The Norns
Old Names, Borrowed Tenses
- First attested
- the 1270sVǫluspá 20 in the Codex Regius of c. 1270 is the earliest surviving witness to the three names, and it calls them maidens, not norns. Snorri Sturluson's Gylfaginning, composed c. 1220–25, supplies the word norn and the doctrine that many norns attend every birth, but survives only in manuscripts of c. 1300 and later, so the older text is carried by the later manuscript. Faulkes's index of names cites Verðandi from Vǫluspá 20 alone. No Eddic poem is securely Viking-Age. The past/present/future gloss is in neither text: Göransson's Latin of 1746, printed at the back of Percy's own volume, still renders the passage without it, and the earliest text it has been traced to is Mallet's French Edda of 1756.
- Claimed
- around 800 CEasserted by Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie (1835), who argued from reconstructed Gothic (Vaurþs, Vairþandei, Skulds) and Old High German (Wurt, Werdandi, Scult) forms that the three-norn doctrine "was originally not foreign to any of the Teutonic nations" and that such beings "must have been known once as personal beings" across the heathen Germanic world; and the popular and Heathen writing downstream of him, which dates the three norns and their tidy division of time to the Viking Age or earlier.
The claim runs about 500 years ahead of the evidence.
Past, present and future is in neither Völuspá nor Snorri: the gloss has been traced no further back than Paul-Henri Mallet's French Edda of 1756, and Thomas Percy carried it into English in 1770.
Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld at the well beneath the world tree: the maidens Snorri named norns, who shape lives.
Völuspá 20, in the Codex Regius of about 1270, names three maidens from beneath the world tree — Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld — who laid down laws and chose lives for the children of men; Urðr is cognate with Old English wyrd, not its source, so English inherited its own word for the idea. The poem never calls them norns. Snorri Sturluson does, in Gylfaginning 15 around 1220, adding that many more norns attend every birth. Neither text mentions past, present or future. That gloss has been traced no further back than Paul-Henri Mallet's French Edda of 1756, which prints it as the Edda's own sense; Thomas Percy carried it into English in 1770 and Jacob Grimm supplied its grammar in 1835. Nor do they spin: in the one textile passage they twist cords and fasten them to the sky.
Light
The gods ride each day to judgement at Urðr's well — they keep their court at the norns' water, not at their own. Fate here is chosen, carved and laid down: something a person may be told, and still meet well.
Shadow
Gangleri asks Hár why lives are dealt so unequally, and the answer is that good norns give good lives and ill norns ill ones. It explains nothing and forecloses everything: misfortune becomes a verdict already passed, with no appeal.
