Indo-European Poetry and Myth

Croat Rodjenice, the Serbian Sudjenice, the Bulgarian Narecˇnice or Urisnice,
are supernatural females who appear at midnight within three days of a birth,
mostly in threes, sometimes in a larger group, sometimes in the form of
beautiful maidens, sometimes as grandmotherly old women, and pronounce
destinies. They spin the child’s fate as a golden thread, the eventual breaking
or cutting of which will signify his death.^28
In Albanian lore there are three old women, the Fatit (also called Mir or
Ora), who appear on the third day after a birth and fix the child’s fate. Phrases
are used such as ‘to tie off the destiny’, ‘predetermine the length of the thread
of life’, ‘cut off the life’.^29

Images of destiny

It is not hard to understand why spinning is such a pervasive image for the
fixing of human destinies. It was a very ancient craft, and eminently suited to
symbolize the conversion of loose, incoherent possibilities into something
definite, something that, like a human life, grows continuously longer but
sooner or later is cut off. The process is driven by the rotation of the spindle-
whorl, and we have seen that there was an intimate connection in Indo-
European speech between turning and eventuating.
The weaving image is a natural extension of the spinning. Thread is spun
so that it can be woven into a fabric. It seems that in northern Europe the
threads representing individual lives were sometimes imagined as being
woven into a larger web. When the Norns at Helgi’s birth fasten the threads
east, west, and north, it is as if they are establishing his far-reaching impor-
tance in the world. Similarly in Reginsmál 14 Sigurd’s fate-threads (ørlo ̨gsímo)
are said to extend over all lands. In the terrible Darraðarlióð (Edd. min. 58–60,
from Njáls saga 157) the Valkyries are represented as weaving the battle:

Wide is the warp for the weapon-play,

a cloud of wrath raining blood.

Grey on the spears we here suspend

the warriors’ web, that with red weft

we thralls of Odin all over thread.

This web’s warps are the guts of wights,

weighted heavy with heads of men.

Bloodstained darts it has for stays,

the shafts are iron, the shuttles arrows:

with weapons keen must the weft be tamped.

(^28) N. Reiter in Wb. d. Myth. i(2), 177 f.; Vánˇa (1992), 125 f.
(^29) Lambertz (1973), 477, 491 f., 494–6.

10. Mortality and Fame 385