The Norns

Old Names, Borrowed Tenses

Earliest record: 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.
Said to date from: 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.

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.

Paul-Henri Mallet, Monumens de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes (Copenhagen, 1756), pp. 36 and 39; Göransson's Latin Edda of 1746 as printed in Thomas Percy, Northern Antiquities, vol. 2 (London, 1770).

Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld, the maidens at the well beneath the world tree whom Snorri calls norns.

More context

Völuspá 20, in the Codex Regius of about 1270, names three maidens from beneath the world tree: Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld. They 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 hold court daily at Urðr's well, where lives are chosen, carved on wood and laid down as law.

Shadow

Asked why lives fall unequally, Hár answers that good norns shape good lives and ill norns ill: misfortune becomes a verdict passed.

Sources7 sources

Primary source

Snorri Sturluson; ed. Anthony Faulkes, Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, 2nd edn (Viking Society for Northern Research; open PDF), 2005, Gylfaginning 15–16; also ch. 36Snorri names the three maidens at the hall under the ash by the well, writes 'Þessar meyjar skapa mönnum aldr. Þær köllum vér nornir', adds that many more norns of the Æsir, the elves and the dwarfs attend every birth, has them water the ash daily from Urðr's well, says the gods keep their court there, and nowhere glosses their names as past, present or future. Faulkes's index of names cites Verðandi from Vǫluspá 20 alone.
Carolyne Larrington (trans.), The Poetic Edda, rev. edn (Oxford World's Classics), 2014, Vǫluspá 20 and 30; Fáfnismál 12–13; Helgakviða Hundingsbana I 2–4Vǫluspá 20 names three maidens (meyjar), not norns, who laid down laws and chose lives (líf kuru) for the children of men, and reads ørlǫg seggja as 'the fates of men' rather than as a verb of speaking; Fáfnismál 13 is the 'many norns of separate births' verse Snorri quotes; Helgakviða Hundingsbana I 2–4 is the one passage joining norns to thread, where they twist örlögþættir and fasten golden cords beneath the hall of the moon; Vǫluspá 30 lists Skuld among the valkyries.

Scholarship

Karen Bek-Pedersen, The Norns in Old Norse Mythology (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press), 2011, the study as a whole; on the textile associationsNo Old Norse source unequivocally shows the norns spinning or weaving; the image of the spinning norn is far commoner in the secondary scholarship than in the primary texts, and the single direct textile association is Helgakviða Hundingsbana I, where the norns twist and fasten threads rather than spin them.

Where this claim originates

Paul-Henri Mallet, Monumens de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes, et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves (Copenhagen), 1756, 'L'Edda des Islandois, ou Mythologie Celtique', at the norns (p. 36), with Mallet's remark (r) on the passage at p. 39. Mallet divides the Edda into Fables, not Gylfaginning chapters.The temporal gloss enters the Edda here: 'les trois vierges nommées (Urda) le passé, (Verdandi) le présent, & (Skulda) l'avenir', none of which is in the Old Norse. His remark presents the tenses as the Edda's own — 'Les trois principales, selon l'Edda, sont le Présent, le Passé, & l'Avenir' — and observes that the temporal distinction was 'une circonstance qui manquoit à la Fable des Parques Grecques', so he knew the Greek Fates lacked it and credited it to the Edda regardless. He renders nornir 'Fées ou Parques', but that equation is not his: Göransson's Latin of 1746 already reads 'Has vocamus Nornas, seu Parcas'. Only the tenses are new in 1756.
Thomas Percy (trans.), Northern Antiquities, vol. 2 (London), 1770, the Edda, the Eighth Fable, p. 51; the same gloss again at the Eighteenth Fable, p. 99. Percy divides the Edda into Fables, not Gylfaginning chapters.The English transmission of Mallet's gloss: 'three virgins, named Urda, or the PAST; Verdandi, or the PRESENT; and Skulda, or the FUTURE', and later 'the youngest of the Destinies or Fairies who preside over Time, viz. Skulda (or the Future)'. Percy carries it into the well-name too, rendering Urðarbrunnr 'the fountain of the Past'. His footnote corrects Mallet's Fairies — 'Nornir, Isl. is rather Fates, or Destinies, Parcæ' — but leaves the tenses standing. Göransson's Latin, printed at the back of the same volume, has no tenses at all.
Jacob Grimm; trans. James Steven Stallybrass, Deutsche Mythologie (1835); Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 1882, ch. XVI.3 'Norni (Fatae)', pp. 405 and 414The grammatical argument for the scheme, at p. 405 — Urðr from the preterite plural of verða, Verðandi its present participle, Skuld from skulu — 'Hence we have what was, what is, and what shall be, or the past, present and future, very aptly designated, and a Fate presiding over each'; and at p. 414 the parallel to Plato, Republic 617, where Lachesis sings what was, Klotho what is and Atropos what shall be, standing in 'just the same relation to past, present and future as the norns have, though the Greek proper names do not themselves express it'. Grimm's footnote at p. 405 quotes Isidore, Etymologiae VIII.xi.92, giving the Parcae the three times, and holds it 'no proof of the Teutonic notion being borrowed from the classical'.