At the Well of Urd

Sunniva Aalto
Field Correspondent, The Northern Reaches

Fieldnotes — an ash root, deep winter

I went looking for the Norns in a library before I went looking for them in a landscape, which is perhaps the wrong order but the only one available to most of us now. The vellum I wanted was a copy of the Poetic Edda, the Völuspá stanzas where a seeress recites the shape of the world to Odin, and among the litany of gods and giants she names three maidens who come from the water beside a tree. Urd, Verdandi, Skuld. That which became, that which is becoming, that which shall be. They live at the well called Urðarbrunnr, beneath one of the three roots of Yggdrasil, and each day, Snorri Sturluson tells us in the Prose Edda, they take water and white mud from the well and pour it over the tree so that its branches will not rot or wither.

It is tempting, and I have been guilty of it myself, to picture them at a loom, spinning out the thread of a life the way the Greek Moirai do, measuring it, cutting it. The image is old in the popular telling and it is not wrong exactly, but I want to be honest about where it comes from. The Norse sources are less explicit than we would like. They speak of the Norns shaping laws, setting the length of lives, sometimes carving fate into wood, sometimes casting lots, but the literal spinning wheel is a picture we have largely borrowed and laid over the top, perhaps from the Fates of classical myth, perhaps from later folk imagination that could not resist the tidiness of thread. Where the sources are silent I have tried to stay silent with them.

What the sources do insist on is that the Norns are not simply three, and not simply grand. Snorri says there are many norns, that they come at the birth of every child to shape its life, and that they are of different kinds, some descended from gods, some from elves, some from dwarves, and that this accounts for the plain fact that some people prosper and some do not. Fate, in this telling, is not a single loom but a crowd of hands, uneven in skill and disposition, working close to the ground.

The word norn itself resists a clean origin. Some philologists tie it to an old word for twining or knotting, which would support the thread reading after all; others are less certain and say plainly that they do not know. I find I trust the uncertainty more than I would trust a tidy answer.

What I can say with more confidence is the kinship between Urd and the Old English word wyrd, the term for fate that runs under so much of the Anglo-Saxon record and surfaces centuries later, transformed, in the weird sisters who greet a Scottish thane on a blasted heath. The three women at the well and the three women in the heather are not the same figures, but they are cousins, carrying the same old idea forward under different weather: that what happens to us has already been set down somewhere, by hands older than our own, at the root of something larger than we can see the top of.

I stood, later, under a farm's guardian ash in Uppland, the kind of tree Swedish tradition still asks you not to fell, and thought about roots and wells and the water someone somewhere must be carrying, quietly, to keep the whole structure from rot. It seemed the right shape of belief to end on: not spectacle, but maintenance. Fate, kept alive daily, by hands that do not ask to be thanked for it.

Sunniva Aalto is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Northern Reaches. High latitudes, deep winter, standing water — she works in the months when the light is briefest, on the theory that the north's stories were made at that time of year and are best understood in it. She travels alone and says little about it.