The Norns in Old Norse Mythology
In The Norns in Old Norse Mythology (2011), Karen Bek-Pederson explores the Norns, or nornir to use the Old Norse plural, who are fascinating but widely misunderstood female supernatural figures. Bek-Pederson reveals that the typical conception of the Norns as the Old Norse equivalent of the Graeco-Roman Fates, three sisters who spin and weave the threads of fate, has no real basis in Old Norse primary sources. By closely examining Old Norse texts, which she notes are “gloriously inconsistent,” Bek-Pederson reveals the reality of the Norns in all their murky complexity (199).
After an opening chapter explaining the nature of her sources (which some non-specialists may want to skim), Bek-Pederson dives into investigating not only the Norns but also other female supernatural figures in Old Norse mythology. She provides an overview of valkyrjur (valkyries), disir (female protective spirits), and fylgjur (fetches) which, although it doesn’t always feel crucial to understanding the Norns, is nonetheless interesting. While the popular conception of the Norns often images them as three sisters with the names Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld who represent past, present, and future and who spin and weave the fates of men, the Norns were actually portrayed as an indeterminate number of sometimes named, mostly unnamed female figures who determined fate without ever spinning or weaving. Rather than named, personified women, the Old Norse seem to have conceived of the Norns as an unapproachable force shaping the course of events. Heroes and heroines often cursed the Norns when they found themselves in difficult situations, but never sacrificed or appealed to the Norns to change their fate—what the Norns decreed simply was. Bek-Pederson argues that fate, and thus the Norns, were considered to lie behind not only what happened to a person but also how society and a person’s personality dictated they must react to those events. The Norns, who are often referred to in legal language, set a sort of underlying law of the world that all people were unable to deviate from, no matter what tragedy resulted. Interestingly, one author writing about his conversion to Christianity describes his pagan faith as “the long-maintained fates of the norns,” indicating an understanding that the Norns undergirded the Norse universe.
The Norns is technical but readable; Bek-Pederson sometimes strays into lexical concerns that are beyond the understanding of those without Old Norse language training, and in one case she assumes the reader has more knowledge about the functioning of a loom than I personally think is reasonable, but none of this detracts from the main arguments. She quotes, sometimes at length, from the sagas, skaldic and eddic poetry, and other texts to demonstrate exactly how the Norns and other female figures are represented in Old Norse sources, but the quotes and their length are always justified and never tedious.
My only quibble with the book is that Bek-Pederson devotes significant time to attempting to explain why fate is so often represented in feminine form, and her answer is not very satisfying to me. Ultimately, she concludes that it derives from the woman’s role as the birther of children and the shaper of textiles from unprocessed masses of fiber. But why the concept of fate must be tied to production in this manner, and why fate’s seeming connections to law in Old Norse thought doesn’t render its personification more masculine, is not explored.
But this question about the femininity of fate, in my opinion, is only tangential to the true main thrust of the book, debunking the Graeco-Romanized version that has seeped into popular culture and presenting the reality of the Norns, in all its cloudiness and uncertainty. For anyone interested in learning about the Norns, or about female figures in Old Norse mythology in general, The Norns in Old Norse Mythology offers understandable insight grounded in the primary sources.
The accompanying image depicts a box brooch (700-900 C.E.) from the Viking island of Gotland, which a Viking woman would have used to secure her clothes and to store small objects. Small animals are depicted in the copper alloy metalwork of the box brooch. The Metropolitan Museum of Art released this image into the public domain.
A Viking woman would have used this box brooch from 700-900 C.E. Gotland to secure her clothes and store small objects.