and her domain are far from static or ‘finished.’ Instead, she stands next to Verðandi, she who rules What-is-Becoming, and they hand strands of orlog back and forth between them. Urð hands over strands from the past to influence the present that Verðandi is spinning, while Verðandi feeds strands from her ‘Becomings’ back to Urð as those Becomings are completed so Urð can weave them into her web.
Standing somewhat to the side, Skuld attaches threads or leader-lines of necessity, of What-Should-Be, to the strands being handled by Urð and Verðandi. Skuld’s threads may be thin and fine, representing only slight, weak effects of What-Should-Be that we may be able to overcome if we firmly set out to do so. Or they may be thick and strong, representing some insurmountable necessity that we will simply have to deal with. These leader-lines of Necessity pull all the strands into a web-like, multidimensional pattern laid by orlog and spoken or galdored into being by all the Norns as they work.
Note: This article is included in my book Orlog Yesterday and Today: The Shapings of the Norns.
Book-Hoard
Bauschatz, Paul C. The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture. The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
Bek-Pedersen, Karen. The Norns in Old Norse Mythology. Dunedin Academic Press Ltd., 2011.
Chickering, Howell D. Jr., transl. Beowulf. Doubleday, 1977. (Dual language edition)
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.