In Beowulf 696 f. the Lord is said to have granted the Weder-Geats wı ̄gspe ̄da
gewiofu, ‘webs of war-successes’, that is, a victorious destiny. As we saw, Wyrd
could also be said to ‘weave’ an individual’s fortunes. The Norse words auþna
‘fate, fortune, luck’,auþenn‘fated, destined’, Old English e ̄aden, e ̄ad, are
related to a verbal root meaning ‘weave’ (Lithuanian áudmi).^30
For the fixing of destinies there are two alternative images that have
already been touched on: oral pronouncement and writing. Morta in Livius
Andronicus determines the day of death by declaring it in advance: profata est.
Another Latin name for the Fates, Fata, expresses the same idea of destiny
beingfixed by pronouncement; fatum is what has been spoken and so fixed.
The model is the pronouncement of the king whose word is law. Similarly
in Greek an old poetic word for ‘fated’ is θσφατον, literally ‘god-spoken’.
Like fatum, the word could also be used of oracles. There is a Lithuanian
expression taip Laima le ̇me ̇, ‘thus Laima has pronounced’.^31
In cultures that have acquired the art, writing becomes a natural symbol
offixing things for the future. The Hittite and Palaic Fate goddesses, as I
mentioned, take their name from the act of writing, and were presumably
imagined to establish destinies by writing them down. Tertullian (De anima
39) records that on the seventh day after a child’s birth the Fata Scribunda
would be invoked, figures personifying destinies to be determined in writing.
The Nordic goddesses at Urð’s well are described as carving (runes) on
wooden tablets (Vo ̨luspá 20). In Beowulf (2574 f.) we find the phrase swa ̄ him
Wyrd ne gescra ̄f | hre ̄ðæt hilde, ‘Fate did not inscribe for him glory in battle’;
the verb used, gescrı ̄fan, is a loan from Latin scribere. One of the Latvian songs
runs:
Bright, bright burns the fire
in the dark corner.
It is there that Laima is writing the life
for the little child. (LD 1196 = Jonval no. 769).In nineteenth-century Greece and Albania the Moirai were often said to
determine things by writing them. The image cannot go back to Indo-
European, as the Indo-Europeans almost certainly had no knowledge of
writing. The metaphor developed naturally and independently in the several
poetic and mythic traditions.^32
(^30) Cf. Hermann Güntert, Kalypso (Halle 1919), 252 f.; EIEC 572. On the Fates as spinners
or weavers cf. further Durante (1960), 238 n. 28; H. T. Bossert, Die Welt des Orients 2
(1957), 349–59; B. C. Dietrich, Phoenix 16 (1962), 86–101; Gamkrelidze–Ivanov (1995), 498;
G. Giannakis, IF 103 (1998), 1–27; 104 (1999), 95–109.
(^31) Greimas (1992), 114 f.
(^32) For the Fates as writers cf. R. H. Klausen, Zeitschrift für Altertumswissenschaft 7 (1840), 226;
Bernhard Schmidt (as n. 17, 1871), 215; Davidson (1988), 164.
386 10. Mortality and Fame