fated death. In Old English Wyrd is a power that weaves destinies: Rhyme
Poem 70 me þæt Wyrd gewa ̄f, ‘Wyrd wove that for me’;Guthlac 1350 f. þra ̄g
... wefen wyrdstafum, ‘the time woven on Wyrd’s loom’. Later the Wyrds
appear as a group, as in Chaucer, ‘the Werdys that we clepyn Destiné’ (Legend
of Good Women, Hypermnestra 19), and most famously as the Weird Sisters in
Macbeth.^23
The word has a significant etymology. It is related to German werden,
‘become’, ‘come about’. But in Latin the same verb means ‘to turn’,uertere;
and in Vedic the middle form vártate has both senses, ‘turns’ or ‘comes
about’, ‘turns out’ in such and such a way; the participle vr
̇
ttá- means ‘turned,
elapsed, happened’. This close semantic connection between turning and
eventuating is surely relevant to the image of the goddesses’ spindle that spins
round as it twists the loose wool into a firm thread. In various languages the
word for spindle or spindle-whorl is derived from the same verbal root:
Sanskrit vartana ̄ or vartula ̄, Old Church Slavonic vre ̆t e n o, Middle High
German wirtel, Welsh gwerthyd. In the visionary cosmology of Plato’sRepub-
lic (616c–17d) the planetary spheres, or rather hemispheres, are nested
spindle-whorls on the great spindle of Ananke, and the three Moirai guide
their revolutions. Perhaps the circling waters of Urð’s well were also con-
ceived as an analogue of destiny: Plutarch in his Life of Caesar (19. 8) records
that German holy women prophesied by observing river eddies and taking
indications from circling currents.
The Norns bear the individual names Urð, Verðandi, and Skuld (Vo ̨luspá
20, Gylf. 15), as it were ‘Happened, Happening, and Due’, representing the
past, present, and future. Plato in the passage cited makes Lachesis sing of past
things, Klotho of present, and Atropos of future, and the idea was perpetu-
ated in later writers.^24 So it is likely enough that the Eddic names are due to
Classical influence. On the other hand it should be borne in mind that ‘past
and future’ or ‘past, present, and future’ were established Indo-European, or
at any rate Graeco-Aryan, expressions of totality, especially in connection
with divine or vatic knowledge (pp. 103 f.). It is a traditional formula that
Plato is applying to the Moirai. This may have been a new combination; but
the extent of the Fates’ sway might have been stated in these terms at a very
ancient epoch.
The spinster goddesses seem also to have been known in Germany. A
spinning goddess is represented on a bracteate from south-west Germany,
and a relief from Trier shows a trio of Mother goddesses, two of them holding
distaffs or spindles. German ecclesiastical writers from around the tenth
(^23) Cf. Brian Branston, The Lost Gods of England (London 1957), 64–71.
(^24) Pl. Rep. 617c, [Arist.] De mundo 401 b18 (> Apul. Mund. 38), Isid. Etym. 8. 11. 92.
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